Baked Stuffed Quahogs
Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on Baked Stuffed Quahogs
Some years ago I was visiting my friend Armand Fernandes Jr., a man of Portuguese descent who lives in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He said he wanted to treat me to traditional Portuguese food at a place he really liked.
We went to a café that served Caldo Verde, the staple Portuguese kale and chourico soup. Chourico (pronounced sure-EESE-o), and often spelled chourice (pronounced sure-EESE), is a linked sausage made from smoked pork, garlic, paprika, white pepper, and other spices. There’s a variation made in the Fall River and New Bedford area called linguica. It’s essentially chourico made slightly thinner and sold as a single loop, rather than links. I’m not sure whether my soup contained chourico or linguica, but then I’m not sure Doc—Armand’s nickname—could have told the difference either.
In any case, the aromatic, smoky soup contained kale, potatoes, sausage, and the herbs and spices that the Portuguese have loved since they sailed the world to bring spices from India back to a hankering Europe. This was the kind of soup that could keep Portuguese fishermen alive on the wintry North Atlantic as they sailed the Grand Banks for cod. I wanted a glass of wine to go with it, but Doc said that the Massachusetts blue laws prevented serving wine on Sundays. When you’re a local, however, stuff can get done. Doc went to speak with the woman behind the counter and returned with red wine in a ceramic coffee cup. “No one will know it’s wine,” he said, looking furtively around the empty café.
On the second and last night of my visit, we went to a New Bedford bar where the kitchen served baked stuffed quahogs, or “stuffies” as they’re known. A quahog, pronounced KO-hog, is also the star ingredient in Boston clam chowder. It’s the same species of clam as the littleneck (about two to two and a half inches in diameter) and the cherrystone (about three to three and a half inches).
Quahogs, though, are the adults in the room with shells about three to four inches front to back and four to five inches side to side. This means they are tough characters, because the larger the clam, the chewier the meat. They are among the oldest living animals on the planet. A huge quahog was dredged up from the sea floor near Iceland in 2006. Scientists laughingly dubbed it Ming the Mollusc because they counted its growth rings and found it was born in 1499, during the Ming dynasty in China. Then they put it in the freezer, which promptly killed it. Idiots.
I hope they made a stuffie out of it, because the stuffies I ate at that bar with my friend Doc changed my life. They were so delicious! I have not forgotten them. I often daydream about them. And I haven’t gotten back to the New Bedford-Fall River area since, or I’d have gone to the nearest bar and ordered them.
Are they organic? Seafood can’t be certified organic because there’s no way to control the variables in the water where wild-caught seafood is found. But you can make sure that all the other ingredients are indeed organic.
What if you live in a part of the country where there are no quahogs? This clam, called the Hard Clam (Mercenaria mercenaria), is only native along the Atlantic coast from the far north to the Yucatan peninsula. Well, you could use the meats from cherrystones or Manila clams, but their shells are too small to make true stuffies. And it’s hard to find chourico outside of Portuguese enclaves, although a few minutes spent online will give you many sources that ship (see the note for crushed red pepper in the recipe). If you want to make them in places away from the East Coast, you could stuff shallow ramekins or oven-proof dishes with them. Or you’ll find a number of places that sell seashells online, including quahog shells.
The tender meats of the smaller clams can be thoroughly chopped, but for actual quahogs, it’s best to put the meats through a meat grinder. This not only tenderizes them, it also releases more flavor. So if you’re ready for a few stuffies, try this authentic recipe.
15 quahogs, shucked, rinsed, and ground
2 loaves day-old Italian bread
2 Tbl. extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, chopped
1/2 green bell pepper, chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 link Portuguese chourico, ground or minced
2 Tbl. crushed red pepper*
2 Tbl. Italian parsley, chopped
Paprika, to taste
1 tsp. butter
* Note: the wet kind. Available online at www.melloschourico.com or at your market
1. Open quahogs, placing meat and juice in separate bowls. Save shells.
2. Break bread into small ½-inch pieces in a large bowl and add enough of the clam juice so bread is well moistened but not soggy.
