五感之外的世界

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• in 1995, environmental historian William Cronon wrote that “the time has come to rethink wilderness.” In a searing essay, he argued that the concept of wilderness, especially as perceived in the United States, had become unjustly synonymous with grandeur. Eighteenth-century thinkers believed that vast and magnificent landscapes reminded people of their own mortality and brought them closer to glimpsing the divine. “God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in thesunset,” Cronon wrote. “One has only to think of the sites that Americans chose for their first national parks—Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Rainier, Zion—to realize that virtually all of them fit one or more of these categories. Less sublime landscapes simply did not ap... (查看原文)

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• We are used to senses like vision or hearing that offer nigh-instantaneous information. Magnetoreception probably doesn’t work like that, but we don’t know the timescales over which it does work. Without knowing that, or without even realizing that you need to find out, it’s hard to design good experiments. As I wrote in the introduction, a scientist’s data are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses. The boundaries of our own Umwelt corral our ability to understand the Umwelten of others. (查看原文)

  跳草 2023-03-15 20:23:19