> There's also an open question as to whether evolution necessarily leads to intelligent species.
Especially when, in this context, we're talking about a rather peculiar type of intelligence, ie. the propensity to construct spacecraft and broadcast high-powered message-carrying radio signals. It seems very difficult to argue that there's any evolutionary pressure in favour of these behaviours, just given the time-lag from the development of our large brains to this.
Your brain does this all the time - the resolution of your eyes is actually quite poor compared to what you perceive (as much as a 25x difference). It's quite easy to demonstrate:
> For the most impressive results -- I guarantee you will be amazed -- use a dim room with no light apart from the computer screen; a pretty strong effect will still be seen even if the room has daylight coming into it, as long as it is not bright sunshine. Cut a slit about 1.5mm wide in the card. On the screen, display http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/Files.html
> Stand or sit sufficiently far away that you can only just read the text -- perhaps a distance of four metres or so, if you have normal vision. Now, hold the slit vertically in front of one of your eyes, and close the other eye. Hold the slit near to your eye -- brushing your eyelashes -- and look through it. Waggle the slit slowly to the left and to the right, so that the slit is alternately in front of the left and right sides of your pupil. What do you see? I see the red objects waggling to and fro, and the blue objects waggling to and fro, through huge distances and in opposite directions, while white objects appear to stay still and are negligibly distorted. Thin magenta objects can be seen splitting into their constituent red and blue parts. Measure how large the motion of the red and blue objects is -- it's more than 5 minutes of arc for me, in a dim room. Then check how sharply you can see under these conditions -- look at the text on the screen, for example: is it not the case that you can see (through your whole pupil) features far smaller than the distance through which the red and blue components were waggling? Yet when you are using the whole pupil, what is falling on your retina must be an image blurred with a blurring diameter equal to the waggling amplitude.
... revoked in Australia after the right wing party spent years demonising the "great big new tax." The government had used the income from it to compensate consumers for price increases passed onto them, so the majority of voters arguably had no real reason to hate it, other than partisan politics.
The fight-or-flight response has a physiological effect on cognition:
> we suggest that stress shifts higher cognitive processing in a way that facilitates both engagement with and/or avoidance of the current stressor (i.e., fight or flight). By impairing executive control of cognition (i.e., working memory, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive flexibility), stress contributes to a reactive cognitive state that is fine-tuned to rapidly consider highly salient (i.e., stressor-related) information
> stress reallocates limited executive resources in adaptive ways [...] by impairing executive control over thoughts but improving executive control over motor actions [...] ideal for either fighting with or fleeing from a current stressor.
In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?
Not only ancient people. The concept of a “foreign” inner voice exists in islam and is called vesvese in Turkish. It is commonly attributed to being deceit from satan and as a child you get taught to actively repress it.
I tried to record myself, to capture my inner monologue, and found it really painful to listen to. I'm also not very good at role play or impersonation. But a professional performer, like a priest or entertainer, has to do it more than just habitually, and their manners become adapted and people might affect a whole dialectic. Whereas children rather randomly babel and come up with unique manerism that are uncommon and consequently deemed unfit. Further, if you grant that deus ex machina could be a bodyless voice in plays and earlier temple ceremonies, it stands to reason that people would consequently spin these messages further and reanalyse their inner monologue as word of god, not the least to shift responsibility, e.g. to the uber-ich, in Freud's terms.
Chrome is a platform for client-side Google services.
As the article says, the web browser is the most obvious component, but it also includes Google Cloud Print [0], Google Talk/Hangouts [1], Google Earth [2], Google Music [3], Gmail Offline [4], etc.
In some sense it's the spiritual successor to Google Desktop [5], which used to fill a similar role.
Especially when, in this context, we're talking about a rather peculiar type of intelligence, ie. the propensity to construct spacecraft and broadcast high-powered message-carrying radio signals. It seems very difficult to argue that there's any evolutionary pressure in favour of these behaviours, just given the time-lag from the development of our large brains to this.