Personal Blog
“A Glorious Piece of Meat”, well said. The short video was very interesting. One of my favorite quotes from the video was “The soul is nothing more than complex network of neurons”(Crick). Which means that our human brain is extremely to understand how it works. Furthermore, we are clueless in knowing if Neurons comes first, or consciousness. What comes first, the matter or the awareness? If you pick matter, than you already knew it, that why you said matter.
The reading subject was Neural Philosophy. The Astonishing Hypothesis written by Francis Crick in 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis describes human as nothing more than bunch of nerve cells and molecules working. Crick mentions that we have created this illusion. Another very interesting reading was An Integral Theory of Consciousness by Ken Wilber which explains that the brain and consciousness is a biological phenomenon. Another reading was The Problem of Consciousness by John R. Searle. Searle says the most important scientific discovery would be to answer the following question “How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness?”. Another good example is intrinsic feature of reality, which describes “physical objects have features that are intrinsic to reality” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: science
Steven Pinker is a professor at Harvard University on Evolutionary Psychology. He has written couple of books such as How the mind works and The blank slate which are related to psychology and its traditions. One really interesting point he makes is that, the mind is very complex. So, complex that we are unable to understand how we can learn so fast, even faster than robots. Furthermore, he talks about the ideas that are sin, which means that the humans are persuade easily to those ideas. People have choice to fantasize reality or come up with an idea to avoid illusion.
Dr. Gerald Edelman talks about Neural Darwinism. Edelman started off with examining the mind processing techniques. He mentions that the brain is context-sensitive, if you look at it, or listen to some music, the brain tries to detect the motion perception. Edelman does show a robot who was driving itself, and maybe detecting the patterns, or trying to find things what it was programmed for. Edelman shows very interesting points, examples and even some videos. One of my favorite one was the robot playing soccer game against the human, which is very different thing I’ve ever seen. Basically, the robots are working on sequences basic, if it detects the sequence, it does something which is very competitive.
The short film had very interesting topic like the reading and the expert lecture had which is evolution. The evolution by Darwin, I think is based on survival from generation to generation. We should know that we have been edited by our parents. The short film, The Fundamentalism is a mental disease which is a photonic narrative. The Darwin’s black box has been critizied of being wrong on the science by many biologists.
The readings were basically related to the evolution which helps us to understand the history of our lives. The theory says that we form ourselves to something we are not, something like monkeys did generation and generation ago. This entire concept began with Darwin’s theory which was first published in 1859. Why do we believe in such theory? Well because, that is the most evaluated and sensible theory that we can probably come up with. Read the rest of this entry »
Professor Edward O. Wilson at Harvard University wrote many books, one of them is Social Biology which was one of the Wilson’s best selling which was about biology and social behavior. Wilson mentioned that if we can get into the brain, such as neurons, we can probably figure out human behavior and self conscious and we would be able to track every part of the brain. He also mentions there is no conperiecy in science, the goal of scientist is to make a discovery and even if you found something, you still keep looking. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: dawkin, Oxford, quantum theory, science
The short movie, The Little Things That Jiggle, the one main point I can probably point out is that our lives and science relates to each other that we wont be able to produce better living standards without it. Moreover, science and our lives are attached together, waiting for a meltdown “Human beings arefrozen popsicle of light waiting for final illumination on meltdown”. There were different quoates in the video, one of them was “It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid” (Einstein) which means that everyone has the ability to learn and explore which we don’t really know much about.
Gods Do Decompose was hilarious. I was shocked with the title but I kind of liked the background music, it was relaxing. Than after watching the video, I think that it had a good point. Every religion, tells to pray to god, in other words believe in something that your not sure of. The video points out that the god might not exist, or he’s dead in other words. The video had good quotes, “God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist” (Stendahi).
Tags: science
The readings were very interesting. The idea behind all the readings was that we are trying to prove our existence through physics, science, and experiments. First of all, the cosmic inflation which is known as part of the big bang theory which illustrates why the world seems flat. Furthermore, the cosmic inflation suggests that the growth of the early expansion of the universe was exponenetial “due to metric expansion of space” (wikipedia). Second, Was Cosmic Inflation The ‘Bang’ Of The Big Bang? By A. Guth mentions details of cosmic inflation. One intereting point I learned is that Alexander Friedmann marked the beginning of Big Bang calculations. Alexander evaluated that the universe is expanding. Read the rest of this entry »
Professor Owen Gingerich, Harvard University Professor Owen Gingerich, Harvard University talking about Astronomy, God, and Jesus. Owen has written couple of books, such as The Eye of Heaven and The Great Copermisuc Chase. Owen starts off with how great the universe is but the unknown purpose of our lives expands the questions of our purpose. Owen than talks about all different kinds of scientific common properties that relates to our daily lives such as oxygen. Owen mentions that “the Universe is easier to comprehend with purpose anddesign”. He also mentions a very interesting idea that we human only look around what we do, which is cause and effect. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: universe
The short movies Java Philosophy and De Docta Ignorantia both had very different ideas. First off, Java Philosophy, the author throws a question, “Who are you?”. What he/she really trying to do is get us thinking that do we really know ourselves. Moreover, another interesting point is that “I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations,-one can either do this or that. My honest opinon and a friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you’ll regret both”, I loved this quote. I think what he says is that we feel that we didn’t make the right decision since we always think back to a situation. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: java, Philosophy