Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Now ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.
Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour.
This week I bring to your attention another excerpt which we have titled – Reductionism from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein.
This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world.
Reductionism
Even as Bacon was formulating his new system, in a small town in Bavaria a snowstorm kept a French military engineer in his lodgings for a whole day and night during which, he said, he had formulated the concept that was to solve the problem of evaluation. His method for doing so would also give specialists a powerful new gift to help them in manufacturing knowledge. In 1637, after much rethinking, the engineer, René Descartes, published his new concept in a book called Discourse on Method, in which he set out the rules for seeking certainty in an uncertain world.
The secret lay in what he called “methodical doubt,” by which everything except self-evident truths were to be questioned until they had proved themselves to be true (and for Descartes, every-thing, especially the evidence of the senses, was to be doubted in the absence of any “evident truth”). Descartes’ method provided the supreme cut-and-control approach to the world in the form of a technique known as “reductionism.” In an echo of the medieval resolution-and-composition technique, the method called for a problem to be divided up into its smallest parts so that it could more easily be understood and then solved. All reductionist thinking should proceed from the simple to the complex and all statements about the world should be expressed only in non-metaphysical terms: size, shape, and movement.
Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein
I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:
Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.
Namaste!
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