Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ch. 12: Reflections on the Cosmic Perspective
Please use this thread to discuss this chapter.by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ch. 12: Reflections on the Cosmic Perspective
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LevV wrote:Given the ethnocentric superiority complex that so many people have, it is no wonder that so many of our fellow humans still believe that the universe revolves around them. A cosmic perspective would bring us to the realization that we are only here on this planet because of a series of fortunate coincidences. A cosmic perspective would also provide insights enabling us to feel at one with the rest of the planet and perhaps get past the cultural and political differences that so divide us today.
If I'm sounding a little mushy, it's likely because Tyson's message overlaps so naturally with the book I just finished reading, Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.
I'll be making a case for this book as our next non-fiction choice. And thanks, geo for mentioning it last September.
I agree that Tyson is over his head, and spouts much drivel here. This is just John Lennon's "Imagine" (or T.H. White's lessons from Merlin to Arthur, in "Sword in the Stone") spun out in a hope for science to fill some role that religion doesn't anymore (if it ever did).ant wrote:Tyson get's way over his head when he attempts philosophy, which, I might add, he too believe is dead.
I think it is actually a real thing. Going back at least to "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds" science has provided many people with a sense of some meaning larger than themselves, and independent of power plays by the clever and the ruthless.ant wrote:Your "cosmic perspective" is poetic language, but in essence just wishful thinking.
The problem of perspective in science arises from a philosophical issue termed the the subject-object split. Rational empirical method requires objective distancing from matters under investigation, whereas the religious attitude of connection to the world relies more on intuition. One philosophy paper exploring these themes is at https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContCuce.htmHarry Marks wrote:I am all for a universalistic moral perspective, and certainly getting people over their desperately self-centered natural perspective is a key part of that. It has not been my experience that "science buffs" have managed the trick - much more common is to find people claiming that science backs their selfish perspective and so they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Can we not "go beyond what evolution has granted" us? Just what has evolution granted us? Maybe to some degree the ability to go beyond our survival needs, as paradoxical as that may sound? I grant that the whole question is profound and difficult. Perhaps faith institutions, in their many forms, are the only way we've devised to escape the confines of ego (not that these institutions don't seem to sometimes create their own problems--maddening!).ant wrote:LevV wrote:Given the ethnocentric superiority complex that so many people have, it is no wonder that so many of our fellow humans still believe that the universe revolves around them. A cosmic perspective would bring us to the realization that we are only here on this planet because of a series of fortunate coincidences. A cosmic perspective would also provide insights enabling us to feel at one with the rest of the planet and perhaps get past the cultural and political differences that so divide us today.
If I'm sounding a little mushy, it's likely because Tyson's message overlaps so naturally with the book I just finished reading, Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.
I'll be making a case for this book as our next non-fiction choice. And thanks, geo for mentioning it last September.
You cannot go beyond what evolution has granted you. Your conceptual and perceptual abilities are inextricably tied to your immediate environment. As such, your behavior is governed accordingly.
Your "cosmic perspective" is poetic language, but in essence just wishful thinking.
Tyson get's way over his head when he attempts philosophy, which, I might add, he too believe is dead.
This unbroken tree of life is another aspect of The Cosmic Perspective that should be emphasized. Again, more detail could be added and the timeline could be made more current. Any break in your ancestry - someone killed 100 years ago (or 50,000 years ago) prior to procreation - you would not exist. Similarly, consider the millions of descendents of victims of recent mass shootings who will never exist.From that day on, I began to think of people not as the masters of space and time but as participants in a great cosmic chain of being, with a direct genetic link across species both living and extinct, extending back nearly four billion years to the earliest single-celled organisms on Earth.
Hi Penelope, Happy New Year.Penelope wrote:Is the term ‘Cosmic Perspective’ the same in meaning as ‘cosmic consciousness ‘ ? Elizabethan cosmic consciousness was explained as a pyramid with God at the top and then humans, animals, etc to the base which sort of held the whole thing up. Then gradually, after the Victorians, the concept changed to humans at the apex and God sort of permeating the whole. I seem to be a bit stuck with this concept. Once you lose the idea that God is a kindly old gent who answers our supplications like The genie in the lamp, and think of God being a state to work towards, it becomes quite a seductive mind set, even if, like me, you have a bit of a crush on Richard Dawkins.