The hypothesis that music is caused by a "glial illusion". That is, glial cells observe the activity of neural activity responding to music, and glial cells falsely perceive certain aspects of that neural activity, which results in dysregulation of neural activity in "downstream" neurons, which causes the emotional intensity we experience when listening to music.
Readit Newspjdorrell commented on · Posted by u/pjdorrell
The results of these experiments indirectly tell us something about our chances of ever meeting aliens:
* No physical collapse => Everett interpretation AKA "many worlds"
* Many worlds gives us the Anthropic Principle for free
* The Anthropic Principle explains the origin of the first living organism, or, to put it another way, the observed existence of the origin of our first living ancestor does _not_ set any lower bound on the probability of the first living organism developing from non-living molecules.
* A very low probability of the origin of life implies the non-existence of any other life in the observable universe.
* Therefore, no aliens.
(The aliens do of course exist in other parts of the total Universal Wave Function, but we never get to meet them.)
pjdorrell commented on Against Effective Altruism fantasticanachronism.com/... · Posted by u/jeffreyrogers
Link to something I wrote once, which includes a discussion about absolute vs relative morality: http://thinkinghard.com/blog/BiologyOfMorality.html.
(It would appear that "moral realism" is just another way of saying "absolute morality", or "moral absolutism".)
pjdorrell commented on Ask HN: Why do songs lose novelty when listened to repeatedly? · Posted by u/hbarka
We could ask the opposite question:
Some forms of entertainment are usually only entertaining the first time. Like jokes. Or movies.
Music seems to be a form of entertainment. But usually we are quite happy to listen to a new song more than once.
So why is that?