3. Add ground quahogs and incorporate into the bread mixture.
4. Add the oil to a skillet and saute onion, green pepper, garlic, and chourico over medium heat until the vegetables are soft but not brown, about 4-5 minutes.
5. Add the sautéed vegetables and sausage mix, along with crushed red peppers, to the bread mixture. Mix well, fluffing as you go.
6. Wash shells and separate. Mound stuffing into shells. Sprinkle tops with parsley and paprika.
7. Dot tops with a couple of tiny dabs of butter. Set the quahogs in a pan and place in a 375 F. oven for about 25 minutes or until cooked through.
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DARK ACT RIDER ELIMINATED FROM OMNIBUS SPENDING BILL
Food Democracy Now reports: “This is huge! With your help and hundreds of thousands of people just like you, we managed to shut down Monsanto in Congress by stopping the Dark Act policy riders that would have killed GMO labeling in America for good.
“We’re happy to report that Monsanto was defeated – this time! But it means they’ll come back stronger than ever after the holidays in January to pass the compromise that Monsanto and the GMA (Grocery Manufacturers Association) are desperate to achieve, so we won’t know if the foods we eat are genetically engineered.
“We only have a few weeks to refill our tanks before Congress comes back in session next month – when the GMA and Monsanto will be desperate to end your right to mandatory labeling once and for all.
“Incredibly, a provision regarding GMO salmon was allowed in the Omnibus spending bill that won’t allow genetically engineered salmon to be introduced for sale until the FDA determines proper labeling requirements-–and while this is not all of what we want regarding GMO labeling – it will slow down the sale of GMO salmon in the United States and elsewhere.”
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AGRIBIZ ABUSES IN ‘ORGANIC’ EGG MARKET ARE DETAILED
Due to the importance of the following report from the Cornucopia Institute, I’m using the entire press release. It’s a weighty read, but details how the USDA and agribusiness firms are cheating consumers, co-opting the organic farming movement, and harming family farms. The report, entitled, “Scrambled Eggs,” contrasts widespread agribusiness fraud and USDA complacency with the real heroes in organics. Here’s the report on Cornucopia’s study:
Just as Americans are reacting to new medical literature encouraging the consumption of “healthy” fats, including eggs, an independent report has been released that focuses on widespread abuses in organic egg production and marketing, primarily by large industrial agribusinesses.
The study, conducted by The Cornucopia Institute, profiles exemplary management practices employed by many family-scale organic farmers engaged in egg production, while spotlighting abuses at so-called “factory farms,” some confining hundreds of thousands of chickens in industrial facilities and representing these eggs to consumers as “organic.”
The report is accompanied by an online scorecard rating various organic brands on how their eggs are produced in accordance with federal organic standards and consumer expectations.
Cornucopia, a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group, also accuses the USDA’s National Organic Program of gross malfeasance in neglecting to protect consumers from fraud and ethical farmers from unfair competition, as Congress charged the agency to do.
“For this report, we have visited or surveilled, via aerial photography/satellite imagery, a large percentage of certified egg production in the United States, and surveyed all name-brand and private-label industry marketers,” said Mark A. Kastel, The Cornucopia Institute’s codirector and senior farm policy analyst. “It’s obvious that a high percentage of the organic eggs on the market are illegal and should, at best, be labeled ‘produced with organic feed,’ rather than bearing the USDA-certified organic logo,” Kastel stated.
According to the United Egg Producers (UEP), 80 percent of all organic eggs are produced by just a handful of UEP’s largest members. Most of these operations own hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of birds and have diversified into “specialty eggs,” which include organic.
Meanwhile, as consumers have become concerned about the humane treatment of animals, and are also seeking out eggs that are superior in flavor and nutrition, a number of national marketers have found success in distributing “pasture”-produced eggs. “There is a fair bit of overreach and the exploitation of this term is well covered in our report,” Kastel explained. “The organic egg scorecard enables concerned consumers to select authentic brands delivering the very best quality eggs regardless of the hyperbole on the label,” he added.
Cornucopia’s report focuses not on the size of some of the mammoth agribusinesses but rather on their organic livestock management practices. It says that most of these giant henhouses, some holding approximately 200,000 birds, provide no legitimate access to the outdoors, as required in the federal organic regulations.
