Finished Goblet of Fire. Good stuff... more ominous and perilous from the get-go. The pages really flied for me. Works well as an adventure and mystery novel. And there's a slight shift of the episodic formula to an ongoing story of conflict against the forces of Voldemort. Interesting characters and good villains. Additional backstory and development for all characters. Have to say, Rowling is most adept in the art of story-telling. Can't wait for the next book....
I finished reading the 3rd Harry Potter book, the Prisoner of Azkaban. It was good, but not as good as the previous books. I think it's because the ending wasn't as statisfactory as the previous two. It's still an enjoyable read. I won't spoil the ending except to say that the plot device Rowling used at the end was majorly deux ex machina. Let's just say, the ending made me feel like I was watching a particularly lazy Star Trek episode.
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BBC reports that Professor Jaak Panksepp have discovered that animals other than humans exhibit play sounds that resemble human laughs. His findings are published in the journal, Science, and can be found here."Although no one has investigated the possibility of rat humour, if it exists, it is likely to be heavily laced with slapstick."I can't tell if he was dead serious or joking with the reporter.
Another articles that advances the Theory of Mind of animals. In this case, Rhesus monkeys. Researchers, Jonathan Flombaum and Dr. Laurie Santos, both from Yale University, found that rhesus monkeys "consider whether a competitor can or cannot see them when trying to steal food". Possessing this working model of another individual's mind is called Theory of Mind, and it's generally considered to be the an unique trait of man.Sigma Xi Magazine has an article by Michael Shermer about using Evolutionary Psychology to bootstrap purpose and thus morality into the Evolutionary Psychology framework. It basically works like a greater and greater integration of collected self-interested.
Shermer adavances several princples:
He also includes a helpful figure (just like the food pyramid!).
link
Another neat animals-are-smarter-than-we-thought article from the San Francisco Chronicle. A scientific group has recently published its findings on avian cognition using comparative brain structure (with brain imaging, genetic analysis, and neural pathway analysis) and cool behaviorial experiments of birds' problem solving ability. Turns out birds have complex brain structure, can fashion and modify tools (in more sophisticated ways than the chimp), and recognize the difference between impressionist and abstract paintings. Birds are pretty smart animals....In experiments by Alex Weir and his colleagues at Oxford University, a captive New Caledonian crow named Betty was frustrated when she couldn't use a bit of straight wire -- which she'd never seen before the start of the experiment -- to snag food from a tiny bucket. Pausing for an instant after an unsuccessful try, she took the wire, bent it around the edge of the food tub, and then snagged the bucket handle with the hook she had fashioned herself.See the movie here.
The Economist Magazine surveys some of ongoing brain studies that might in the future be incorporate into governmental MacroEconomics calculations to more accurately maximize individual Utility (as in increasing Happiness). Maybe they have some insights that shows increasing happiness is not the same as decreasing misery.
David Laibson, an economist at Harvard University, thinks that such experiments underscore the big role that expectations play in a person's well-being. Economists have usually assumed that people's well-being, or “utility”, depends on their level of consumption, but it might be that changes in consumption, especially unexpected downward ones, as in these experiments, can be especially unpleasant.link
"Make the pain go away! I want my daddy! Make it stop!" she moaned over and over, writhing along the 12th Street sidewalk, slamming hands against cement and walls as she made her way up to Market Street. She picked at abscesses on her arms and face, the blood mixing with dirt to leave brown smears wherever she rolled. She screamed and drooled.SFGate link
The New York Times excerpts from The Edge which annually poses big questions to Eminent Scientists. This year's questions is "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The Times grabbed some of the notable interesting ones among the 120 answers. Among your usual scientific professions of atheistic faith are some pretty interesting answers (notably from, of course, a Cognitive Scientist and a Neuroscientist):Donald HoffmanAnd
Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine;
author, "Visual Intelligence"
I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.
The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.
Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits.
Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.
If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience.
Joseph LeDouxNYTimes link
Neuroscientist, New York University;
author, "The Synaptic Self"
For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can't even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different.
Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings.
There's lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there's lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I'm not a radical behaviorist. I'm just a practical emotionalist.
