In the News

Discussion of science, technology, politics, and other topics that aren't strictly philosophical.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Do Cells in the Blood, Heart and Lungs Smell the Food We Eat?
Scientists have found that heart, blood, lung and other cells in the body have the same receptors for sensing odors that exist in the nose. It opens the door to questions about whether the heart, for instance, "smells" that fresh-brewed cup of coffee or cinnamon bun
Beingof1
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Diebert van Rhijn
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This book seems interesting or at least the fact is has been published: The Self Beyond Itself: And Alternative History of Ethics, The New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will by Heidi M. Ravven.

Free Will is a Myth — But We Can Still Have Ethics and Hold People Accountable
  • In this book I argue that it is not obvious that human beings have free will, as we like to believe, in the way that it is obvious we have hands and feet and noses; instead, free will is a cultural assumption. And it is an assumption that turns out to be false. I make the case that, rather than serving as a description of human beings in general, free will is a particularly American and Western way of conceiving human nature. Even though it feels natural to us, the belief in free will is actually conventional and provincial. While we generally believe that this way of thinking about our moral nature is universally human, an account of human nature— everyone knows that we have “free will,” that all human beings experience this inner freedom and lay their claim to moral virtue or sin and to the right to praise or blame upon the basis of that freedom— it turns out that most other cultures have no notion of free will. They base their understandings of human moral nature on different cultural assumptions. They conceive both human nature and the human place in the universe quite differently from the way we do. The belief in free will is actually part of a larger story, a story we take for granted or have even forgotten. Other cultures have different stories. We are as culturally provincial as they are, for ours is just one way among many of thinking about the human moral capacity and human nature generally. One of the aims of this book is to expose the free will account of moral agency as a mere cultural assumption and inheritance.
  • The belief in free will, I recount at considerable length in Chapter Four, has a unique history that more or less began at one time— in early Latin Christianity— and was widely disseminated through authoritative thinkers who worked to make it sacrosanct and to delegitimize and even outlaw other points of view advocated by other individuals and groups. The presupposition of free will has been embodied in our institutions, practices, and laws and transmitted for hundreds of years by systems of education. These practices and institutions, with their implicit notion of human moral agency, still govern our lives to a great extent in the West
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Jamesh
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Cahoot
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Eyes on Estonia.

Estonian music swirling amidst the tides of conquest.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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I grew up being taught Y was mainly rubbish but now:

All men are part of a PURE GENETIC ELITE, says science bloke
What the boffinry gang found was that the human Y had shed just one ancestral gene over the past 25 million years. Moreover, they found the same genes in five more other mammals: the marmoset, mouse, rat, bull, and 'possum. "This is not just a random sampling of the Y's ancestral repertoire," Page added. "This is an elite bunch of genes."
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