The new report comes at a critical juncture for the organic poultry industry. After failing to persuade the USDA to investigate alleged illegalities (i.e., confinement of animals without outdoor access) on numerous concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), Cornucopia contracted for aerial photography of a number of the nation’s largest organic egg operations. Without even conducting an investigation, the USDA closed a second set of formal legal complaints earlier this year, which was backed up by Cornucopia’s photographic evidence as well as state regulatory documents.
The USDA’s action, along with other alleged improprieties, resulted in The Cornucopia Institute filing formal ethics charges against the National Organic Program’s staff director, Miles McEvoy, and asking USDA Secretary Thomas Vilsack to remove him from that post. Thousands of proxy letters have been collected from organic stakeholders, addressed to Secretary Vilsack, calling for Mr. McEvoy’s removal.
“Many of these industrial-scale operators are gaming the system by providing tiny enclosed porches, with roofs and concrete or wood flooring, and calling these structures ‘the outdoors,’” stated Paul Nehring, a livestock producer with firsthand experience pasturing organic chickens and a farm policy analyst with Cornucopia. “Many of the porches represent just 3 to 5 percent of the square footage of the main building housing the birds. That means 95 percent or more of the birds have absolutely no access whatsoever to the outdoors,” Nehring explained.
“If one animal has the legal right to be outdoors, then all animals have the same right, whether they choose to take turns or if they all choose to be outside at the same time,” said Jim Riddle, a Minnesota organic farmer and former chairman of the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB).
At meetings of the NOSB, United Egg Producers represented industrial-scale producers and publicly opposed proposals to strengthen regulations requiring outdoor access.
“We are strongly opposed to any requirement for hens to have access to the soil,” UEP member Kurt Kreher, of Kreher’s Sunrise Farms in Clarence, New York, wrote in a 2009 letter to the NOSB. And, in 2010, Bart Slaugh, director of quality assurance at Eggland’s Best, a marketer of both conventional and organic eggs based in Jeffersonville, Pennsylvania, stated to the Board members, “The push for continually expanding outdoor access … needs to stop.”
Cornucopia’s Mark Kastel concluded, “Circumstantial evidence indicates Mr. McEvoy, and his colleagues at the USDA, are paying more attention to the voices of agribusiness lobbyists, rather than the preponderance of consumers and ethical farmers in the organic industry.”
In a third effort to legally compel the USDA to act, Cornucopia has again filed formal complaints against several of the independent certifiers, working under USDA supervision, and the poultry companies that either offer their birds no access to the outdoors or “faux” outdoor access — very small enclosed porches.
After visiting scores of egg producers in 11 states, the authors of the Cornucopia report also conclude that the vast majority of family-scale producers are at least complying with minimal organic regulations. “This is the good news in this report,” explained Kastel. “Now the USDA needs to step up and protect ethical organic farmers from unfair and illegal competition.”
“An important subset of organic farmers even go far beyond the minimum requirements in the organic standards: not just providing access to the outdoors but rotating birds on high-quality pasture,” affirmed Kastel.
However, Cornucopia’s report reveals that, as pastured eggs have gained cachet in the marketplace, a few national marketers are attempting to cash in by using the word “pasture” to describe eggs from fixed houses, some containing as many as 20,000 birds. Others “of these brands are doing a wonderful job encouraging their birds to actually go outside and providing varying qualities of vegetation,” said Kastel. “We call this Enhanced Outdoor Access.”
Cornucopia contends that all organic chickens should be outdoors with that kind of Enhanced Outdoor Access, providing up to 108 square feet for each bird. “These entrepreneurs are complying with what organic consumers think they are getting from all packages labeled organic,” Kastel stated.
The report also profiles some producers that Cornucopia describes as “the gold standard”: those with mobile chicken coops rotated frequently in pasture. Some, like Alexandre EcoDairy Farms in Northern California, with 25,000 birds in 16 movable henhouses, are proving they can scale-up the model without diminishing the integrity.
“When consumers buy organic eggs, I think they expect that the hens were out on pasture, enjoying fresh air, running around, foraging in the pasture,” said Stephanie Alexandre.
