Entropyisanillusion

The Passion of the Western mind by Richard Parnas. " Understanding the ideas that shaped our worldview." A review by MR Jones My attempt to describe this book will surely fall flat. It will be doomed to superficialities and it will reveal my own sense of humility when I attempt to describe such a book. Parnas captures the entire sweep and the substance of the Great vision of Western humankind. From the ecstatic, transcendental, chimeric religious experiences of pre-platonic Greece, to the elaborated, and deeply coherent Union of the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics and The discoveries of Emmanuel Kant, we are in awe. We see Grand symmetry, and profundity beyond measure. We are truly in awe, Not only of Richard Parnas, for his capacity to articulate the grandest vision of all, But of us, we have only been here on this planet for 100,000 years and, we sense The deep chords and harmonies of the universe already. It is a vision of our profound journey into rationality and an understanding of the universe and our place in it. Parnas leads us slowly, step by step through the stunning insights and, us and all of the blind alleys our culture went through before reaching this singular moment in time. Like the philosophers he describes, Parnas has great reverence and affection for humankind itself. To him, we turn out to be quite a miraculous lot. I too, am in awe. Footnote: If you want to understand The cutting edge of philosophical and scientific thought right now, the exploration and creation of a conceptual scaffolding that links, Emmanuel kantz ontology, the entangled Quantum State, with it's non-locality, contextuality, indeterminism and The nature of human consciousness and existence itself. You need to read this book. I didn't study philosophy in school that much, But I was exposed to informally. This book would have been over my head had I not been fairly well grounded in the broad Concepts of philosophy, contemporary classical and Quantum physics, perceptual science, and the Jungian archetypal cosmology. Even with that, I spend a lot of time researching the background. Anyone can read it. And gain from it, but they will need to Google a lot of the terminology and the Concepts that are crucial to understanding the evolution from Western philosophy and science over the last 3,000 years. I'm about to turn around and read it all over again! It makes me feel good about being a human being and a Westerner. "We have been maligned for a while"...