Centric

[hobozeller]

My favorite writers write about mind and body, more specifically about the paradox of body and mind. I love reading paradox, especially Rushdie's parallel paradoxes, as well as Kundera's neatly discussed-but-not-entirely-explained paradoxes. I love them so much that a fantasy I've had about the results of an imaginary philosophy paper worries me

Comments

[full_bloom]

I think that a lot of Kundera's stuff about the body/soul paradox is about characters seeking to know themselves. Tomas knows the bodies of women, but with Tereza he knows her soul, too. Tereza doesn't have the distance to see that she's a baby in the bull-rushes, but she is (because Kundera and Tomas made her that way).

[coffeewurm]

We're still working on the consciousness thing. We're a little further on emotion, but they're both in their infancy. Neurotransmitters won't do too much; you'll need to look into synaptic plasticity, neuroanatomy, and electrophysiology to get a better sense of what limited bits we can piece together. Some of the more computational models are halfway decent for what you're looking for, but they sound a lot like cs and fall under cognitive science more than neurosci so I can't say as much about them.

[full_bloom]

Your icon frightens me.
What is it?

[coffeewurm]

Everyone's favorite boneless kitty from Something Positive.

[hobozeller]

I'm beginning to think looking to biology to explain emotion and consciousness might be looking in the entirely wrong direction. These things are, again, based on empirical observations, right? This seems a lot like trying to experience what color looks like to other peoples' brains - wavelengths that are consistent but beyond electircal signals, not a clue