The Alexandres have expanded to meet the market demand of larger retailers, selling their eggs under the Alexandre Kids label to Whole Foods stores in Northern California, North Coast Co-op in Eureka and Arcata, California, and even select Costco stores. The brand has earned the top, “five-egg” rating on Cornucopia’s scorecard.
Laying hens living on pasture-based farms tend to be under less stress, due to their greater opportunity to exercise and ability to engage in instinctive foraging behaviors that lessen aggression toward their flock mates. Pastured hens also frequently live longer productive lives instead of the one year that is common on industrial-scale farms.
On the other side of the continent, one of the other high-integrity organic egg producers is a group of 10 Mennonite farm families in Virginia. One of their producers told Cornucopia researchers, “Our hens are healthy, live longer, and produce better-tasting and more nutritious eggs. How can you go wrong with pasturing?” The group markets their eggs under the Shenandoah Family Farms brand, available at Whole Foods stores and co-op grocers in the Washington, D.C. area.
Organic customers are also increasingly aware of a growing body of scientific literature confirming the nutritional superiority of eggs when the birds have an opportunity to eat fresh forage, seeds, worms, and insects. “Part of our intent, and the basis of this research and report, is to protect the livelihoods of family-scale organic farmers,” said Dr. Linley Dixon, a Cornucopia policy analyst. “These farmers are being placed at a distinct competitive disadvantage by corporations that are more than willing to ignore the rules and cut corners in pursuit of profit,” she said.
One producer whose pastured poultry operation was squeezed out of business is Ivan Martin, of Natural Acres in Millersburg, Pennsylvania. He told Cornucopia researchers during their site visit, “Consumers saw my [legally produced] eggs next to other so-called organic eggs bearing the exact same USDA Organic label, and probably thought they were equivalent in terms of outdoor access and nutrition. We could not compete with those [factory farm] eggs,” said Martin.
“Until the USDA decides to enforce the law, consumers and wholesale buyers can be empowered in their purchasing decisions by accessing Cornucopia’s Scrambled Eggs report and the organic egg brand scorecard,” said Kastel. Both can be viewed at www.cornucopia.org.
“The commercial size egg industry — both conventional and organic — has great concerns with birds having outdoor access,” wrote the United Egg Producers in testimony before the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB).
Jim Riddle, a former NOSB chairman, illustrated the illegality of small porches as a substitute for true outdoor access, stating, “The outdoor access space needs to be sufficient in size and designed to accommodate all animals being outdoors at once.”
Cornucopia’s Mark Kastel added: “Just as with our organic dairy and other brand scorecards, Cornucopia’s goal is to assist consumers and wholesale buyers with information to make good, discerning purchasing decisions — so they can vote in the marketplace, rewarding the organic heroes and sending a strong message to the bad actors to improve their management practices.”
“These giant ‘factory farms,’ or concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), generally produce eggs from caged birds, but they have diversified, depending on which way the marketing winds blow, to what the industry refers to as ‘specialty eggs,’ such as ‘cage-free,’ vegetarian, omega-3, and the organic label,” Kastel said.
“Whether it’s laying hens for eggs, hogs for meat, or cows for dairy, organic customers expect livestock to be treated with respect and in compliance with the USDA standards,” added Kastel. “The good news in this report is that, although the vast majority of organic eggs are coming out of industrial complexes, in every market there are farmers and brands that meet the high expectations of organic consumers,” Kastel explained. “Now the USDA needs to step up to protect these producers from unfair, if not illegal, competition. Congress gave the USDA the authority to protect these farmers from unscrupulous competitors. It needs to wield that power!” he urged.
“From the beginning, Cornucopia’s position has been that the original organic regulatory language actually means something,” said Kastel. “Just because it didn’t prescribe exactly how to comply with the requirement for ‘access to the outdoors for all organic livestock’ or ‘access to pasture for ruminants’ doesn’t mean farm operators can ignore the requirement.”
The NOSB has a proposal pending that would require a minimum of 2 square feet, both indoors and outdoors, for organic laying hens. “That proposal is a joke and an insult to consumers and farmers practicing true organic methods,” said Kastel.
