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 I agree with much of what Vidya has already said. I too watched the video prior to class, and was surprised at how different its impact on me was the second time. There were probably many causes for this change in my attitude, including the laughter in the room, the fact that we skipped the entire introduction to enter on the line "I'm as huge as a whale, swimming through the sea" or something like that, etc. However, I think there's something worth defending from my initial reaction to the video: there was something I was moved by. There is something immediately repulsing by the mixing of emotion and science, subjective and objective. And yet as we discussed in class and Vidya has pointed to, emotion is becoming increasingly a part of that very science; the subjectivity we tried so hard to keep separate has become the very topic to be investigated. This, I think, has loosened us up to the idea that maybe emotion should not be kept so strictly distinct from science. But since Vidya has already talked about emotion, I additionally wonder about another discomforting aspect of Dr. Taylor's talk: her incorporation of religion. I imagine that as repulsive as we find the integration of emotion into science, we find the incorporation of religion about a hundred times worse, and for many legitimate reasons. Strongly held religious doctrines can violently inform, often falsely, the direction that science should/can proceed. Moreover, science is often put in the place to discredit religious beliefs that many derive happiness from. As such, the mixture of religion and science is a messy one at best, and one that many feel we should shy away from. However, Dr. Taylor forcefully brings us into religious language, using abstract metaphor to describe the enormity of her experience, her connection to the universe, to her constituent parts, and nirvana. What should we do about this? Do we reject her from science? Do we convince ourselves that she's not really talking about religion, per se? While these are possibilities that we entertained in class, I wonder if they're the most productive ones. Is it possible that science is an inevitable part of religion, or even more jarringly, that religion is an inevitable outcome of science?