Tuesday, December 15, 2009

A mixed review ...

... The Play’s the Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

OK. So organisms interact with a complex environment containing, among other things, a good many other organisms, some like, most unlike themselves. If I understand Mr. Darwin, he drew from this a plausible explanation of the origin and diversity of species. So it would seem that the point of knowing what neurons do what when one reads Moby Dick is not what such neuronal action has to do with the book and the reading of it, but rather what the effect of such interaction is having on the organism reading it. This might not help us to know much about literature, but it might tell us something about how such an organism evolves, which is what I thought Darwin had been looking into.

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