Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
This video features Gordon Brown, talking openly about the balance between national and human interests. This is a hot spot in the attempt to recognize the individual as we identify with the collective.
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Saturday, April 11th, 2009
I gave a talk in a pub, informally (25 mins) and there was a question and answer session afterwards.
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Thursday, June 5th, 2008
Michael Pollan offers a brief talk on TED that describes how different the world looks if one adopts a grasses point of view. The move is akin to Dawkins' famous adoption of the gene's point of view. The Pink Monkey Farm idea is similar. Following the thesis presented at PworldRworld.com, ...
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Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
In a now classic article from 1977, Sverker Runeson observed that variables which we scientists consider to be basic, such as length, duration, etc, may or may not be basic from the point of view of opportunistic, evolved perceptual systems. He suggests that perception may consist of "smart mechanism" which ...
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Monday, April 14th, 2008
Allow me a small moment of hubris. We have been fundamentally wrong about what kind of thing the brain is. We have worked with the notion that it was some kind of a controller. This produces the embarrassing question of who is doing the controlling.
No.
Brains bring forth ...
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Saturday, March 15th, 2008
In this remarkable talk at TED, Jill Bolte Taylor describes the phenomenology of a stroke. She gives a very moving and spirited account of what it felt like for her to suffer a major stroke which essentially knocked out the left half of her brain. The experience was essentially mystical ...
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Monday, February 25th, 2008
I'm reading a very short note in this months Scientific American (so short it doesn't warrant a counterpart on their website, so no link. Sorry). In treats of people with body dysmorphic disorder, in which sufferers perceive themselves as flawed based on very little evidence. Functional MRI has ...
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Monday, February 25th, 2008
More and more, I find that the vision of being I am outlining here and in the sister site is one that aligns well with the enactive approach in Cognitive Science. I try not to read too much ahead of me, but when I do read in this area, things ...
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Saturday, December 29th, 2007
Within psychology, the branch that aspires to provide coherent stories about our mental lives (I didn't say our subjective experience) is Cognitive Psychology. It is frankly a mess. It uses terms such as 'perception', 'sensation', 'emotion', 'memory', and 'valence' with gleeful abandon, without any basis whatsoever apart from received tradition ...
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Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
I quote this in toto. The page I found it on is a weird mixture of quantum physics and nekkid ladies. Ain't the interwebs great?
Throughout the last decade, apocalyptic visions have abounded in response to the increasing fragmentation of knowledge, dehumanization of the individual, and generalized disruption that ...
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