i found myself with about an hour to kill before my presentation today (!), so i went into the bookstore and read the first few chapters of douglas hofstadter's i am a strange loop, which was entertaining but completely antithetical to what i believe in a number of ways. his stand, which seems to resemble that of many philosophers of neuroscience nowadays, is that the vertical integration of neuronal, systems and cognitive theories is neither possible nor desirable. i say: nonsense. inconceivable at the present moment, maybe, but so were bullet trains a hundred years ago. the gestalt of consciousness from matter, the explanation of how that occurs lurks in the interstices, the sticky places that neuroscientists and psychologists alike are wary of exploring. and i shall control myself here by not talking too much about fools rushing in, but you know what i mean*.

and then came the presentation, which was shit, and has convinced me that i need to make a bullet-pointed script before i go into my defense on the 15th. the difficulty is that all of our committees have one "outsider", someone with no background in the subject material, and so we have to pitch the talk at an appropriate level while still hitting all the high points. this was impossible to do on the fly, as i discovered, and i'm glad i had the opportunity to look like an idiot among other grad students before i did so in front of my advisor.

* and to be fair, his point is that we can all live and read good books and smell the coffee without understanding the (sub)atomic world, which is true, and cheerfully anti-reductionist, but also immensely unsatisfying.