You have to believe in a placebo or it wont work, but if it works, its obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.
Cant you see, we are in a dialogue with the universe?
What is the most interesting thing to people? Other people.
Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.
The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.
It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.
I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse. ' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.
Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.
The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.
I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.
You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evolution you see it jumps, it goes through phase changes, and that's very exciting.
A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases.
In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.
I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.
Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3. 32 p. m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.
I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.
Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.