Posted in Evolution, Idle Speculation, Minds and Brains on August 17, 2007 | No Comments »
One thought experiment in the philosophy of mind is the inverted spectrum. It asks you to imagine a person that sees things in opposite colours (like a photo negative but not exactly - the light areas are still light and the dark areas are still dark, it’s just the colours that are different). This person would [...]
Posted in Animals, Evolution, Personal Minutiae on August 5, 2007 | No Comments »
The good thing about having a zoo membership is that I can go there between lectures and not have to worry about the expense. It’s not a bad zoo, certainly the only one I know of that has both a bear-cat and cat-bears. I went twice this week, to renew my membership and to meet [...]
Posted in Holiday on August 3, 2007 | No Comments »
We got into Kuching fairly late and had KFC for dinner. Like McDonalds, the food was slightly different. There was rice on the menu, for instance. The next day we went to Semenggoh, the orangutan reserve. There weren’t any orangutans but I did get bitten by a leech, the first of many. I learnt there [...]
Posted in Education, Evolution on August 3, 2007 | 1 Comment »
A lot of people don’t understand evolution and it never used to bother me too much. After all, people seem to function just fine without knowing the basics of any other scientific theory. For me, the problem is twofold: First, people who don’t understand evolution talk about it as if they do. Second, where evolution [...]
