Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

A Conversation with Einstein’s Brain 460of the narrative are doing the work. If the oversimplifications are the source of theintuitions, rather than just devices for suppressing irrelevant complications, we shouldmistrust the conclusions we are invited to draw. These are matters of delicate judgment,so it is no wonder that a generalized and quite justified suspicion surrounds suchexercises of imagination and speculation.In the end we must turn to the rigorous methods of hard science the experiments,deductions, and mathematical analyses-to keep the speculations honest. These methodsprovide raw materials for suggesting and testing hypotheses, and even serve often aspowerful engines of discovery in their own right. Still, the storytelling side of science isnot just peripheral, and not just pedagogy, but the very point of it all. Science properlydone is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once said. The point of science isto help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the greatstories: the tale of how, once upon a time, there was a Big Bang; the Darwinian epic ofthe evolution of life on Earth; and now the story we are just beginning to learn how totell: the amazing adventure of the primate autobiographers who finally taught themselveshow to tell the story of the amazing adventure of the primate autobiographers.D.C.D.