Showing posts with label being human. Show all posts
Showing posts with label being human. Show all posts

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Semibotic Semibiotic


It's not often you get to see an article about consciousness on the BBC, but you do, it's Dan Dennett getting mega-memetical. (just kidding, that doesn't even make sense, in this context.)

Is consciousness just an illusion?
Apr 2017, BBC

We're not just are robots", he says. "We're robots, made of robots, made of robots".
-Dan Dennett

More Human Than Human

It's Alive

[This image is of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, illustrated by artist Matt Kish.]

New Zealand river first in the world to be given legal human status
March 2017, BBC

["It's no stranger than family trusts, or companies or incorporated societies." -New Zealand's Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson.]

Yup.


Wednesday, January 4, 2017

On Science and Religion



Study finds beliefs about all-knowing gods fosters co-operation

The research, an international collaboration among anthropologists and psychologists, looked at how religion affects humans' willingness to co-operate with those outside their social circle.


I'm a strong believer that religion serves the purpose of large-scale human population cooperation, and that despite how much people (like myself even) think it instead today acts as a thought-smothering default state in response to difficult decision-making tasks, it has been, in the early development of human civilization, totally necessary for that development to take place, and that science (a kind of anti-religion) would not exist today had it not been for religion, and that the two are part of the same continuum of cultural evolution. This piece here is a good start for a more well-articulated discussion on the matter.