[Editor’s Note: Today’s post is a listener submission by Adam Arnold, graduate student at the University of Warwick. You too can be a guest blogger.] During the Buddhism Naturalized episode, the guest Owen Flanagan (as well as Mark, not unusually for him) may have dropped more names than in any other podcast. I have this same tendency in everyday life. Continue Reading …
Blind Sight as Quality Control?
This article at Salon.com I thought presented an amusing alleged implication of the structure of our brains: We have multiple streams of visual information input, and a proof of this is in the phenomenon of blind sight, whereby whatever the normal pathway is that makes it all the way to the speech center and/or consciousness (however that arises) has been Continue Reading …
Magnetic Morality Modulation
This September, PBS will re-broadcast an interesting episode of NOVA ScienceNOW, which touches on some points raised in PEL’s interview with Patricia Churchland. The episode demonstrates a procedure called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which can influence a person’s moral judgments as they are being made, simply by messing with the neural activity located within the brain’s Right TemporoParietal Junction (RTPJ): If you find Continue Reading …
Tripe, Part Two
Dear kind and patient readers, The burden of stewardship is great, and though it is with hesitation that I here link to the “Second Sitting” of Cliffson Wolf’s masterwork Tripe, given that interested parties could have easily clicked through from the first chapter to this document, it is incumbent upon me through the terms of Wolf’s will (in which he Continue Reading …