Wonder

In “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov, people who live on a planet that rotates around five suns only see the stars once in a thousand years, because almost all of the time they are rotating around one or another sun in daylight.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore…” Emerson’s lines about the wonder of stars inspired the young Isaac Asimov to write what has been called “the best science fiction story of all time.”

Englishman ended his opus On the Origin of Species with these lines: “…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

Some of the information that codes the molecules of which we consist is older than almost anything else we generally encounter on Earth. Our spool of DNA contains sequences that are older than the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, older than the individual continents. In my cells are informatic chemical sequences that chide the mighty Himalayas as children.

Theologian A.J. Heschel wrote about his deepest request from God: “I didn’t ask for success. I asked for wonder.”
The added information, multiplicity of perspective, and uncertainty in the modern mind is a blessing and an invitation. We no longer live in fortresses. Is doubt our enemy, or our dearest friend?

If we exist, as Einstein says, in a context of an intrinsically uncontactable beyond, might not the pinnacle geniuses of Heisenberg and Gödel themselves with their apparent irrefutable “certainties of uncertainty” some day be scaled, and overturned? Isn’t “uncertainty” itself uncertain?

know that some events are likely, some events are unlikely, and nothing is “certain.”
Truth is a probability statement. When we define what we know we need to also clarify how we have come to know it. We always know what we know based on something, and that basis may contain hidden viewpoints and biases.

Because right now some facts are absolutely unavailable to us, we can never create predictions which extrapolate from the present into the future with full accuracy.

We dream, wonder, hope, fear and then act and try to rebuild the world accordingly. Mind seems to exist at a boundary, where the things of the world are pulled into a new order.

Mind may be a feature of the world which the brain reveals.