flashlights

...

So, today, we live with the disastrous results of the ego, which, according to nineteenth-century common sense, feels that it is a fluke in nature and that if it does not fight nature it will not be able to maintain its status as an intelligent fluke.

Therefore the geneticists and many others are now saying that man must take the course of his evolution into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, unintelligable processes of nature to develop him any further; he must intercede with his own intelligence...This, I submit, is a ghasltly error, because human intelligence has a very serious limitation.

It is a scanning system of conscious attention that is linear, and it examines the world in lines, rather as you would pass the beam of a flashlight or a spotlight across the room.

...

However, the universe does not come at us in lines. Instead it comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening altogether everywhere at once...The computer may greatly speed up linear scanning, but it is still linear scanning.

i'm on (meta)physics kick. the likelihood of metaphysics quotes from charming hippie alan watts and disarming physicist dick feynman has increased.