Evolution and the Blank Slate It is sometimes observed that evolution by natural selection resembles learning by trial and error. Mutation is the trial and natural selection is the error correction. It is certainly apt to think of evolution as a kind of learning process: over time organisms “learn” […]
Language as a Tool for Thought A typical tool must meet two requirements: it must be able to be used by its intended user, and it must perform its designated function. Often the tool must be firmly gripped and manipulated, so it must fit into the human hand, while […]
Pan-Mentalism and Geometry Russell’s neutral monism is enjoying something of a recrudescence. He starts with the thought that physics does not disclose the intrinsic nature of matter, being merely structural and relational, and then postulates that this nature is mental in character. That is, the intrinsic nature of matter […]
` Ideal Communication Life on earth has reached the point that germs are in the ascendant. You can’t touch someone without catching a disease. Naturally this puts a crimp in people’s romantic lives: no more dating, no more kissing, and certainly no more sex. The future of the human race […]
Word and Hand It is sometimes suggested that human dominance is due to language. Up until about 80,000 years ago humans were not dominant, being pre-agricultural and pre-industrial. Then language evolved and we were off and running, with our technology and social organization. Language was the lever to […]
The Unity of the Word What is a word? It seems safe to say that a word is something that combines with other words to produces phrases and sentences. We can also describe words as discrete units of meaning, finite in number: they are digital not analogue, never shading into each […]
Semantic Discreteness as a Logical Defect It used to be said that natural languages are logically defective in one respect or another: quantifiers look like names, definite descriptions look like names, names look like names, vagueness is pervasive, no distinction is made between object language and meta-language, and […]
Consciousness Demystified In Nabokov’s political dystopia Bend Sinister (1947) the philosopher Adam Krug reflects on his eight-year-old son: “And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the […]
Consciousness As The Only Reality The belief that only consciousness is real (really real) is deeply ingrained in philosophy, both western and other. To many people it has seemed as if something like this must be true—that there is no coherent alternative. Consciousness undoubtedly exists, and it is all that […]
Deciding to be Good I start with an imaginary case to oil the wheels of thought. Suppose there are people who go through a specific schedule of moral development: around the age of ten their moral thinking crystallizes around the question, “Should I be a good person?” At this time […]