What You Can Imagine Depends On What

Up Till Now, We Can Suppose, Nervous Systems Solved The 'now What Do I Do?' Problem By A Relatively Simple Balancing Act Between A Strictly Limited Repertoire Of Actions - If Not The Famous Four F's (fight, Flee, Feed, Or Mate), Then A Modest Elaboration Of Them.

How Good Are The Best Musical Imaginations? Can A Trained Musician, Swiftly Reading A Score Tell Just How That Voicing Of Dissonant Oboes And Flutes Over The Massed Strings Will Sound?

Some Cultural Phenomena Bear A Striking Resemblance To The Cells Of Cell Biology, Actively Preserving Themselves In Their Social Environments, Finding The Nutrients They Need And Fending Off The Causes Of Their Dissolution.

My Faith In The Expertise Of Physicists Like Richard Feynman, For Instance, Permits Me To Endorse—and, If It Comes To It, Bet Heavily On The Truth Of—a Proposition That I Don't Understand. So Far, My Faith Is Not Unlike Religious Faith, But I Am Not In The Slightest Bit Motivated To Go To My Death Rather Than Recant The Formulas Of Physics. Watch: E Doesn't Equal Mc2, It Doesn't, It Doesn't! I Was Lying, So There!

Philosophers' Syndrome: Mistaking A Failure Of The Imagination For An Insight Into Necessity.