Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
Hey, I made this thread because you were complaining about not enough thoughtful threads anymore, so I expect 600 words on either Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Hume, Locke, or Wittgenstein for tomorrow, or you FLUNK THE COURSE!
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I actually took a course called Phil 381 (i think) called The Philosophy of Mind and my paper was on Plato.
I have some fascinating articles/notes on exactly what consciousness is and how we define it.
My post was sort of an inside joke for just me because I really enjoyed that course but find these discussions to be...not sure what the right word is.. tedious maybe.
Maybe one day when I'm bored I'll read thru but for now I have no valuable contributions. I'm even too lazy to link or at least reference the brilliant articles that I studied.
Actually I'll say this because it just popped into my head. We got to watch a video of a wasp and scientist doing an experiment.
Basically a wasp has a very short memory. The testers would put food just outside the wasps house. Every time the wasp would leave his/her house thing it would drag the piece of food closer then go back inside to inspect the house. (IIRC it looked like a miniature birdhouse, clearly not naturally built but that is neither here nor there, I digress)
While the wasp was inspecting his house (even though only gone a second or two it is just their biological/genetic/instinctual nature to do so) the scientist would move the piece of food a back to its original position, just a little further away from the house.
The wasp would then exit the house, grab the piece of food, drag it closer, then re-inspect his house. Process of scientist moving food further away while wasp was inside would repeat.
Moral of the story is that the wasp would not exit this cycle even if it became starved. Apparently the wasp will continue this pointless maneuver and never notice that it should just give up on the food and let it be.
It would literally do this until it died.
That story is neither here nor there it just came to mind and I thought it was fascinating.
Oh, and go watch the TED talks video about memes. It'll blow your mind. Some British lady, IIRC, is the one giving the speech. Fascinating to say the least.