[T]here are emergent phenomena from the whole interconnected system at the hemisphere level, and neuroscience increasingly recognises that we should think in terms of complex widespread networks.
The hemispheres are massively more intraconnected within themselves than they are connected to one another. So, as in life, science needs both narrow focus and broad vision.
This book is about what goes on at a higher level than that of intrahemispheric regions alone – though a very significant intrahemispheric distinction that will emerge regards the inhibitory effect of the frontal region of each hemisphere on its own posterior cortex. Nonetheless, this should not be thought of in purely antagonistic terms, but in dialectical terms, whereby something new is brought about through their joint action.
[T]oday’s world population of 7.6 billion is far too large to be supported by the flow of solar energy, so a benign future depends upon a radical reduction in numbers. In addition, agrarian civilizations are no paradise.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau pinpointed the fundamental contradiction of a life devoted to consumption by saying, ”For the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.”
The disaster [Chernobyl] had both active and latent causes, some of which were undoubtedly of a uniquely Soviet nature. The reactor’s operators took excessive risks in a way that exemplified the “We can do it no matter what” mentality instilled by Soviet propaganda since 1917, and especially in the late Stalin and Khrushchev eras, the formative years of the key actors. The design flaws of the reactor itself, and the operators’ unawareness of its potential instability, were also consequences of the peculiar political economy of the planned economy. Yet in some respects, as we shall see, Chernobyl could have happened anywhere.
Too much chaos doesn’t lead to higher order, just more chaos and disorder.
If, as I suggested before, the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to “demand” its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.
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