Sex, religion and the pursuit of blankness
Try to make your mind go completely blank. Too difficult? That’s not surprising, at least according to Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
“If you can’t achieve this tabula rasa state after a few seconds, then it’s no use persisting: the longer and harder one tries, the more stubbornly cluttered the mind becomes,” she said.
Daston opened her talk “Seeing Things: A History of Blank Screens” on Tuesday with this thought experiment — or anti-thought experiment, as she called it. Mental blankness does not come naturally, she said....
#2
By out west
12:19p.m. on June 15, 2008
a blank mind is difficult- it takes practice. and there is use persisting.
Miriam Posner would do well to read Daston's (and Galison's) book "Objectivity," which traces the development of scientific atlases from the 18th to the 20th century. In it, Daston argues that scientists employ varying epistemologies, some seeking to eliminate subjectivity, and others (as is illustrated in the book with images taken from 20th century medical atlases) wholeheartedly embracing it.