thought
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Protected: A survey about consciousness and metaphysics
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Synchronicity, Coincidence and VALIS
Synchronicity is coincidence right? Here’s how Wikipedia defines the concept: “Synchronicity is a concept, first explained by psychiatrist Carl Jung, which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship, yet seem to be meaningfully related.” Since meaning is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose you get to decide if a coincidence is an example of…
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Insides without Outsides
There are at least two things that the observer cannot view from the outside.
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A storm is blowing in from Paradise
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive…
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“Psychic cells” were silly in 1909. And they are still silly, regardless of what you call them.
Here is Korbinian Brodmann (of cortical Brodmann area fame) writing about a trend towards assigning functional roles to single neurons based on anatomical type, back in 1909: “There has been occasional talk of “sensory cells” located in particular regions, or of sensitive or sensorial “special cells”. People have invented acoustic or optic special cells and…
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Which is the most evolutionarily advanced part of the human brain?
This is a potentially controversial issue, since there is no consensus yet on the evolution of the brain, beyond a very coarse-grained chronology. Broadly speaking, neocortical areas are new, hence the term “neo-cortex”. But among cortical areas, there is still some disagreement about which areas emerged most recently in primates. Based on what we know about…