In this episode I’m continuing to look at consciousness and cognition and the working memory that sets humans apart from all other animals. Human working memory can be roughly quantified to hold about 7 items at once in a sequence and allow conscious manipulation, consideration, and attention to about 4 of them at a time. These numbers are surprisingly consistent across all humans. The size of working memory in humans is much larger than in our nearest relatives the great apes. The ability to remember sequence information also seems to be unique. Today I’m interviewing a researcher who studies the evolution of the human capacity for cognition. His vocabulary and working memory are both immense.  I need to stretch my working memory to the limit just to parse some of his most elegant utterances.  For example, in a recent exchange he opined the following gem: “However, as Karl Friston reminded us, the mathematical itinerancy of stochastic genetical and epigenetical mechanisms in ergodic systems can explain the appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of some technological outcomes of Early Pleistocene human behaviours from a far more rational scientific basis than can any self-justifying assertion that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’.” Professor emeritus Michael Walker is a paleoanthropologist with degrees in Medicine, Physiology, and Prehistoric Archaeology from Oxford University including his doctorate on the prehistoric physical anthropology and archaeology of the southeastern Spanish region of Murcia. He established systematic two important Palaeolithic excavation sites, one with fossil remains of fourteen Neanderthals in deep sediments with dates from 130,000 to 40,000 years ago, and a very much older site dating to between 900,000 and 772,000 years ago where he discovered burning in the cave, as well as abundant stone artefcts among which is the earliest stone hand-axe from Europe. The unique hand-axe reawakened Dr. Walker’s interest in neuroscience and, in particular, about how cognition might lead to surprising manual behaviour that was not passed on culturally. This hypothesis, based on the Free Energy Principle, has implications on the evolution of human cognition and calls into question time-honoured interpretations by anthropologists about human cultural transmission. Add your two cents on Facebook @TheRationalView If you like me to keep doing this send more than two cents to patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView

In this episode I’m going back to look at consciousness and cognition, and specifically one aspect of our mental capacity that sets us apart from other animals.  It’s our ability to recall items in a sequence, for those of you who are software buffs, basically we have a short term memory buffer that acts like a linked list. We can remember a list of numbers (about 7 or so), or letters, or items in a particular order over a short timespan if we are not too distracted. This capability is called working memory. Working memory can be roughly quantified to hold about 7 items at once in a sequence and allow conscious manipulation, consideration, and attention to about 4 of them at a time. These numbers are surprisingly consistent across all humans. The size of working memory in humans is much larger than in our nearest relatives the great apes. The ability to remember sequence information also seems to be unique. Some scientists speculate that the evolution of working memory is what separates humans intellectually from other intelligent animals. Working memory capacity is strongly correlated with fluid intelligence. Héctor Manrique: graduated in Psychology in 1999, then he started his scientific career by studying ethanol metabolism in the brain and its effect on memory in rodents and got his PhD in Psychobiology in 2005. Hmm sounds a lot like my graduate work inadvertently studying the effects of alcohol on my brain.  In 2008 he joined The Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany) where he investigated the cognition of the four species of great apes. After having occupied different positions in several Spanish universities he currently holds a professorship in Developmental Psychology at Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain. Support The Rational View at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView Throw in your 2 cents on Facebook @TheRationalView

This episode is a rant about why people don’t have time to become better informed about the issues. It is about why people are rushed. It is about why people feel mistreated by the system. The Rational View is going to rant about inequity and highlight the growing resentment amongst the struggling middle class at the elite robber barons of capitalism. Capitalism is about greed. It is about gloves-off below-the-belt big-stack bullying that pretends it provides a level playing field. I’m no communist. I believe that a well regulated market system is probably the best way that we know of to efficiently distribute goods…But I’m not taken in by the rich ponces who have been pushing the big lie that lack of market regulation and union busting is good for us.  If you are too young to recall the collapse of the entire capitalist system due to under-regulation, I will remind you of 2008 and the sub-prime mortgage collapse where the government spent trillions of dollars to pay off the bad bets made by the Wall Street elite financial class. Our current system is capitalism for the masses and socialism for the rich. Its a system that is happy to grind away the earnings of lower and middle class citizens and to keep them fighting for table scraps, but if Biff is about to miss a yacht payment the government is only more than happy to give his bank a few hundred million dollars of quantitative easing to help their bottom line. My interview with Naomi Oreskes on her book the Big Myth is an eye opener that I highly recommend. Support the podcast at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView Add your voice on Facebook @TheRationalView

This episode is one of my favorite interviews. A great chat that was part of my series on consciousness—are we biological robots? I’m getting into some real science talking to a biophysicist who brings the esoteric world of quantum mechanics to bear on the topic. His groundbreaking work in the lab provides us with some real measurements that provide tantalizing hints at the previously unknown quantum processes tied to consciousness. Dr. Luca Turin was born in 1953 in Beirut, Lebanon, to Italian-Argentinian parents and was brought up in France, Italy and Switzerland. He studied Physiology and Biophysics at University College London, PhD in 1978. Dr. Turin worked at the CNRS 1982-92, then became a lecturer in Biophysics at UCL 1992-2000. He is best known for his work on olfaction, in which he proposed a quantum mechanism for odorant recognition by receptors. For 8 years he was CTO of a venture company designing odorants for fragrance and flavors with a success rate 100 times the industry average. After returning to full time research in 2009, in collaboration with Makis Skoulakis in Athens, Greece, he has shown that both flies and humans can detect molecular vibrations by smell.  His current interest is in quantum electronics in neuroscience. He is the author of three perfume guides, a collection of essays and a popular science book on how smell works. He is currently a Professor in the Medical School at the University of Buckingham (UK). Join the Facebook discussion @TheRationalView Twitter @AlScottRational Instagram @The_Rational_View

