re: #287 rikzilla

Thanks for the TED video! Very cool stuff.

As for the “Heaven” video? Love how the guy figures out the size of Heaven. Hey…”it’s big” woulda worked for the faithful, but I think he was trying to convince the slightly more rational of his flock that he had some special knowledge? Sounded more like Ross Perot with a pie chart.

Here’s a better video…George Hrab gives you an idea how huge gigantic is!

[Video]

You’re welcome! It is cool and I sort of surfed into that video this morning. “We rationalize the vastness of space and then rationalize the rationalizing.”

Here’s the UCSD page for V.S. Ramachandran.

Some of his Reith Lectures from 2003.

The history of mankind in the last three hundred years has been punctuated by major upheavals in human thought that we call scientific revolutions - upheavals that have profoundly affected the way in which we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. First there was the Copernican revolution - the notion that far from being the centre of the universe, our planet is a mere speck of dust revolving around the sun. Then there was the Darwinian revolution culminating in the view that we are not angels but merely hairless apes, as Huxley once pointed out in this very room. And third there was Freud’s discovery of the “unconscious” - the idea that even though we claim to be in charge of our destinies, most of our behaviour is governed by a cauldron of motives and emotions which we are barely conscious of. Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc rationalisation of things you really do for other reasons.