Entries by Colin McGinn
Consciousness and the Cogito
Consciousness and the Cogito I think it is fair to report that people take the Cogito to reflect something important about consciousness, thinking, and the existence of the self. Roughly, they take it to demonstrate (or purport to demonstrate) that conscious thinking entails personal existence: if you know that you consciously think, […]
Footnote to “Emotion Management”
[1] Of course, to say that dreams have an emotion-regulating function is not to say that they have no other function—they might be multi-functional. They might aid in memory retention or help with cognitive tasks or allow us to blow off steam or provide a space for adaptive simulation or even provide sexual release. There […]
Emotion Management
Emotion Management It is striking how much of human life is devoted to emotion management. Among the more obvious manifestations of this are psychiatry, psychotherapy, drug taking, shopping, hot baths, and taking a brisk walk. We are forever trying to calm ourselves down, recover from an emotion-laden incident, cope with a crisis, […]
Footnote to “Dreams and Emotion”
[1] It’s hard to find a good analogy for the co-evolution of emotion and dreaming, but the idea of adaptations and counter-adaptations is surely familiar enough. Adopting a bipedal gait will require compensating adaptations to deal with issues of balance, for example. In fact virtually every adaptation will require some counter-adaptation to deal with unintended […]
Strange Ignorance
Strange Ignorance Imagine coming across a tribe with the following peculiar epistemic deficit: they are strangely ignorant of ordinary familiar things like animals, people, mountains, and other objects in the environment. They don’t know whether cats and dogs are both animals, they don’t know whether mountains are convex or concave, they don’t […]