Cornucopia notes that probably the biggest name-brand organic egg purveyor, the farmer-owned cooperative Organic Valley, requires 5 square feet outdoors for their birds. European organic regulations require 43 square feet per bird. Three companies noted in Cornucopia’s report are affording “Enhanced Outdoor Access” for their birds, with 108 square feet per hen.
Organic farmers, and their urban allies, can download and execute the proxy letter, calling on USDA Secretary Thomas Vilsack to replace the current leadership at the National Organic Program, by clicking here:
SIGN THE PROXY LETTER: Remove Current USDA Organic Management
For more information of the report, visit http://www.cornucopia.org/2015/12/scrambled-eggs-report-contrasts-widespread-industry-fraud-and-usda-complacency-with-true-heroes-in-organics/
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AN ENDOCRINE DISRUPTOR IMPLICATED IN AUTISM
According to an article by Peter Reuell, Harvard Staff Writer, “In a discovery that could offer valuable insights into understanding, diagnosing, and even treating autism, Harvard scientists for the first time have linked a specific neurotransmitter in the brain with autistic behavior.”
Using a visual test that prompts different reactions in autistic and normal brains, a research team led by Caroline Robertson, a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, was able to show that those differences were associated with a breakdown in the signaling pathway used by GABA, one of the brain’s chief inhibitory neurotransmitters. GABA stands for Gamma Aminobutyric Acid, one of the endocrine system’s signaling hormones that acts as a gatekeeper for neurologic signals approaching the brain. It keeps the flow of sensory information at safe and healthy levels. If that gatekeeper is impaired, all kinds of sensory inputs can flood the brain with too much information, causing mental overload. That is exactly what happens in autism. The study is described in a December 17 paper in the journal Current Biology.
“This is the first time, in humans, that a neurotransmitter in the brain has been linked to autistic behavior — full stop,” Robertson said. “This theory that the GABA signaling pathway plays a role in autism has been shown in animal models, but until now we never had evidence for it actually causing autistic differences in humans.”
Though long believed to play a role in autism — GABA has been widely studied in animal models — evidence supporting GABA’s role in the disorder in humans has been elusive.
“Autism is often described as a disorder in which all the sensory input comes flooding in at once. So the idea that an inhibitory neurotransmitter was important fit with the clinical observations,” Robertson said. “In addition, people with autism often have seizures — there is a 20 to 25 percent link between autism and epilepsy — and we think seizures are runaway excitation in the brain.”
To find that evidence, Robertson and colleagues went searching for an easily replicable test that produced consistently different results in people with and without autism, and found it in what visual neuroscientists call binocular rivalry.
Normally, she said, the brain is presented with two slightly different images — one from each eye — that it averages to create the single image we see. The binocular-rivalry test, however, forces each eye to take in very different images, with surprising results.
“The end result is that one image is just suppressed entirely from visual awareness for a short period,” Robertson said. “So if I show you a picture of a horse and an apple, the horse will entirely go away, and you will just see the apple. Eventually, though, the neurons that are forcing that inhibitory signal get tired, and it will switch until you only see the horse. As that process repeats, the two images will rock back and forth.”
In earlier studies, Robertson and colleagues showed that while the same process does occur in the autistic brain, the oscillation between images can take significantly longer.
“Where the average person might rock back and forth between the two images every three seconds, an autistic person might take twice as long,” she said. “They spend the same amount of time in the steady state, where they see only one image, as the average person. It just takes them longer to switch between them, and the second image is not as deeply suppressed.”
Using magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a brain-imaging technique that can measure the levels of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, researchers found that while those with autism did show normal levels of excitatory neurotransmitters, GABA was far lower than expected.
“What we think we’re seeing is evidence of a deficit in the GABA-ergic signaling pathway,” Robertson said. “It’s not that there’s no GABA in the brain … it’s that there’s some step along that pathway that’s broken.”
Here’s a question. What chemical, ubiquitous in the environment and food supply, is an endocrine disruptor and hormonal disruptor? One answer is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, Monsanto’s weed killer used in fields of glyphosate-resistant major crops like corn, soybeans, cotton, alfalfa, and more. Could glyphosate be damaging GABA, thus allowing torrents of neurological information to flood and disrupt young brains, causing autism?
