Fascination

If you belong to the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens, then you will find at least 2 things on the following list, with which you are fascinated.

 

  1. The sun setting into the sea.
  2. Your birthday and life-time. What the world was like before you were born, and how it changed since, in your own life-time.
  3. Archeology – past. You’d feel some excitement walking around the ruins of Pompei.
  4. Human evolution – deep past. For example, finding the 3.2 million year old Lucy.
  5. The universe. What it is, where it came from, how it started, how it will end.
  6. The future. What cool gadgets we’ll use, where (what planet) will we live, what kind of aliens we will meet.
  7. Art. A classical piece of music, a painting, a statue.
  8. Math.
  9. Sense of humor.  Wit.
  10. Race cars.
  11. Fighter jets.
  12. Space craft.
  13. Explosives and weapons.
  14. A love story.
  15. God. You might believe a god exists. You might believe (especially if you lived 2000-4000 years ago) that multiple gods exist.

The question is, what’s the evolutionary advantage to being able to appreciate these things?

There must be an advantage, since animals don’t share this with us. I have a few ideas about this, but I prefer to leave the question open.  It feels more complete this way.  Answers are sometimes just a distraction.

Feel free to answer, though.  Sometimes a distraction is much needed.

About Kidmat Eden

Science/tech/space and sci-fi connections; the human experience in the 4th age.
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2 Responses to Fascination

  1. Moty aharonovitz says:

    Perhaps what all of these things have in common is that they inspire a feeling of how small one is compared to time, space, or what I generally call “the sense of infinity”, which also applies to things of utter beauty, such as art and math.

    Like

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