Perhaps the greatest divide between ancient and modern thought concerns stability. The ancient world considered the natural world as something eternally unchanging, affected perhaps by a disaster here or there, the whims of gods off and on, maybe some long slow path to destruction or rebirth or recycling. Modern belief is that all stability is an illusion of consciousness.
There is still tension between both ideas. For although we may know that scientifically the earth is spherical, rushing through space, constructed of floating tectonic plates _ it just doesn’t feel that way. We accept that the wind blows, but it is harder to understand that oxygen and other gas levels are maintained by various massive invisible life forces.
And it’s much worse than that. We think we see a picture of the universe as it is, but in fact our sight is a mashup composed of restricted wavelength streams of photons hitting a constantly moving eyeball which somehow excites specialized nerve cells to “make sense” to other billions of neurons. Even at rest, we breathe, blood moves, trillions of cells go about their frantic uncountable internal reactions.
Future thought, should humans survive, will focus on systems and stress. Nothing is in equilibrium, all is maintained by opposing, supporting, adjusting forces. A difficult cosmology, that goes against all our basic intuitions.
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 