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Showing posts from October, 2021

Infinite has its implications

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Like the concept of consciousness, infinity is a concept I imagine took millenia to grapple with in its total abstractness, in order to be finally able to nail down its domain. Still and alike, I believe we're far from understanding these concepts, and it shows a mis-equiptment of material science to cope with these concepts. As I write these lines at a emergent sunrise in coastal Australia (see below), I realise that in no way could I ever expect to enjoy this unique convergence of fog scoped to my left, and a peaking sun to my right, all while the crashing waves of erosion battle for terriroty below me. Yet still, if I was able to somehow conjure all the components of this scene into the same arrangement, to cast superficial order for my own doubly pleasure, still my conscious state would be differing from the first moment. Truly, that order would have to both be extrinsic, and have some power to instrincically wipe away the moments of history and state between these relative eve

The split brain, and other ideas

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Recently, I finished Michael Gazzaniga's book,  Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience , a book on his personal human experience, and his time researching split-brain patients amongst neuroscience breakthroughs. What is a split brain? A split-brain individual is someone who's had a section down the midline of their brain separating the two hemispheres severed to a degree. Various depths of "split brains" can be observed, but the general idea is that "some" information is no longer being transfered. The catch, however, is that the brain has tricks to bypass this. Ideas on split brains It goes without saying, much of science requires inference, and where inference dwells also exists margins of error. But, I believe these inferences are all too human, and take us to places of error-correction and transformational ideas.  The book in question clearly lays out a half-a-century history of brain-debate with interesting conclusions, detailing it