Brain Perception I am going to adumbrate a new theory, quite an eye-stinging one. It says that you perceive your own brain. To be more specific, pain is the perception of C-fibers firing. It isn’t C-fibers firing itself but the perception of that.[1] The relation between pain and C-fibers is like that between seeing a […]
Christmas Speaking personally, there is not much about Christmas I like. I am not conventionally religious, still less Christian, so that angle carries little appeal for me. It is also quite exclusionary to dwell on this aspect, given that many people are not Christian and it is meant to be a holiday for anyone who […]
Living Consciousness Panpsychism is the doctrine that elements of mind exist in all physical things, down to atoms and their constituents. And yet we don’t see inanimate things tending towards mentality, despite their alleged quota of it. The mind is confined to animate things. Why should this be? A hypothesis suggests itself: elementary consciousness does […]
Hand Work I just had occasion to revisit my 2014 book Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (it is the topic of episode 8 of the long-form interview I am recording with my Turkish collaborators). I found myself rather impressed by it. It is really a science book with some philosophy thrown in. […]
Solipsistic Realism Berkeley had a metaphysics and epistemology that dispensed with matter; he thought this gave us a better theory of the nature of objects and also delivered us from the skepticism generated by the idea of matter. But he was not a solipsist, not by any means: he believed in multiple “finite spirits” and […]
