To resist the idea that any non-human animals have the capacity for a range of emotions and have the capacity for thinking is not only unscientific, it is to reject evolution altogether.

BBC Radio 4 podcast: The Life Scientific: Frans de Waal

Frans de Waal is definitely one of my favorite scientists. I was delighted to find out that he confirms ( Read more... )

Autism
Being alive linked to autism! (The original blog post is actually a few years old, but it's not available at the original url.)

I highly recommend listening to the first half of this podcast episode: How attitudes to autism have changed Only the first half has to do with the autism stuff - especially for some of the very enlightening ( Read more... )

This (link to podcast below) was a fascinating discussion that's right up my alley of bringing together knowledge from different fields to enlighten and gain further insights, but not making the assumption that the "harder" sciences - in this case, neuroscience - has authority and better access to what's really going on, and is going to be the one ( Read more... )

Philosophers like Dennett push the scientistic view in the philosophy of mind that, look, neuroscience explains everything we want to know about the mind - or rather, neuroscience is on the way toward that goal, but it already explains a whole lot, and eventually, it will explain everything we want to know about the mind - so we should just forget ( Read more... )

(Just to be clear, this is all fairly off the cuff.)

When I was in high school - now seventeen years ago - I did a "report" on David Berkowitz. (Do they still do "reports" in school anymore? Or did they get rid of that, too?) My classmates were horrified and puzzled as to why on earth I'd choose to read, write, and present about such a topic; ( Read more... )

(Continued from Part I.)

Law v2.0At this point, Dr. Eagleman brings up the fact that, twenty years ago, the technology available didn't allow us to see what we can now see in the brain with current technology, and that we should obviously expect technology to continue advancing, so that, in the future, we'll be able to see even more. But this ( Read more... )

Wow, I just had a moment of realization ( Read more... )

[From the handwritten journal, 10 and 11 November 2011 and 17 and 18 October 2011 ( Read more... )

The other day while on my way to the dock to sit by the ocean and catch the sunset - the kind of sunset that provokes one to contemplation, a sunset characterized by a broad display of a variety of clouds, some massive and heavy and looming, some light and thin, some with a fullness of one shape or another, and some too wispy to hold a shape, a ( Read more... )

Below, some ramblings from the handwritten journal yesterday ( Read more... )