{"id":22982,"date":"2018-05-15T12:24:57","date_gmt":"2018-05-15T11:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22982"},"modified":"2018-05-15T17:50:22","modified_gmt":"2018-05-15T16:50:22","slug":"word-of-the-day-homunculus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22982","title":{"rendered":"Word of the day: homunculus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--more-->The word comes from the Latin for &#8220;little man&#8221; and you can find a short account of the the use of the word <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Homunculus\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I came across the word while reading &#8220;Enlightenment Now&#8221; by Steven Pinker [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nfbooks.html#EN\">here<\/a>]. He uses the word to represent the false notion that some people have of a little figure sitting inside our skull or brain independent of the brain itself.<\/p>\n<p>in fact, Pinker writes: <em>&#8220;Nothing that we know about consciousness is inconsistent with the understanding that it depends entirely on neural activity.&#8221; <\/em>So, no spirit, no soul &#8211; when the brain\u00a0dies, we die entirely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22982"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22992,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22982\/revisions\/22992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}