Upcoming topics (and a brief intro)

Soooo, I've told several people in the last month or so that I was hoping to be posting regularly on here by now... but, obviously, there's only been one post so far--and not even an introduction or anything. Just know that I have been writing a lot--stuff written specifically for this blog--but some of the things aren't even near being finished rough drafts. Being something like a clinically-OCD perfectionist tends to make the writing process long and laborious sometimes--especially with subjects that I don't know as well as others.

I don't think I'm going to even write a big intro post to this blog, as I'd planned to do (I will probably write a pretty neat description on the sidebar, though). But, to sum up in extreme brevity, this blog is about meaning, the world, and the self.

It is this author's judgment (which is certainly open to elaboration, qualification, and criticism) that, for a good number of us, knowledge and information in our education often arrived in a very fragmented state, and we have had to organize our knowledge in a very compartmentalized way. Elaboration on this argument will be forthcoming, but the defining memory I have of something like this is elementary school cell biology, and rote memorization of the components of a cell, but with little to no idea of function--no idea of how the parts interact on the micro level, and absolutely no conception of how a cell functions in the world of the macro.

Not until several years into college would I begin to get some glimpse of the interconnectedness of chemistry, microbiology, and evolution, and hence finally begin to understand the principles that birthed Life itself, and now sustain it. We are this product of billions of years of evolution, fine-tuned by Nature to the extent that we are now Nature turned back to reflect on itself.

Meaning is what emerges from our attempts to make connections and draw inferences between elements in our environment. This is a process shared by apes and infants alike. But now, in our peculiar situation, society (for most of the readers, advanced scientific capitalist society) is the middleman between the world and meaning--and for our species, has allowed for a complexity of meaning absolutely unrivaled in our corner of the universe. Our social environment is the architect of our perception, and determines how broadly or narrowly we will see events in the world.

It will be our goal to see the world as broadly as possible, free from any limiting biases that may be prevalent in our social environment.

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Oh, and the self is important, too. :) Hopefully you see where that fits in to all this. :)

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Okay, now that that was some sort of introduction, I'm going to wrap this up, and just show a couple of the forthcoming posts that I've at least done some work on so far (some of them are almost done). Things in quotations are actually semi-formal papers.

• Islam in Western Europe
• Genocide: "Never Again," and again, and again...
• The Top Ten Craziest Conspiracy Theories Ever
• "Can first-person accounts of cognitive processes during high-level psychedelic experience give valuable insights into consciousness and brain studies?"
• "Towards a quasi-objectivist aesthetics of music"
• Does Mass Media Really Defer to Governmental Interest?
• Analogy in science education
• Was the Invasion of Iraq for Oil?
• Is Evolutionary Psychology a Pseudoscience? (Redux)
• "On Cosmopolitanism: Ethics and International Relations"
• The philosophy of Gilmore Girls
• Gender, Neuroscience, and Behavior
  
• Babies for Breakfast: Politicians and Conspiracy Theories
• Dialogue and approach of the popular religious critics (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc.)
• The Thin Veneer of Christian Belief in America