The Mind of God Divine Psychology A typical university education in the science of psychology will include a course entitled “comparative psychology,” which deals with animal psychology and its similarities to, and differences from, human psychology. But I have never heard of a psychology degree that offers a comparative […]
Evil comes in many varieties. A typical list would include: genocide, murder, torture, terrorism, slavery, sadism, the sexual and physical abuse of children, slander, betrayal of trust, desecration of the sacred, disfiguring, maiming, and crippling. We might count as evil the willful destruction of great works of art or architecture, in addition to […]
The Human Malaise There is widespread agreement that something deserving to be called a human malaise exists, but there is little consensus about its origin and nature. It is accepted that human beings suffer from some sort of angst or distress or depression or sickness or uneasiness—some negative emotional […]
Monotheism and the Problem of Evil There is no problem of evil for polytheism, which for the theist is a good argument for polytheism. If there are three different gods who are, respectively, omniscient, omnipotent, and all-good, then it is quite clear how there could be preventable evil in the […]
The Moral Law Within Kant famously says: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” We can take this statement […]
Memes, Dreams, and Themes This is to be an exercise in the taxonomy of ideas. It is characteristic of ideas to be shared by many minds. Why is this? One reason is that ideas spread from mind to mind. Here is where the concept of a meme comes in: a meme […]
Atoms, Genes, Ideas I propose to ruminate briefly on the analogies between the three topics of my title. What do they have in common? The most obvious point is that they are each discrete isolable units that combine to form complexes with like units. Atoms combine with other atoms to produce molecules, […]
The Evolution of Color According to projectivist views about color, color properties do not precede color vision. It is in virtue of color experiences in perceivers that things come to be colored. Color is mind-dependent. I will assume this view here. My concern is with the consequences of this view for […]
The Cruel Gene I can forgive the genes their selfishness; it is their cruelty I can’t forgive. [1] I understand their need to build survival machines to preserve themselves until they can replicate: they need the secure fortress of an animal body. But why did they have to build suffering […]
Particles and Identity In the case of statues and similar objects we can separate the identity of the thing from its substance. Thus the statue is not identical to the piece of bronze that composes it, because the piece but not the statue survives being melted down. The piece is the aggregate […]