Links With Your Coffee - Friday
- Edge: THE NEUROLOGY OF SELF-AWARENESS by V.S. Ramachandran
What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the "turning inward" aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.
- William Rivers Pitt | His Name Was Wellstone
After Wellstone's death, his staff released a transcript of his last 2002 midterm election campaign commercial, which had been slated for airing just before the November vote. "I don't represent the big oil companies," said Wellstone in the ad; "I don't represent the big pharmaceutical companies, I don't represent the Enrons of this world. But you know what, they already have great representation in Washington. It's the rest of the people that need it. I represent the people of Minnesota." Little else needs to be said; his own words are more than enough.
- Prejudice and the brain, bias, neuroscience, amygdala | Salon Life
All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They
-- Rudyard Kipling - FT.com / Columnists / John Kay - Science is the pursuit of the truth, not consensus
Consensus finds a way through conflicting opinions and interests. Consensus is achieved when the outcome of discussion leaves everyone feeling they have been given enough of what they want. The processes of proper science could hardly be more different. The accomplished politician is a negotiator, a conciliator, finding agreement where none seemed to exist. The accomplished scientist is an original, an extremist, disrupting established patterns of thought. Good science involves perpetual, open debate, in which every objection is aired and dissents are sharpened and clarified, not smoothed over.
- Brain stimulation sparks out-of-body experience - Yahoo! News
Guardian book award list, from Bangladesh to Baghdad
Fiction and non-fiction lock horns on this year's Guardian First Book Award shortlist, whose subjects range from a dexterous imagining of the birth of modern-day Bangladesh to an account of the craziness and corruption of life in the fortified Green Zone in post-occupation Iraq.- Fall Fiction Week at Slate. - - Slate Magazine
- Ode To Our Petulant Prez » Mad Kane's Political Madness
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Comments
Ooh - talk about a kick in the nuts. That one's gotta hurt for everyone who seeks to merge Darwinism and Creationism
(for those of you who don't wish to register on ft.com then you can access John Kay's article through his website)
Posted by: cirano
|
November 2, 2007 12:59 PM
Re: John Kay's article
I'm sympathetic to the overall message in this article, but I'd be willing to bet that this is not true:
Most scientists have more knowledge of science going on outside of their specialities than lay people - and commonality of their training usually makes them better equipped to intelligently read general accounts of science outside their disciplines.
Posted by: Tim
|
November 2, 2007 1:21 PM
This article on the neurology of self-awareness sounds fascinating. Whenever I tell my friends how much I love the work of Hofstadter and Dennett, my friends then ask me to summarize the key insights from those books, something I find VERY challenging. This article sounds like the kind of thing I need to point them to. Then again, if the points of those books could be satisfyingly and believably made in less than a few hundred pages, then that's probably what Hofstadter and Dennett would have done...
Posted by: atheistspy | November 2, 2007 7:24 PM
Re: V.S. Ramachandran's article
That last paragraph was uncalled for. 3,000 years of philosophical discourse on the mind-body problem? Is he now assuming that the discipline of neuroscience appeared magically in the last decade? The problem wasn't formally raised in philosophy until Descartes, and it wasn't formally introduced to our reason until then either. This is a little more than 400 years ago.
After all his metaphor/jargon masturbation, he has no right to make arbitrary claims about philosophical discourse and its relationship to one of its hottest topics. And even then, is he even aware that dualism isn't the "in" thing anymore? That said, it's highly controversial that the mind-body problem is actually even a problem in its introductory sense.
Posted by: Aaron | November 2, 2007 7:44 PM
"How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being?"
There is nothing in the article that answers this. I don't see how one could scientifically examine the 'problem.' (I use quotation marks because I think it is a linguistic or emotional problem, not an epistemological one.) Consider the following question: What sort of test could you devise to see if an object is conscious or not? I think anyone who seriously thinks about this will realize that any test would only indicate those things she, on an emotive level, believes to be conscious, not those things that are conscious.
Any objective theory of consciousness will necessarily be on the level of an "objective theory of beauty," or an "objective theory of right or wrong." For those who try to apply objective science to it, we should follow Hume's advice: "to the flames."
Posted by: anon | November 3, 2007 11:15 PM
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