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I constantly kept thinking to myself that I should write my post soon because my entire long post had disappeared after one click of my shaky finger before Fall Break.  So I could not stop thinking of my duty for CSEM, and tended to connect Dennett’s concepts to whatever I was doing during Fall Break like OCD person.  During Fall Break, I bought a duvet for my dorm bed.  While I was picking the right color, I thought the duvet was like philosophy that warms + brightens the bed, science.  I appreciated how the author intermingles two branches.  Just like we explored grim fairy stories realizing there is an icky side in life, the author’s attemept to demonstrate his opinion both in philosophy and science appealed my interest.

Philosophy is a good deal to me because that was the best topic for a conversation with my friends during high school.  I was glad to read about Gaia Theory.  Undergoing puberty, me and my friend came up with our own philosophy called ‘Soul Theory’ that I now realize very close to the Gaia Theory introduced in the reading here.   Our Soul Theory is “Universe is a big soul, and we individual soul, as componets of the mother soul, work together as means of living, yielding, sharing, etc, for the common goal of the Universe,  which is Love.”  When I read about Gaia Theory, I was stunned!  So, the rest of the reading became hard for me because whatever the author was arguing on, my enthusiasm about Gaia Theory didn’t go away easily.  So, that was joy while reading this convoluted chapters.

But I came to my senses.  I had to finish the reading and had to get what the author was saying about Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.  So, I went on putting aside my joy.   I found interesting that how Darwin was a smart reductionist who made abstract philosophical ideas into general form.  Okay, the reading was hard for me because there was something interesting here and there so that I had a hard time to focus on a big picture, or the real topic of the author.  When I encountered reductionism, I pondered upon it for like another five minutes.  In this manner, I took looong time to grasp the author’s voice. 

I confess now that I digressed so frequently due to my interest in the small topics mentioned in the reading.  But after I read the entire reading, there was a sense of accomplishment.