Don't go into the woods alone at night!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWP8ti_pTBA

"The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behavior (called "causal theories") or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.

The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others' mental states from their behavior.

When people mistake unreliable introspection for genuine self-knowledge, the result can be an illusion of superiority over other people, for example when each person thinks they are less biased and less conformist than the rest of the group. Even when experimental subjects are provided with reports of other subjects' introspections, in as detailed a form as possible, they still rate those other introspections as unreliable while treating their own as reliable. Although the hypothesis of an introspection illusion informs some psychological research, the existing evidence is arguably inadequate to decide how reliable introspection is in normal circumstances. Correction for the bias may be possible through education about the bias and its unconscious nature."===http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion

"[I]ntrospection does not provide a direct pipeline to nonconscious mental processes. Instead, it is best thought of as a process whereby people use the contents of consciousness to construct a personal narrative that may or may not correspond to their nonconscious states."===
Timothy D. Wilson and Elizabeth W. Dunn (2004)

High strangeness!

http://twistedsifter.com/2013/01/strange...in-russia/

I am constantly plagued by this question. Evolutionarily what comes after consciousness? I think it is already dawning. I call it aseity or self-conscious existence. To plummet the logic of one's being down to a self-evident or necessary level. Too often we get stuck in the trap of thinking our existence is incidental or contingent. That it is just as likely for us to have not been as to have become. But there is a logical, almost mathematical, certainty in self-existence. We exist because we are conscious of our existence. There is no chance that we are not because the very act of being aware of ourselves entails that we exist. They are fused together in a indivisible core. We thus have a moral principle behind oufundamental being. We are necessary a priori. There is no possibility that we could not be, because we are and we KNOW that we are. We partake of the infinite absolutivity of pure Being.

It seems like whenever I turn on the cable TV news networks, there's an awful lot of Ebola coverage. Not so much Ebola in west Africa either, but about the possibility of Ebola becoming epidemic here. (I live in the US, but I gather that worries are the same elsewhere in the world.)

So...

Do you think that all the anxious news coverage is justified? Or is it maybe being overdone a bit? Or alternatively, is it possible that the public isn't as concerned as they should be?

I voted Yes.!!!

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/texas-ebola...d=26045360