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Rupert Sheldrake observing that pets frequently exhibit the behaviours recognized in humans before they die.
I can't speak specifically to the situation, but I'm definitely not convinced that humans have the monopoly on spirituality or consciousness. And I know for a fact that pets - like humans - will often need "permission" to die - waiting until the owner or significant other is absent.
Link: https://www.sheldrake.org/essays/pets-often-know-they-are-about-to-die-wish-us-farewell
Previously: Deathbed Visitations,
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This does not seem to me in the slightest bit unreasonable, consider the instinctual behaviours of the "lower" animals - that a duck fears the shadow of the hawk even while still in the egg, that unconsciously many people still fear spiders, scorpions, snakes, and not all learning must be avoidance, there should be paths towards pleasure and memories (generational) of good things as well.
Which, worth noting - somewhat vindicates Lamarck and his theories on talent, evolution & memory.
Previously: Lamarckian Evolution, Epigenetic Triggers, Radiolab on inheritance
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Having paid attention to the Oilers loss in the Stanley Cup Final last night, rooting less for them than for Canada, I realize that the bulk of the players they're playing against are Canadian as well. Canada won either way. Some players from Finland, Latvia, the USSR and even the good ole USA, but by and large we were just publicly playing with ourselves.
Now this is something, that corporations buy up the best and brightest (?? maybe just "best") players from around the globe, assemble them in Florida, Las Vegas, New York, Wherever, and call them "The Home Team", when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. There were no players from Florida on the team last night that defeated the Oilers.
This annoys me. Shouldn't the "Home Team" be comprised of locals?
It seems to me that this is how we should be building pride in our communities and neighborhoods. Not by importing the best players world-wide to play on our teams, but by fostering our own talent and having them compete against other communities.
This should be true for all sports, if you're born in or near Edmonton, then you play for Edmonton, not Calgary, Montreal, or anywhere else you choose to move in pursuit of the filthy lucre. Teams should reflect the communities they come from. This would increase fan base and give real cause for pride. This would reflect the core values of the sport, of the competition, and bring us back to our roots.
Anyways, just a thought, and yet another reason I pay little attention to professional sports.
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Via the Big Think: The Second Arrow of Time
The Second Law of Thermodynamics comes under reasonable scrutiny.
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To the modern mind, at first glance this seems preposterous. That the eye shoots out a beam that reveals, through reflection, the world to it. Some ass-backwards form of echo-location.
Consider all the tropes and superstitions that surround it, eyes that dart lasers, x-ray eyes, the Medusa or basilisk that with it's eye can petrify, or turn to stone, the trope of the "evil eye", or that to look on with envy is to somehow curse the object, superstitions such as stare at a funeral, look away from a wedding, the sense of being stared at, and others too numerous to name, yet quantum mechanics suggests that the gaze of the viewer is intertwined with the result.
So at first, Plato's theory rejected, and yet now we find that perhaps there was a little more to it...
And meditation, too many tropes and theories to delve into here, merely imagine it (in your mind, with your third eye, "picture it", etc) - and it will come to pass...
The dollar bill, the all-seeing eye of creation, whose gaze in fact is creation, that the eye - the "I" creates what it sees is as much founded on psychology and neuroscience as it is on folk wisdom.