Cataloging at LibraryThing

I'll soon use up their 200 free books. The $25 lifetime fee would be worth it if they would help me find Dewey Decimal numbers.

Trying out Web2.0 sites Writely and LibraryThing

I'm drafting a story at Writely.

Untangle URIs, URLs, and URNs

Untangle URIs, URLs, and URNs

French cheeses going extinct

Independent Online Edition > Europe : app3: "profitable "

125 science questions: the mind

Some of the big questions posed by Science magazine are about topics I am interested in. I may bet around to commenting about two that involve the mind:

What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?

How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved?

Russell's Analysis of Mind

I have started to read Bertrand Russell's lectures published in 1921. I picked up the book in India last February. He accepts Watson's behaviorism for desire, but not for belief. He claims his approach is a kind of neutral monism between materialsim and idealism, similar to William James' rejection of consciousness as an entity. He says mind and matter can affect each other, rejecting Descartes' dualism of independent substances. The common stuff seems to be "events" that modern physics refines into matter and objects, while psychology should show how common-sense mental concepts like desire and belief arise from events. So neither mind or matter are fundamental, both are derived from a common stuff (what James called pure experience). Matter and mind interact causally; however, Russell is open to the empirical possibility that physical laws don't depend on psychological laws, although psychological laws clearly depend on physical laws. The preface calls this a nomological dualism. This work was apparently in reaction to Wittgenstein's criticism of his earlier theory, which I have to read up on.

Why are there flowers? Angiosperms are results of a certain dynamic in evolution. The diversification of interbreeding populations (species) of terrestial plants with flowers increased the opportunities for outcrossing, and this macroevolutionary development has been propagated in a dramatic radiation dynamic that involved more than angiosperms. In involved coevolution with (mostly flying) insects, and later also some vertebrates (especially flying birds and bats, and also rodents). During the early Cretaceous (or earlier), some embryophytes developed showy radial flowers with a closed carpel (the closure limiting the chances of self-fertilization) that attracted insects to pollinate them and increase chances of outcrossing and reproductive success. Some 60 million years later, during the late Cretaceous, multiple clades developed bilateral flowers, that guided insect pollinators on how to enter the flower to reach nectar. This was associated with the radiation of bees. Since bees also continued to visit radial flowers, there were many opportunities for mutations towards bilateral symmetry to be reinforced through natural selection. A very visible example of this bilateral symmetry is Orchidaceae. A third major node in angiosperm evolution was the emergence of seed-related tissues into fleshy nuts and fruits, which additionally supported animal vectors for dispersal. So a major explanatory dynamic of angiosperm evolution is the coevolution with pollinating insects, as well as pollinating and seed-dispersing rodents. This also provides a basis for explaining the emergence and evolutionary success of certain vertebrate clades: among the Euarchontaglires, the rodents are an important example, and we can also surmise that the ancestors of tree shrews and primates benefited from the availability of fleshy fruits and nuts which they consumed while dispersing angiosperm seeds. "Toward a New Synthesis: Major Evolutionary Trends in the Angiosperm Fossil Record" by David Dilcher in Variation and Evolution in Plants and Microorganisms: Toward a New Synthesis 50 Years after Stebbins (2000) National Academy of Sciences http://www.nap.edu/books/0309070996/html/255.html

Expect to find here ideas on my diverse interests. This includes biodiversity, with a somewhat egocentric interest in flowering plants and vertebrates. It includes the intersection of philosophy and computing, including both senses of the term ontology (philosophy and computer science) and topics like the nature of conscious mental states and models of information flow. Postings in Filipino will have the language code [fil], rather than the older [tl].