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POPSThe first evidence for a belief in the region for the soul - found in Turkey What is it with humans and the idea of a soul? "It might also be an evolutionary strategy that takes us away from the anxieties of self-consciousness. Once fully modern humans knew they could die, it probably made sense to pretend that no one really died but that some part of us lived on into the cosmos. Given the vagaries of ancient life, it probably also made sense to invent souls that had the power to haunt and cause harm to explain all the bad stuff in life".
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POPSNever Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence. Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.
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POPSAm I Dead Yet? A fascinating article that explores the state of death and why we have such a hard time coping with it.
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POPS Why We Can't Imagine Death? "This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start."
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POPSObama: It's Only About Winning
But here's what's scary: For all of Kerry's reputed smoothness and Eastern intellect, he often tied himself in knots trying to reconcile his absurdly opposing positions. Obama can flip and flop with unmatched alacrity and facility and with the absence of self-consciousness and accountability of an accomplished sociopath . This guy doesn't even acknowledge he's changing positions; he does it without breaking a sweat and never looks back. I ask you to consider the common thread underlying these turnarounds his nearly immediate backtracking on whether Iran poses a serious threat to America; his progressive position shifts on Iraq from "don't go in, stay in, and get out"; and his vigorous defense then abandonment of both his pastor and his church. The common thread, in a word, is expedience. It is not toughness; it is not savvy; it is not gravitas; and by all means, it is not admirable. Barack Obama is every bit as politically calculating as Bill Clinton but twice as smooth.
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POPSTheory of Sexual Selection:The Human Mind and the Peacock's Tale "There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of modern man is a simple hunter-gatherer rule: strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy affairs with other men’s wives who will bear bastards . . . Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity. Likewise, deep in the mind of modern woman is the same hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they both be the same man . . . Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth and genes."
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POPS Self models There is no such thing as a substantial self (as a distinct ontological entity, which could in principle exist by itself), but only a dynamic, ongoing process creating very specific representational and functional properties. Self-consciousness is a form of physically realized representational content
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POPSBeing Your Avatar Participants "delocalized" their "self" from their own physical body onto a gaming avatar. Wild.
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POPSHas the Screen Killed American Novel? Very interesting article. It goes into more depth at the site than I could clip. I don't thin it is as bad as all this though. I see plenty of people reading. Public transportation is filled with people reading books and bookstores and sites like Amazon still do a great business in books. What I notice is this study only seems to include fiction prose, not poetry or non-fiction. If those were added in, the numbers would probably be higher. That's not to say that tv hasn't become the dominant form of education in most American households. Television's hold on people is quite powerful. But teh book isn't dead yet.
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POPSBrehon Laws: Ancient Irish Laws It is probable that Celtic will yet be found to have been one of the most important of the Indo-European tongues. Its influence on the formation of the Romance languages has yet to be studied in the light of our continually increasing knowledge of its more ancient forms; and perhaps the conjectures of Betham will, by the close of this century, receive as much respect as the once equally ridiculed history of Keating.
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POPS6 Key Social Skills Obvious? Perhaps not - judging by how people often respond in social situations - where 'me' is the most important subject
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