Blog 3: The Cosmic Egg

On page xxi: "we lost so much when we chose machines". I agree with this, although, while machines have almost certainly dulled the edge of our senses, the real loss is what we suffer at the hands of our own overriding of natural selection, the very process that promised to allow humans to reach their maximum potential. We have traded a world where only the strong, healthy and capable survive and reproduce for a world in which anyone, regardless of defects, health problems and genetic disorders can procreate and pass along all the wrong kinds of genes. The result is a human species so watered down, so riddled with problems, that in terms of our abilities both physical and mental, we get further from our ancestors with every passing generation.

On page xiii: Pearce talks about the "reality shaping function of the mind". Of course everyone interprets reality differently and I would agree that there are many examples of people subconsciously creating circumstances, situations or realities that they would not consciously take credit for, I am not as sure about the author's suggestion that a person who is afraid of getting cancer would develop cancer because the power of the mind is so powerful that it would bring about the very reality imagined by that person. Furthermore, I would be more then opposed to forgo considering that there was some explanation other than "a total brainwash" (page 7, paragraph 3) for the remission of the author's wife's cancer. Pearce declares that anyone unwilling to consider such possibilities is narrow minded when he says "Holding to [these ideas] today are the "tough-minded", whose boastful posturing of a "realistic, no-nonsense objectivity" cloaks a narrow and pedantic selective-blindness...". Newsflash: If you touch a lit cigarette, it burns your skin. Any other outcome is a parlor trick.