Erisa

“Just before I left for Long Island and my new life, I got another call, this one from Dr. Ernest Sachs, up at Dartmouth Medical School. He was head of neurology at the time, and he invited me up to give a lecture. I was thrilled. I was to play the role of professor at my old alma mater! It was especially sweet because the very same medical school had rejected my application eleven years earlier, even though I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and my brother was one of their stellar graduates. It is events like this in one’s past that fall off the story line. What if I had been accepted and gone? There would have been no split-brain work for me. How would that whole story have been different? I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life’s events. Yet randomness is ever present.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning” and Turing’s equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they still provoke dismay and disbelief in some quarters, which I have tried to dispel in this chapter. Creationists are not going to find commented code in the inner workings of organisms, and Cartesians are not going to find an immaterial res cogitans “where all the understanding happens".”
― Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

“Attraverso i suoi molti peccati, Teodoro non ismentí mai, però, il suo carattere precipuo: una generosità avventata e cavalleresca, la quale, malgrado la sua frivolezza in amore, gli meritava il perdono e, in certi casi, fin la gratitudine, delle sue stesse vittime. Con grandiosità senza pari, egli si spendeva tutto intero in ogni avventura, anche nelle piú effimere: se amava una donna, foss’anche per un sol giorno, per la durata di questo giorno era il suo schiavo, ed era capace di commettere ogni sorta di vistose e costose follie per una fiamma passeggera ed esigua. Inoltre, egli possedeva il dono delle parole, e, di piú, il dono di credere in esse: grazie al magico uso d’un vocabolario poetico, romanzesco, e, badate bene, sincero, egli trasmutava, nel concetto suo proprio e in quello delle credule amanti, una comune tresca in una tragedia. E nessuna delle sue amanti (qualsiasi fossero stati le amarezze e gli strazi inflittile, per crudeltà della sorte, da Teodoro), alla fine, almeno, non rimaneva senza l’estrema soddisfazione d’aver vissuto, non già una mediocre avventura, ma un’esperienza magnifica, e d’aver rappresentato una parte sublime.
A Teodoro non piaceva di lasciare alcuno con la bocca amara: e ciò non solo a motivo della sua naturale mitezza, ma anche perché l’ideale amoroso, sul quale egli avrebbe voluto modellarsi, non era di perfidia, ma di cortesia e magnanimità. Egli preferiva di rappresentare dopotutto, e a dispetto, magari, d’ogni verisimiglianza, la parte della vittima; e vi riusciva con tanto successo che si dette il caso d’amanti da lui tradite, disonorate e abbandonate che s’impietosirono meno sulla propria sorte che sulla sua.”
― Elsa Morante, Menzogna e sortilegio