But the future is not a self-fulfilling prophecy - 8 billion people on this planet have a voice and that carries far more weight than one person with 8 billion dollars. We just forgot how to exercise it.
many of the quant-ities related to suffering are based on perceptions and similar uncertain infer-ences. The uncertainty will necessarily increase frustration since it means the predictions of reward often go wrong . More fundamentally, the computed reward loss can be uncertain, even illusory .
The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain... See more
Smell has the power to evoke strong emotions and trigger vivid memories, making it an ideal candidate for enhancing children’s experiences in a living enactment of the story on a trail within the museum.
In recent years, neuroimaging has provided evidence to suggest that imagining the future relies on much of the same neural machinery as remembering the past. One hypothesis that such findings motivate is that memories must be reactivated in order to extract the information needed to “flesh out” detailed simulations. Indeed, if simulations involve... See more