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, […]
Illusions of Mind Is it possible to maintain that we know other minds better than we know other bodies—or even our own body? Can we be more skeptical about our knowledge of bodies than our knowledge of other minds? That sounds unlikely, given that we infer other minds from other bodies: we see other bodies […]
