Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Metacognition? Or Just Thinking?

“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it is always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.”
-Carl Sagan From an introduction to A Brief History of Time By Stephen Hawking

What analysis or new insight can you add to this blog regarding this quotation? What does it challenge you to think? Comment about a portion of the quotation or all of the quotation. Use direct quotations to support your claims. Please respond.