Dreaming and Philosophy I have an empirical hypothesis: dreaming caused philosophy. That is, it was dreaming that tipped our ancestors off to philosophical questions, and it still does. Dreaming embodies so much of what stimulates philosophical thought; it’s the cradle of philosophy. Not all of it, to be sure, philosophy being a […]
A Theory of the Unconscious From a biological point of view, the mind is a problem-solving device: the problem of finding food, the problem of avoiding predators, the problem of reproducing and raising offspring. That’s why the mind exists—to solve problems. Sometimes we consciously reflect on problems, using Rational Thought. The problems can […]
Persistence Through Time In virtue of what do material objects persist through time? This is not a difficult question to answer: the particles composing the object must persist through time (enough of them anyway) and they must stay spatially related to each other in the same way over time (to a sufficient degree). […]
Music and Language The analogies and connections between music and language are striking. This is most apparent in the case of song, but it applies quite generally. Music is made up of notes, phrases, bars, tunes, riffs, verses, movements, symphonies, operas, albums, etc. It has compositional structure. It proceeds from a finite […]
