Running with the stars

 Did someone say Carl Sagan?

Predictably, when Dan chose the Baloney Detection Kit as his report topic in Rationality I seized the moment: yet another occasion to speak gratefully of the formative model Sagan's cosmic perspective  has been for me. I discovered his Cosmic Connection late in High School and, in retrospect, credit the Sagan connection with lighting the candle that would eventually lead me to Philosophy. 

Carl's daughter Sasha insists (pace NASA administrator Nelson at the conclusion of yesterday's big Webb telescope reveal party) he never said “somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” (that was somebody else, quoted in Newsweek) but he surely believed it. “Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.” 

In the transition we've learned to think critically (or try) and use the logical toolkit to detect and call bullshit on at least some of the baloney. Logic is indeed a great tool, in service of rationality conceived as life on the grandest scale of possibility for our species and loyalty to our cosmos. We've been invited to see ourselves as transient riders on a pale blue dot, "a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark." We should by now have come to accept "our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Nobody else in class had ever seen, read, or heard the PBD before, or the Contact opening, which together convey that most rational perspective that transcends personal, tribal, sectarian, merely instrumental parochialism. Rationality in the expansive Jamesian sense involves just such a broadened big-picture perspective that doesn’t diminish us and reduce everything to narrow self-regarding means-ends efficiencies.

I noted that, by contrast to this generation's most renowned astro-popularizer Neil deGrasseTyson (who has recounted receiving the Cosmos baton from Carl directly), Sagan was instinctively a friend of philosophy. He knew what the old Roman emperor meant: "Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. 

We are a way for the universe to know itself.”