I don’t know. I’m not a scientist studying this. But if I was, I’d surely suggest that we examine that possible link.
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CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE GROUND FROM WHICH REALITY SPRINGS
Science doesn’t seem to have arrived there yet, but it’s my contention that consciousness doesn’t grow out of reality, but that reality grows out of consciousness.
Strange at it seems, science really doesn’t have a clue about what consciousness is. And that’s because scientists think that first there is reality—atoms, molecules, compounds, and more complicated systems, from which consciousness emerges in sentient beings. My position is that consciousness itself is the ground from which reality springs. And from that concept comes the idea that everything is at least conscious of itself. And so certainly all conscious beings are aware of the world they live in. How can it be otherwise? How could they survive if they weren’t aware of their world and its resources?
Now an international group of prominent scientists has signed The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in which they are proclaiming their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware to the degree that humans are — a list of animals that includes all mammals, birds, and even the octopus. But will this make us stop treating these animals in totally inhumane ways?
Let’s hope so. But it seems that science is trailing far behind the central idea that it is consciousness itself that is the fundamental reality of the universe, and from which everything else derives.
While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it’s the open acknowledgement that’s the big news here. The body of scientific evidence is increasingly showing that most animals are conscious in the same way that we are, and it’s no longer something we can ignore.
What’s also very interesting about the declaration is the group’s acknowledgement that consciousness can emerge in those animals that are very much unlike humans, including those that evolved along different evolutionary tracks, namely birds and some cephalopods.
“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states,” they write, “Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.”
Consequently, say the signatories, the scientific evidence is increasingly indicating that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.
Isn’t it obvious that if consciousness is the substrate of reality, that all creatures are built out of consciousness, and that they all share a conscious awareness of the world? C’mon scientists, get with the program!
The group consists of cognitive scientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists — all of whom were attending the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals. The declaration was signed in the presence of Stephen Hawking, and included such signatories as Christof Koch, David Edelman, Edward Boyden, Philip Low, Irene Pepperberg, and many more.
The declaration made the following observations, most of which strike me as wrong-headed gobbledegook. But stick with me as I give these scientists their day in court:
“The field of consciousness research is rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for human and non-human animal research have been developed. Consequently, more data is becoming readily available, and this calls for a periodic reevaluation of previously held preconceptions in this field. Studies of non-human animals have shown that homologous brain circuits correlated with conscious experience and perception can be selectively facilitated and disrupted to assess whether they are in fact necessary for those experiences. Moreover, in humans, new non-invasive techniques are readily available to survey the correlates of consciousness.
“The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals. Artificial arousal of the same brain regions generates corresponding behavior and feeling states in both humans and non-human animals. Wherever in the brain one evokes instinctual emotional behaviors in non-human animals, many of the ensuing behaviors are consistent with experienced feeling states, including those internal states that are rewarding and punishing. Deep brain stimulation of these systems in humans can also generate similar affective states. Systems associated with affect are concentrated in subcortical regions where neural homologies abound. Young human and nonhuman animals without neocortices retain these brain-mind functions. Furthermore, neural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).
“Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots.
“Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.
“In humans, the effect of certain hallucinogens appears to be associated with a disruption in cortical feedforward and feedback processing. Pharmacological interventions in non-human animals with compounds known to affect conscious behavior in humans can lead to similar perturbations in behavior in non-human animals. In humans, there is evidence to suggest that awareness is correlated with cortical activity, which does not exclude possible contributions by subcortical or early cortical processing, as in visual awareness. Evidence that human and nonhuman animal emotional feelings arise from homologous subcortical brain networks provide compelling evidence for evolutionarily shared primal affective qualia.”
These last few paragraphs seem like scientific gobbledegook to me. What they fail to realize is that consciousness is the ground from which reality arises, not the other way around. The gobbledegook occurs because they are thinking about consciousness backwards, trying to puzzle apart the fact of consciousness as an artifact of reality, when reality is just an artifact of consciousness.
Without consciousness, there is no reality. Consciousness is the light that fills the universe, and its omniscient understandings constitute the rules from which energies emerge, and from those energies, the particles that coalesce into what we call physical reality.
Turn it around scientists. Then you’ll see it right.
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