I wrote a blog post describing the article, talking about criticisms of Crick and Koch's theory, and describing related research involving salvia:

http://the-lagrangian.blogspot.com/2014/07/epilepsy-consciousness-and-salvia.html

Enjoy.

AFAIK, there is really no good standardized exam for neuroscience. Eg, see someone ask the same question and get no replies here: http://www.funfaculty.org/drupal/node/4331

The old Kandel textbooks used to have questions at the end of at least some chapters, but recent editions do not have them IIRC.

If you're interested in the medical side of things, there's a lot of good practice multiple choice questions you can do for psychiatry and/or neurology, that med students use when preparing for Step I. USMLERx and UWORLD are both good qbanks, but they're fairly expensive and you'll only want a subset of them.

For awhile I was going through CalTech's 100 Questions: http://www.cns.caltech.edu/academics/100questions.html , but I only got until #18 or so before my interests change too much to make it worthwhile to continue. (Some of which you can find here: http://brainslab.wordpress.com/category/100-questions/.)

Please update me if you find anything, since I'd be curious about this too.

The link to the original paper is broken.

Regarding color you might want to have a look at the as usual funny and detailed XKCD color survey: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

Philosophy Bro writing as Popper:

So how does science proceed, if induction is fucked (which it is) and we can't logically determine how to have new ideas (which we can't)? Easy - just take a fucking guess. No, I don't mea- dammit, you asshole, I don't mean "guess how science works", I mean guessing just is how science works. Just start guessing shit and go from there. Of course you're going to make a couple stupid guesses at first. Seriously, some of the shit you're going to try is going to be genuinely fucked in the head. Remember when we thought heavier objects would fall faster? Boy was that wrong. But we took a guess, tried it out, and it didn't work. Instead of being whiny babies about it, scientists just took another guess and then tested that out, too. That's the process: guess, and then you test that guess. And if the test works, you're like "Huh! That was an even better guess than I thought." And the more tests it survives, the more people are like, "Great guess! I'll bet that's probably it." And then you get to a test that your guess doesn't pass, and you're like, "Welp, close but no cigar. Back to the drawing board."

We'll eliminate the fucking stupid guesses pretty quickly - it doesn't take long to show that we can't move things with our minds. Eventually, you start to build a pretty cool system of things so you can make better and better guesses. and you can totally use data to make good guesses; you don't always have to invent something completely new every time. I'm just saying that's all the data does, helps make good guesses. It doesn't prove shit.

And look! That method is deductive! What incredibly good news! You don't have to derive a universal statement from a bunch of single events, which is great because you can't; instead, you just guess a universal statement and then see if you can't find an event that breaks it. You can't get from "the sun keeps rising" to "the sun will always rise" but if one day the sun doesn't come up, you can be damn sure about "the sun does not always rise." All you need is one bad apple and you know for sure that not every apple is good, no induction needed. QED, motherfuckers.

And - AND - now we know what is and isn't science! Holy fuck I am on fire here. Not actually. Just- look, I'm solving lots of things, is my point. Scientific theories are falsifiable - they're incompatible with certain things we could observe. They predict shit, and then we see if that shit really happens. Back when we thought Newton's Laws were totally, completely true, Mercury had this weird fuck wobble in its orbit that said we should find another planet. Except we looked and no planet. And now we know for sure that Newton wasn't completely right. Einstein? He was a patent clerk for fuckssake, and he came up with a fucking incredible guess. And we just keep devising more and more complicated tests to check it out, and it keeps on passing. When it does finally fail, we'll fucking know. There won't be aaaaany confusion whatsoever. Souls? How the fuck would we go about testing for souls? "Well, we cut him open, and we didn't find a soul, so..." "Yeah, but you can't see souls! That's the whole point!" So you're saying we can't ever test for souls? That's fine, just, it means souls can't come to the science party. They're not falsifiable. You must be THIS FALSIFIABLE to ride the science ride, and souls just aren't.

I am deeply confused by your statement that the complete class theorem only implies that Bayesian techniques are locally optimal. If for EVERY non-Bayesian method there's a better Bayesian method, then the globally optimal technique must be a Bayesian method.

In section 8.1, your example of the gambler's ruin postulates that both agents have the same starting resources, but this is exactly the case in which the gambler's ruin doesn't apply. That might be worth changing.

I don't understand why we can't simply build an LFTR. I can't find anything online about why we can't just build an LFTR. I get the serious impression that what we need here is like 0.1 wild-haired scientists, 3 wild-haired nuclear engineers, 40 normal nuclear engineers, and sane politicians. And that China has sane politicians but for some reason can't produce, find, or hire the sort of wild-haired engineers who just went ahead and built a molten-salt thorium reactor at Oak Ridge in the 1960s.

Jared Diamond, in Guns Germs and Steel, argues that when the time is ripe scientific discoveries are made quite regardless of who makes them, give or take a few decades. Most discoveries are incremental, and many are made by multiple people simultaneously. So wouldn't a discovery that isn't published be just made elsewhere in a few years time, possibly by someone without many ethical concerns?

Just because the states are the same doesn't mean the probability of being in that state are the same. It's only meaningful to discuss the probability of an outcome in terms of a probability distribution over possible outcomes.

In my example, I specified that the BB is in a reference class with all other brains, including the psychic cousin's. Given that they are both in the reference class, the fact that the BB and the cousin share the same cognitive history implies that the probabilities of their cognitive histories relative to this reference class are the same. The reference class is what fixes the probability distribution over possible outcomes if you're determining probabilities by relative frequencies, and if they are in the same reference class, they will have the same probability distribution.

I suspect Eliezer was thinking of a different probability distribution over brain states when he said the psychic's brain state is correlated with the deck of cards. The probabilities he is referring to are something like the relative frequencies of brain states (or brain state types) in a single observer's cognitive history (ETA: Or perhaps more accurately for a Bayesian, the probabilities you get when you conditionalize some reasonable prior on the sequence of instantiated brain states). Even using this distribution, the BB's brain state will be correlated with the top card.