{"id":34353,"date":"2018-05-19T11:02:51","date_gmt":"2018-05-19T16:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34353"},"modified":"2018-05-19T11:02:51","modified_gmt":"2018-05-19T16:02:51","slug":"the-taste-of-anothers-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34353","title":{"rendered":"The Taste of Another\u2019s Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/the-taste-of-anothers-thoughts\/\">The Taste of Another\u2019s Thoughts<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>We\u2019ve taken a somewhat rambling route in our discussion of how each of us can haul ourselves up out of the swamp of abstractions in which modern industrial society is sinking fast, and find our way to the solid ground of things that actually matter. I know some of my readers have been baffled or irritated by the vagaries of that route, but that can\u2019t be helped. Our sense of where to look for straightforward solutions is exactly what\u2019s led us into this swamp; raised in an era of abstraction, we instinctively try to solve problems caused by too much abstraction by piling on more abstraction, or swapping out one set of abstractions for their opposites.<\/p>\n<p>As Einstein pointed out, you can\u2019t solve a problem by using more of the thinking that created it. What\u2019s more, the solutions to really intransigent problems usually have to be found by asking questions about the most basic assumptions that undergird the thinking that created them. One of Einstein\u2019s odder contemporaries, the irrepressible Charles Fort, put it this way: \u201cIt is by thinking things that schoolboys know better than to think that discoveries are made.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For most of two thousand years, to cite a useful example, astronomers across the western half of Eurasia had tried to make sense of the motions of the planets under the assumption that the sun, moon, and planets moved in circles. The result, as observations piled up, was a vast creaking mechanism of epicycles, eccentrics, and equants\u2014geometrical gimmicks intended to force circles into copying the simple and elegant motions of the heavens. It took a mystical astrologer named Johannes Kepler, who\u2019d brooded over Renaissance sacred geometry for decades, to see through the clutter, realize that the planets moved in ellipses rather than circles, and send the whole lumbering mass of fudge factors into history\u2019s compost heap.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Taste of Another\u2019s Thoughts We\u2019ve taken a somewhat rambling route in our discussion of how each of us can haul ourselves up out of the swamp of abstractions in which modern industrial society is sinking fast, and find our way to the solid ground of things that actually matter. I know some of my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[20167,15417,12381,1758,8272,7943],"class_list":["post-34353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-abstraction","tag-ecosophia","tag-ideas","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-problems","tag-solutions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34354,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34353\/revisions\/34354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}