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wholeness and satisfaction which is characteristic of our response to
great art and other transcendent states of mind. The patterns of music,
translated, analyzed, shorn of detail, are able to stimulate the patterns of
emotions on many levels simultaneously, thus bringing various hierar-
chical states of consciousness and unconsciousness into harmony with
MYTH 161
one another during the existence of the music for us, whether this is in
a performance or purely in the memory. As this happens we experience
the sense of unity which arises from the cessation of conflict between
conscious and unconscious. (McLaughlin, 1970, pp. 104 105)
MYTH
The Contrast between Myth and Reality
The contrast between myth and reality has been a major philosophical
concern since the time of the Pre-Socratics. Myth is a many-faceted per-
sonal and cultural phenomenon created to provide a reality and a unity to
what is transitory and fragmented in the world that we experience. . . .
Myth provides us with absolutes in the place of ephemeral values and a
comforting perception of the world that is necessary to make the insecu-
rity and terror of existence bearable.
It is disturbing to realize that our faith in absolutes and actual truth
can be easily shattered.  Facts change in all the sciences; textbooks in
chemistry, physics, and medicine are sadly (or happily, for progress)
soon out of date. It is embarrassingly banal but fundamentally important
to reiterate the platitude that myth, like art, is truth on a quite different
plane from that of prosaic and transitory factual knowledge. Yet myth
and factual truth need not be mutually exclusive, as some so emphati-
cally insist. A story embodying eternal values may contain what was
imagined, at any one period, to be scientifically correct in every factual
detail; and the accuracy of that information may be a vital component
of its mythical raison d être. Indeed one can create a myth out of a factual
story, as a great historian must do: any interpretation of the facts, no
matter how credible, will inevitably be a mythic invention. On the other
hand, a different kind of artist may create a nonhistorical myth for the
ages, and whether it is factually accurate or not may be quite beside the
point.
Myth in a sense is the highest reality; and the thoughtless dismissal of
myth as untruth, fiction, or a lie is the most barren and misleading def-
inition of all. (Morford & Lenardon, 1995, p. 4)
162 MYTHICAL THINKING
MYTHICAL THINKING
Mythical Thinking Is Not Rational
Analysis but Rather the Captivating of
Consciousness
Mythical thinking. . . does not dispose freely over the data of intuition,
in order to relate and compare them to each other, but is captivated and
enthralled by the intuition which suddenly confronts it. It comes to rest
in the immediate experience; the sensible present is so great that every-
thing else dwindles before it. For a person whose apprehension is under
the spell of this . . . attitude, it is as though the whole world were simply
annihilated; the immediate content, whatever it be, commands his . . .
interest so completely that nothing else can exist beside and apart from
it. The ego is spending all its energy in this single object, lives in it, loses
itself in it. (Cassirer, 1946, pp. 32 33)
N
NATURE
Modern Science Focuses Not on Nature
Itself, But on Abstract Representations of
Nature
To Newtonians, each question had its singular answer, one that would
remain the same no matter who asked it, or why. But now, the uncer-
tainty that undercuts every measurement of some fact in the real world
compels the observer to choose which question to ask, which aspect of
a phenomenon to study.
The necessity of choice became overwhelmingly apparent when Hei-
senberg elevated uncertainty to a principle in quantum mechanics in
1927, having recognized that on the subatomic level the observer had to
emphasize only one of a pair of properties to study at any one time. In
one of the prominent interpretations of quantum mechanics, the idea
took on a larger meaning: that in choosing what to study, the scientist
in effect creates the object of his inquiry. . . . The impossibility of con-
structing a complete, accurate quantitative description of a complex sys-
tem forces observers to pick which aspects of the system they most wish
to understand. . . .
What one studies from among this wealth of choice depends on what
one wants to know; the questions create or at least determine the
range of possible answers. No such answer can be completely  true :
instead of saying  This is what nature is like, they can claim only,  This
164 NEURAL NETWORK
is what nature seems like from here  a vastly diminished claim from
that of Newton. The critical issue raised by such subjectivity is how to
decide what value each partial answer has, what connection it actually
makes between the real world and our understanding of it. The object
of study, the focus of much of modern science, has therefore shifted
inward, to examine not nature itself but rather to study the abstract rep-
resentations of nature, the choices made of what to leave in and what to
drop out of any given study. (Levenson, 1995, pp. 228 229)
NEURAL NETWORK
The Characteristics of Neural Networks
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