-
More on Descartes: His Second "Proof"
My third ever entry on this blog had to do (in part) with René Descartes and his famous Cogito, ergo sum.[1] I have referred back to that entry many times in discussions here about epistemology, how my belief in my own existence is (after believing in logic) the second most secure of all my beliefs.[2]While I highly respect Descartes - he's the ( Read more... ) -
On Artificial Senses
a short(er) entry for a change...
One of my earliest entries was on a pet-peeve or "anti-favorite" of mine - the commonly taught error that we have five senses,[1] when all of us have (at least) six - the sixth being balance/spatial orientation, not an ability to see dead people.
If you have ever watched a science-fiction/fantasy movie, you have ( Read more... ) -
On Grief and What It Does Not (Necessarily) Involve
Two of the most fascinating questions yet to be answered by science, in my opinion, are how developmental biology works and how the brain works. This is because they are, relatively speaking, some of the most complicated processes known.
On the other hand, while the questions asked by psychology are some of the most fascinating to me, psychology as ( Read more... ) -
Still More on Education: Epigenetics
Some of you may recall an entry of mine a few years ago in which I described research that shows that the dogma of biology that says that who we are comes primarily from our genes is lacking. A new field of "epigenetics" has been started to study changes in expression of genes as opposed to simply whether genes are there or not. (In other words, ( Read more... ) -
On Mind-Reading
Japanese researchers, at the end of 2008, reported in the science journal Neutron that they were able to reproduce approximations of what subjects were looking at by directly monitoring their brains with an MRI ( Read more... ) -
On Self-Refuting Statements and Physicalism
The most famous example of a self-refuting statement that I know is: "Nothing is absolutely true." Of course, the statement itself cannot then be true ( Read more... ) -
More on Moral Radii: The Circle Collapses
Directly continuing from Thursday's late entry, what causes the moral circle to shrink?
Social psychologists have long studied this phenomenon, and I've referred to a few of these experiments in a past entry.[1]
Bloom listed the following (with the exception of conformity, which I have added):- distance -- We are less likely to treat people ( Read more... )
-
Even More on Time: Augustine's View
Yesterday, I tried something new and attended a lecture series from the humanities department. The guest speaker was a Jean-Luc Marion, Director of Philosophy at the University of Paris in Sorbonne and Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology and member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School, who ( Read more... ) -
On Perseverance and Addiction
Oftentimes people will throw around the term "addicted to something", such as, "Lhynard is addicted to Live Journal." Or "Lhynard is addicted to pinball ( Read more... ) -
On Understanding Without Doing
An idea that I have commonly heard from teachers is, "Oh, just do it, and then you will understand." (I have written about how this rarely works with me; I tend to learn best by reading about something, not by doing it.[1]This idea is sometimes taken further -- "You can't understand what I mean, because you have not practiced such and such for ( Read more... )