¶ Piano Top
← Piaget: Jean: Child’s Spontaneous Geometry (2) | Piano →
Index Entry
I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. Our brains deal exclusively with special-case experiences. Only our minds are able to discover the generalized principles operating without exception in each and every special-case experience case which if detected and mastered will give knowledgeable advantage in all instances.
¶ Citations
- opening paragraph, Chapter One of OPERATING MANUAL FOR SPACESHIP EARTH, 1969
