What exactly is consciousness?
There is a bonobo (a near relative of chimpanzees and our own close cousin) that in his lifetime learned Read More »
Posts Tagged: Consciousness
What’s Pain Got to Do with It? In Art, It’s Everything
Pleasure and pain, and that which causes them, good and evil, are the hinges on which our passions turn.
– John Locke, 1690
Silence as Art – The Art of Space
On a beautiful spring afternoon, a Sunday in Berkeley, California we were only two Read More »
NEWS: WINTER 2012 – Happenings in Art, Science and Other Stuff
HIGHWAYS & BYWAYS: Your brain wiring in 3-D…
The Human Connectome Project can now scan and show all the wiring in your brain – but not yet Read More »
Is The Internet Conscious? Could It Be?
The short answer is Read More »
Consciousness & Free Will – They Are Just Illusions
Just when we think we know why we are superior to monkeys – the larger size of our prefrontal cortex: that ‘thinking’ or executive brain – now neuro-biologists are telling us we don’t really Read More »
What Mad Pursuit – Francis Crick 1916-2004
But to convey my own feelings, I cannot do better than quote…the painter John Minton in which he said of his own artistic creations, “The important thing is to be there when the picture is painted.”
Francis Crick, on his discovery of DNA structure
On this day eight years ago, the most creative biologist of the twentieth century died in San Diego, California. He was one of the greatest scientists of of all time, along with Einstein, Read More »
Of Chimp & Child – And Aesop’s Fable
How smart is your four-year-old? Not as smart as a chimp, or maybe even Aesop’s rook. Watch these videos in the BBC News report Spitting and Urinating Chimps ‘Replay Aesop’s Fable. Read More »
Information = Knowledge?
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information
T.S. Eliot, from “The Rock” (1934)
Since those bleak pre-war days when Eliot put down these lines, our world has galloped on at even greater speed, with a velocity ever more dizzying. This of course is in great part aided by the advent of the computer and the information age. It has created such wealth and prosperity utterly unimagined a mere seventy years ago. But has all this made our lives better? Are we wiser and happier? We should be, if information = knowledge. Read More »