When all is said and done, environmentalists are guaranteed to be disappointed. Nature is fucked. Your recent ancestors who lived in the earlier half of the 20th century may have farmed land that nature has now reclaimed. What happened? Labour was cheap then. People were willing to work for whatever money they could get. Since […]
The words “attractiveness” and “attraction” are routinely applied to an array of pleasurable stimuli with different properties, of which there are at least three obvious types: the erotic, the romantic, and the aesthetic. The erotic is the oldest of these, since erotic attraction facilitates gene replication in sexually reproducing species, reproduction being perhaps the only […]
All experiences whether good or ill, in their essence, can be equated to the inter-relations between external stimuli and the internal states of consciousness created by our brains and, in an ultimate sense, by our genes. Most people will concede that no amount of overpowering stimuli, no amount of pretty sunsets, will bring a smile […]
Like many or perhaps most people with a verbally slanted intelligence profile, I used to invest a lot of energy into heady academic philosophy, especially ethics. The distant vision of a cognitively post-human species and a suffering-free world governed by utilitarian moral codes probably stimulated my endogenous opioid system. In retrospect, it seems to have […]
People probably make too much fuss about defining biological sex in terms of its organic components. The term “chromosomes” gets thrown about, maybe because it is commonly used in basic biology education and is consequently a bit more accessible than “gametes,” although gametes are in fact the heart of the matter. Several different chromosomal combinations […]