SAMVAD (Together In Conversation‪)‬ Sunil Rao

Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Now ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.







Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour.







This week I bring to your attention another excerpt which we have titled – Reductionism from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein.







This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world. 







Reductionism







Even as Bacon was formulating his new system, in a small town in Bavaria a snowstorm kept a French military engineer in his lodgings for a whole day and night during which, he said, he had formulated the concept that was to solve the problem of evaluation. His method for doing so would also give specialists a powerful new gift to help them in manufacturing knowledge. In 1637, after much rethinking, the engineer, René Descartes, published his new concept in a book called Discourse on Method, in which he set out the rules for seeking certainty in an uncertain world.







The secret lay in what he called “methodical doubt,” by which everything except self-evident truths were to be questioned until they had proved themselves to be true (and for Descartes, every-thing, especially the evidence of the senses, was to be doubted in the absence of any “evident truth”). Descartes’ method provided the supreme cut-and-control approach to the world in the form of a technique known as “reductionism.” In an echo of the medieval resolution-and-composition technique, the method called for a problem to be divided up into its smallest parts so that it could more easily be understood and then solved. All reductionist thinking should proceed from the simple to the complex and all statements about the world should be expressed only in non-metaphysical terms: size, shape, and movement.







Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein







I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:









The Axemakers Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture









Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.







Namaste!

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Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Because ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.







Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour.







This week I bring to your attention another excerpt which we have titled – The Town Clock from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein.







This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world. 







The Town Clock







The gift of the clock immediately made possible new forms of wider, more effective marshaling of social forces. Demand for clocks from royal courts and from the growing number of towns throughout Europe was overwhelming. Town clocks gave guilds and governments the means to regulate all behavior. In Brussels, textile workers rose at a dawn bell, weavers and twisters ended their day with an evening bell, and there was a special clock for cobblers, In 1355, in Amiens, France, the city government would issue an ordnance “concerning the time when the workers… should go each morning to work, when they should eat and when to return to work after eating; and also in the evening when they should quit work for the day,” and they used a special bell for this purpose.







Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein







I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:









The Axemakers Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture









Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.







Namaste!

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Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Because ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.







Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour.







This week I bring to your attention another excerpt which we have titled – History – Oral & Written – A Perspective from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein.







This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world. 







History – Oral & Written – A Perspective







Key to the new way of thinking is that where pictographs were in a sense representations of the object, alphabetic letters were not. For example, an “A” represented nothing specific in nature. The alphabet codified nature into something abstract, to be cut and controlled impersonally. In this way, to some extent the alphabet removed us one more step away from our environment. It also gave us a new view of the past.







While literature was one obvious offspring of the development of the alphabet, a less obvious outcome was the concept of history. Oral memory deals with the present, and recollection is concerned with what is relevant to the present. Biography in an oral tradition is not as much careful scholarship as it is a creative act, in which events are woven into coherence with the aid of imagination. But the accumulation of written records makes it possible to separate the present from the past. Somebody who can read is able to “look back” at what happened before, in a way that the non-literate person never can. Written material is by necessity “dated” and fixed, while an oral tradition is “living” and fluid.







Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein







I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:









The Axemakers Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture









Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.







Namaste!

a class="a2a_button_email" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?

Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Because ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.







Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour.







This week I bring to your attention another excerpt which we have titled –Plato and Alphabetic Thinking from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein.







This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world. 







Plato & Alphabetic Thinking







Plato expressed his concerns about how alphabetic thinking might affect our view of knowledge in an admonition that would go largely unheeded until the late twentieth century:







It will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory, as through reliance on writing they are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from inside, themselves by themselves: you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. To your students you give an appearance of wisdom, not the reality of it; having heard much, in the absence of teaching, they will appear to know much when for the most part they know nothing, and they will be difficult to get along with, because they have acquired the appearance of wisdom instead of wisdom itself.







Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein







I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:









The Axemakers Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture









Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.







Namaste!

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Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Because ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.







Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour.







This week I bring to your attention another excerpt which we have titled –Tools & Lifestyle from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein.







This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world. 







Tools & Lifestyle







As the population centers increased in size and number, new axemaker gifts facilitated their organization and maintenance. The ox-drawn plough boosted grain production, the wheel and the sail transported it, the potter’s wheel made jars to store it, and the waterwheel ground it into meal for people now living in houses made of kiln-fired bricks in communities protected by metal weapons. Draft animals fertilized the soil, the plough increased the area of workable land, and “short-fallow” farming (with frequent cropping and growing) produced crops in faster sequence. Things were changing faster now.







Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein







I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:









The Axemakers Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture









Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.







Namaste!

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Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), this is where we try to draw your attention to things that matter and the importance of our attention, why is that? Because ‘let us remember this again, ‘What we give our Attention to matters,’ as Our life’s experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.







Attention: is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. Once our attention is drawn to the mechanism of why and what we give attention to, it is as if a veil has been stripped off and we become freer in our action and choices. And that is our endavour.







This week I bring to your attention another excerpt which we have titled – New Tools & their Effects from the book titled ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ – Technology’s capture and control of our minds and Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein.







This book is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds. The gifts we accepted from them gave us the power to change the way we lived, but doing so also changed the way we thought. It is a stunning account of how scientific thinking and technology have gained control over the way we perceive and value the world. 







New Tools & their Effects







With the acceleration also came major change in the nature of the relationship between us and our axemakers. When tools like the alphabet appeared, they encouraged new ways of thinking. The linear nature of the alphabet facilitated sequential, reductionist, logical forms of expression and thought. Its ease of use promoted literacy and with it the involvement of citizens in the governing process.







Above all, the alphabet made it possible to ask questions that were not immediately essential to the well-being of the community. These questions, about matters such as the origin of the universe, the nature of life, or the sum of the internal angles of a triangle, generated increasingly esoteric axemaker vocabulary. They also changed the way we thought about the way we thought.







Excerpt from ‘The Axemaker’s Gift’ by James Burke and Robert Ornstein







I am sure that you will enjoy reading this book; you can buy your copy from the following link:









The Axemakers Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture









Enjoy reading it with your family, friends and near and dear one’s.







Namaste!

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