This thread has attracted some thoughtful and thought-provoking responses.
Suddenly, everything I read seems to touch on the idea that changes in the world are changing human nature. Suggested culprits include television
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Originally Posted by David Foster Wallace, examining in 1988 the work of young writers
It may be that, through hyper- and atrophy, our mental capacities themselves are different [from those of previous generations]: the breadth of our attentions greater as attention spans themselves shorten. Raised on an activity at least partly passive, we experience a degree of manipulation as neutral, a fact of life.
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and quantum mechanics
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Originally Posted by a character in Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World
it was mathematics--not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare, or our climate Armageddon--which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.
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