JITOTM37: Imagine the Future
How do we think about the future? It seems obvious, right? We just... think about it! But a pair of recent studies are shedding new light on what parts of the brain are involved in that simple activity, and it's more complex than you might think.
That's especially true when you think about the fact that for both Buddhists, and physicists... the future doesn't exist! Find out what's to come in this week's episode of JITOTM, Imagine the Future.
posted by David Newland at 10:01 PM
3 Comments:
There were some interesting comments by Richard Dawkins this month about bat consciousness. (see www.cbc.ca/ideas/podcast.html)
He suggested that a bat's experience is similar to a bird's, because they need a similar model of the world to exist in a similar niche, but that they also have a similar conscious experience to us, because we share many of the same brain structures, which could be co-opted for the bat's need. So the qualia we experience for "red" might have the same feel as the bat's sensation of the echos coming from a certain type of surface. Dawkins says it better than I do, so check it out.
3:14 PM
Yes, I listened to the same podcast actually. I was taken with Dawkins' notion that squirrel "software" must be very like monkey "software."
Based on the behaviour of the squirrels in my backyard, I'd come to the same conclusion. Cheeky rascals!
7:03 PM
Great podcast! Do you have citation references to the two papers that you mentioned? Where specific research is being discussed, this might be a helpful addition to the covering post, or included as a comment.
3:36 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home