Philosophy of Life I came up with the following philosophy of life as I watched the Sun rise this morning; I hope you find it as profound and apposite as I do. We live on this fucking planet, in this fucking galaxy, surrounded by these fucking people, having evolved from these fucking animals. One day […]
Is Meaning in the Head? Learned readers will recall those halcyon days of trips to Twin Earth and the outer reaches of meaning when we discovered that meaning isn’t situated in the head.[1] We learned that no meaning is an island; there are bridges of meaning linking one piece of land to another. We called […]
Anti-Skepticism We know what skepticism says: it says that we don’t know what we think we know. At its extreme, it says we don’t know anything; typically, it says we know nothing about the external world and other minds. It asserts this; it claims to know it. We definitely know that we don’t know. We […]
Information and the Brain It has become routine to speak of neurons as “transmitting information”, usually without any definition of “information”. This talk is highly misleading. We can use wires and waves to transmit information to other people, because we have knowledge we can communicate in this way; but if the “information” is not sent […]
Musical Therapy It is well known that listening to and performing music has cognitive benefits. It is not known, however, what explains these benefits—in virtue of what is music good exercise for the brain? I conjecture that three factors are at work: mathematics, memory, and emotion. Music is mathematical, because of scales and keys, as […]
Moral Knowledge I am going to defend a view of which I am morally certain: moral knowledge is the best kind of knowledge we have—intellectually, epistemologically. It is knowledge at its finest, purest, least qualified. It is the shining star in the epistemological firmament. Needless to say, this goes against the grain of the entire […]
Ignorance and Other Minds What do we know better—material objects or other minds? In the ordinary course of things, there is a lot about material objects of which we are ignorant: their insides, their chemical composition, their unseen side, their atomic structure, the nature of matter itself. They are often too distant to see well, […]