In this episode I am interviewing a returning guest to the show to examine the economics surrounding Ontario’s foray into renewable energy.  As is typical in divisive topics such as this, the government has made it very difficult to track down the actual costs of ideologically driven policies such as Ontario’s 2009 Green Energy Act that brough in juicy Feed In Tarriffs on 20 year contracts for renewable energy to kick start the green economy. The act was brought in by Liberal premiere Dalton McGuinty and aggressively pursued by his successor in that office, Kathleen Wynne who was driven out of office by angry voters in the 2018 election, losing official party status. A key element of that loss was her mishandling of the energy transition, the privatization of Hydro One, and the disastrous costs downloaded onto voters. Our guest today is investigating the costs and benefits of renewable energy in Ontario’s nuclear and hydro-dominated electrical grid. Edgardo Sepulveda is a telecommunications and electricity economist with the last several with his consulting firm in Toronto, Canada. He was born in Chile and has an MA in Economics. As part of his civic policy-related engagement, he also writes about inequality, COVID-19 and other issues, including at the Progressive Economics Forum. Support the podcast at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView Join the Facebook discussion @TheRationalView

In this episode I have a special returning guest, the famous Dr. Michael Shermer on the show to discuss the interesting times our neighbours to the south are experiencing.  I’m hoping to discuss the polarization and the bias that have catalyzed conspiratorial thinking emerging around the Trump assassination attempt. Dr. Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. For 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He writes a weekly Substack column. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist.  Neil deGrasse Tyson has called him “a beacon of reason in an ocean of irrationality”. Support the podcast at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView Make your voice heard on Facebook @TheRationalView

In this episode I’m responding to the political tension we are witnessing in the US with a historic election looming on the horizon. Many see this as some sort of battle royale between good and evil. But for some reason the options on the table for our neighbours to the south are four more years of increasing inequity in a reasonably well-off country vs. a wrecking ball to the heart of the institutions that keep us all safe. How did we get here? Why are these the only options available?  The problems are significant, and we are all being fooled by the rich and powerful oligarchs that rule both parties. We are being hacked by those who would destroy us. And not only literally, but also psychologically. Bad actors are exploiting our human reactions, and our emotions, to paralyze our rationality. This is a job for The Rational View!   Support the podcast at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView   Share your views on Facebook @TheRationalView

Today I’m taking a step back from science and addressing politics. I know certain of my listeners do not like to hear my opinions on this topic and I respect that, so if you need to stay in a silo to protect your political narratives please stop listening. This is your trigger warning.  It was recently announced that the Supreme Court has ruled that it is inadmissible to use evidence from a president’s actions to prosecute them. The founding fathers of our friends to the south are spinning in their graves. It is sad that I’m here talking about getting out the popcorn to watch the trainwreck happening to our neighbours in the south. I never thought that I would watch the most prosperous nation on earth choke on the hate generated by social media clickbait, alternative facts from purveyors of putred partisan apologetics preying on the vulnerable and the venerable with their faux outrage engines. The 2025 Presidential Transition Project claims that it is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for "the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025". This is the partisan document published by Conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, that outlines their plans for the next Republican presidency. I will provide a Rational View on what this document contains. Support the podcast at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView Give me your feedback on Facebook @TheRationalView

In this episode I will be discussing the topic of abortion with a philosopher who has studied the moral arguments on both sides of the issue. I am interested in rational bases of moral decision making. I’d like to be able to work out moral rules from a set of socially acceptable first principles, but often I find that my moral intuition conflicts with what I derive as a rational morality. Is our morality wrong if it is not totally consistent, or is morality not derivable from precepts? I’d like to understand how these ideas apply to the topic of abortion ethics. Bonnie Steinbock is professor emerita of the Department of Philosophy at the University at Albany/State University of New York. A Fellow of the Hastings Center, she has been a visiting professor at Santa Clara University (2012), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2015) and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia (2017). In addition to 70 articles, she is the author of Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos (Oxford University Press, 1992, 2011) and the editor or co-editor of several collections, including Killing and Letting Die (1980, 1994), New Ethics for the Public's Health (1999), Public Health Ethics: Theory, Policy, and Practice (2006), the Oxford Handbook of Bioethics (2008), and Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, 4th - 8th editions. Her latest book, co-written with Paul Menzel, is Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2023). Please support the podcast at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView Join the Facebook discussion @TheRationalView Instagram @The_Rational_View Twix @AlScottRational

In this episode I’m delving into the weaponization of space. The space race was originally a military flexing competition between the US and the Soviet Union. Since that time space has been consistently used for surveillance, similar to early airborne operations, but weaponization of space has been off limits through treaties.  Now the space race seems to be evolving. China, Russia and the US have all tested weapons that can blow up satellites.  I will be interviewing an expert who can tell us about what is going on and whether the space race is heating up again. Clayton Swope is the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Before joining CSIS, Swope led national security and cybersecurity public policy for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, an initiative to increase global broadband access through a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit. While at Amazon, he also worked on cloud policy issues. Prior to his time at Amazon, Swope served as a senior adviser on national security, space, foreign affairs, and technology policy issues for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He also worked for more than 14 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, serving largely in the Directorate of Science and Technology. He holds a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. Please support the podcast at patron.podbean.com/TheRationalView Provide your feedback on Facebook @TheRationalView