RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
February 14, 2020 at 10:30 pm
(This post was last modified: February 14, 2020 at 11:07 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(February 14, 2020 at 7:26 pm)Objectivist Wrote: When I learned how to think in terms of essentials, it was really an eye-opening experience. Actually, it was life-changing. Read An Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. It will amaze you. Leonard Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy at the end of the book is worth the price of the book alone, all by itself. I think it will help you immensely in your studies in the hard sciences. I know that I find it much easier to learn new things now. I wish I had a better grasp of physics, astrophysics and quantum mechanics. Currently, my area of interest is time, like what is it? But alas, I'm so limited in the amount of time I have to study time.
I found a digital copy of the book and was able to read the first chapter. The part that resonated the most was her explanation of measurement being man-centered; that we understand the universe by viewing it in relation to ourselves. This is what we observe in the brain, for example, with mirror neurons. Our brains use our bodies to form the building blocks with which it understands the actions of others. When it sees someone do something it runs a simulation, it embodies the perception as if it were the one doing it, and its thus able to comprehend it.
Canonical neurons are similar to mirror neurons, except that they activate when you see objects your body can interact with. For example, one set of neurons will activate when you grab something with your whole hand, and also when you see objects than can be grabbed with your whole hand like a ball, or a rock, but not when it sees objects that needs to be finely gasped like a pencil.