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Comment by James_H on Locating emotions · 2011-07-28T14:10:42.353Z · LW · GW

I found it interesting how love seemed to be diametrically opposed to anger- anger as a very cranial (and hand) centric emotion while love seemed to be the most whole. I think it says something about the emotions being either very individualistic or shared- the love one's outline in places almost looks like it's expanding the character.

Comment by James_H on Is it okay to take toilet-pills? / Rationality vs. the disgust factor · 2011-07-26T12:49:11.959Z · LW · GW

I agree that the pills are probably safe, but are you confident enough to avoid your own disgust? That is, do you think you could suffer ill effect through placebo?

Comment by James_H on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011) · 2011-07-26T12:33:31.490Z · LW · GW

Hi everyone, I'm a 25 year old Olfactory Psychology student, hopefully about to start my phd soon. I have a blog myself at http://freeze43.wordpress.com/ that's mostly about atheism and philosophy. I was here after a link by a friend pointed out some stuff by Eliezer Yudowsky and I was really excited about it.

I got into rationality fairly early by enjoying religion and philosophy classes and being concerned with a desire to find truth. As I progressed through my Psych undergrad I found myself changing my career preferences as scientific understanding became far more convincing and powerful to the point where it is perhaps the only truly implicit understanding we have. I was shocked to see humanist psychology et al. strutting around as if it was meaningful when compared to statistically verified information. What was worse, is that this fluff stuff invaded the "psychology" section at bookstores, was made into teaching curriculum at schools and was thought to make meaningful predictions about people's lives. So, here I am in the most scientifically-based psych discipline I could get into; studying the sense of smell.

Olfactory psychology is rewarding and has led me down some weird paths in understanding consciousness which is my big interest. However I feel I've neglected other studies of cognition and I really want to get a better insight.