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I, again, feel that my experience in this seminar was an interesting contrast to my other science classes. I will admit that at times I was frustrated with the lack of primary scientific literature brought up in our discussions (those of us who posted primary lit/studies seemed to often end up talking about the more controversial topics presented by short personal-interest pieces), but I do feel that the discussions that we did have were valuable. Many were much more philosophical than I had expected-- there really is no one answer or way to approach this material and I found it incredibly interesting how many different ways we each found to get at the key themes, such as neural diversity, throughout the semester. I also felt like these boards were an interesting avenue to continue class discussion; often times in other classes I've found that time to reflect on what was talked about allows for much more critical study, so I think this is great medium to do just that.

in terms of the things that I have found most interesting, I really think through each of the topics there were a few main themes. first, the idea of everything being defined on a spectrum was fascinating for me. I do, as many people have mentioned above, tend to think of things as right and wrong and black and white. Its hard to think about some of the things I deal with during my senior thesis research in this way-- if my experiment doesn't work, I don't immediately think about all the other things it could be telling me. However, i really SHOULD think abotu all those things, because that is what science is all about... a lot of times we talked about there being a lack of definition (love, consciousness) and I think this is also applicable on a wider range of topics. what is more interesting is the question: do we really need a definition? often, im not sure we do need a concrete definition to study something-- isn't the studying it itself helping to define it? and dont our definitions change as we learn more and more about something? the other thing that i think its very important to remember is that we need to define things on a spectrum (as i mentioned above). AND, perhaps even more importantly still, we need to carefully consider the viewing and presenting audience. we cannot get outside our own personal human experience, so is there really some objective truth that exists outside of it? can we ever really attain such a thing? we have priviledged science in this way-- we feel that because science provides hard reproducible data it must be our way to discover such objective truth. this seems somewhat a fallacy in itself, because even our science is shaped by our own experience. therefore, i think one of the main things to keep in mind from this class is to consider the diversity with which we view the world-- and not to place our own interpretation of it on others and assume that their experience is similar (or judge it as better or worse) than our own.

i do want to thank everyone for such an interesting semester; the topics everyone chose were quite interesting and highly varied so it was great to have such a broad range of things to talk about. also, the discussions were insightful and definitely forced me to think about things in ways that I probably wouldn't have. I liked all the personal opinion and anecdote that were present throughout the discussion, it really brought the material onto a more personal level. so thanks to everyone!