Minds in Space How do I think of my own mind and other people’s minds? Or, what comes to the same thing, how do I think of myself and other selves? What distinguishes the way I think about myself (my mind) and the way I think about other selves (other minds)? This question should be […]

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 […]

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 […]