Monday 23 July 2012

the comatose worm

Is fear grounded in meaning? If one loses touch with meaning, would one still be struck by fear? What is there to be afraid of? 
I was thinking it could be generalized to other feelings such as happiness,love or hatred, but it couldn't. Apparently, fear has an unspecifiably unique quality.
According to this, I'm wondering if it is implausible not to have some level of meaning in any conscious animal who can experience fear.

Sunday 8 July 2012

Like me if you want, but don't let me think for you!

For a while, I have been busy with school, and I didn't get a chance to update the blog.
But I spent some(actually quite a lot of) time in Google Plus, and as I'm generally interested in neuroscience and cognition.. and related topics, I usually follow these kinds of posts. What I noticed about the scientific/pseudo-scientific posts ..and the interactions with them (Comments/ +1s/Shares), was how people usually by understanding only some parts of a text, or by just seeing a few familiar terms related to the topic of their interest, +1/Share it.
If someone's posts are interesting, or usually credible, it doesn't mean that we should accept whatever they say by faith. We can of course, but this lacks critical thinking. And we might obtain information this way, but not knowledge.
It's also dangerous, as it's a form of sophistry to put a desired pseudo-fact in-between a few known, accepted facts, or fabricate a seemingly coherent causal relation between them, or deviate an argument by long, correct but unrelated examples. Accepting without critical thinking and scrutinizing, instead of knowledge, leads to double ignorance.