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I was reading this article the other day and thought it was an interesting conversation point. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/dalai_pr.html I guess the central message of the article is that people like the Dalai Lama are trying to tie Buddhism to science. That some Buddhist monks have taught their brain to focus their brains on certain things like compassion at a level that the rest of the world does not experience. Scientists can see (via MRI scans) that various parts of the brain are much more active in Buddhist monks than normal people. I don't know why I found this article around the same time I was watching a documentary about doctors trying to find the essence of a soul but the two seem to marry. One doctor took a patient that was in a vegetative state and could not respond to even simple commands like move your eyes right or left. When he put the same patient under a MRI and told her to think about playing tennis the part of her brain that most people use to think about a physical activity lit up. When he asked her to imagine walking through her home a completely different part of her brian lit up (the same part of the brain that would light up if asking a normal person to think about walking through their home). And I guess as a completely random occurrence, I was reading the print edition of Wired Magazine and they had a series of articles about AI (artificial intelligence) and they were discussing about how AI researchers have given up on trying to replicate the human mind because after years and billions in research they discovered that we don't know enough about the human mind and how it works to even begin trying to replicate it. I don't know . . . sort of interesting stuff to ponder on if you have a few extra moments :-)

I could kill someone I just wrote a 3 page reply to Zeusy....before Tf saw it fit to erase the whole damn thing when i posted it... i'm heartbroken to say the least ..... no way i'm writing it again ..so i'm gonna post some lecture links and make one little point ... regarding how unlikely life in the universe is... regarding chaos.... http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/lindex.html and here is my little point.... arent human beings the ultimate testimament to how flawed deterministic physics is ? isn;t the fact that carbon based structures constantly interact in their environments in chaotic not structured or predictable ways enough evidence that physics is terribly flawed ? either physics.chemistry must allow for some serious Chaos...or there must be some third force at play ... any ideas as to what that third force is ?

which makes much of the work in the social sciences a critical discipline like philosophy or comparative literature rather than science. that said, there are some human-science projects that have gotten more rigorous/scientific, like cognitive psychology. i think a lot of things are called science that aren't very scientific as a byproduct of the 19th and 20th centuries' infatuation with science. i am one of the biggest fanboys of science, but it can only do so much. there is so much we can't know scientifically about the human world especially that it's awfully tempting to overreach. that said, in principle the social sciences exist not because it is likely or even possible for them to enlighten us much, but because we're so damned interested in ourselves and our place in the world. love the way they quantify stuff by pulling numbers directly out of their dingleberry-encrusted ass.