17-Aug-2008, 02:40
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| Senior Member | | Join Date: Sep 2004 Country: CHINA
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 language points related to way of mind working?
 Hello Everyone,
The following paragraph is taken from the interview of Theodore Roszak about his book the cult of information. I am wondering here whether you can explain the underlined to me? ...There have been over the ages many models of the mind. The mind is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled; or the mind is a machine, breaking down sometimes. Nowadays, the mind is often described as being a computer, processing information. Writer and social theorist Theodore Rozak disputes that model in his book The Cult of Information . He says that the word is over-used, and the mind works more by juggling ideas than sifting through information. In fact, says Rozak, some of the most important ideas have no information at all. Confusion 1: Does juggling ideas here mean combining idears and sifting through information mean selecting some information? "The example I use most prominently in the book is one that should be of ... familiar enough to all Americans: 'All men are created equal.' Very powerful idea, has absolutely no connection with information. The people who developed that idea and used it for revolutionary purposes were not drawing upon some body of research, some facts and figures about the whole human race. That's not what that idea is based upon. It's based upon experience and upon moral vision. And there are so many ideas like that, and I try to remind people, in this critique, that most of what's going through their mind when they're thinking most of the time, the run of ideas that they've learned from the cradle on up, many of which are matters of wisdom, of judgment, of insight, of intuition that have nothing to do with facts and figures or with information." "You write on page 213, you say, 'What I am suggesting is that in little things and big, the mind works more by way of Gestalt than by algorithmic processes. That is because our life as a whole is made up of the hierarchy of projects, some trivial and repetitive, some special and spectacular. Pondering choices, making projects: these are the mind's first order of business. This is so obvious, so basic that perhaps we are only prompted to reflect upon it when a different idea about thinking is presented, such as that thought is connecting data points in formal sequences." Regards Sky  |
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