EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE – Science & Technology

The Tides of Mind

In this book David Gelernter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter), a professor of computer science at Yale, argues that the current trend in cognitive science toward ‘computationalism’ ignores basic, glaringly obvious truths about the difference between brain and mind. He makes the case that human intellect and selfhood are not merely the product of a calculating brain. He explores […]

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The Copernican Question

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/copernicus/) publicly defended the hypothesis that the Earth is a planet and the sun a body resting near the centre of a finite universe. Copernicus’s reordering of the universe mattered because it was the first in a string of new and daring scientific claims at odds with traditional representations of

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Rare Earth

This book argues that the universe is fundamentally hostile to complex life and that while microbial life may be common across the galaxies, complex intelligent life requires an exceptionally unlikely set of circumstances, and must be extremely rare. The book argues that among the essential criteria for life are a terrestrial planet with plate tectonics

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Behave

Robert M. Sapolsky (https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/robert-sapolsky, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky) is a distinguished primatologist working broadly in the life and social sciences to examine human behaviour, manifestations of which, he writes, belong to the nervous system and to sensory stimuli. Some of human behaviour is purely mechanical, with payoffs in dopamine, that ‘invidious, rapidly habituating reward.’ Other aspects are located

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The Evolution of Beauty

In this book Richard Prum (http://prumlab.yale.edu/) argues that natural selection is not the only evolutionary mechanism at work in animal life. Beauty and desire in nature are also dynamic forces, and those features in males that females prefer in choosing mates evolve rapidly. In a nutshell, each species evolves its own standard of beauty by

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