Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Wallpapers from the Beagle!
There are some new high resolution photos from the Beagle's voyage on their Facebook page. This voyage retraces the steps of the H.M.S. Beagle, the ship that Darwin sailed on, accumulating evidence that led him to presenting his groundbreaking theory of evolution.
Of All Things
Right now, I'm putting together a short essay on integration for a friend. Might come back to it and expand it at another time.
The matter of the origin of thought and impulse was recently in the popular science news again. In a nutshell, the research on the surface implied that impulses originated before conscious knowledge and consciousness acted merely as rejection of impulse, and not origination. There are a few problems with the methodology however.
It reminded me of quotes from a few prominent scientists that the breakthrough necessary for the solution of an especially difficult problem would usually occur in complete form when they were not in the process of thinking about the problem (previously, of course, they had worked on the problem for quite awhile). It is only after this impulse occurs that they then went forward and worked through the logic on paper, implying that the logic was, at least, not stored in the mind that created the solution!
From whence, then, come these thoughts? Is there a protologic that we have yet to grasp (ie., the mind is not a complex computer, but operates on another set of rules), or does the unconscious mind work at a high level independently of the conscious mind using complex resources and discarding everything but the output which it then presents to the conscious mind? The latter may be an evolutionary advantage in that dedicating one's thought processes to a single problem is not necessarily a good method of survival. The background work allowed our ancestors to solve complex problems while working on everyday challenges.
I will be back on this subject after I have re-read "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker and "The Man Who Mistook his Wife For a Hat" by Oliver Sacks.
Check them out at Babbo's Books in Windsor Terrace if possible.
Other books I am re-reading at the moment include "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould, and "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose.
The matter of the origin of thought and impulse was recently in the popular science news again. In a nutshell, the research on the surface implied that impulses originated before conscious knowledge and consciousness acted merely as rejection of impulse, and not origination. There are a few problems with the methodology however.
It reminded me of quotes from a few prominent scientists that the breakthrough necessary for the solution of an especially difficult problem would usually occur in complete form when they were not in the process of thinking about the problem (previously, of course, they had worked on the problem for quite awhile). It is only after this impulse occurs that they then went forward and worked through the logic on paper, implying that the logic was, at least, not stored in the mind that created the solution!
From whence, then, come these thoughts? Is there a protologic that we have yet to grasp (ie., the mind is not a complex computer, but operates on another set of rules), or does the unconscious mind work at a high level independently of the conscious mind using complex resources and discarding everything but the output which it then presents to the conscious mind? The latter may be an evolutionary advantage in that dedicating one's thought processes to a single problem is not necessarily a good method of survival. The background work allowed our ancestors to solve complex problems while working on everyday challenges.
I will be back on this subject after I have re-read "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker and "The Man Who Mistook his Wife For a Hat" by Oliver Sacks.
Check them out at Babbo's Books in Windsor Terrace if possible.
Other books I am re-reading at the moment include "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould, and "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose.
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