Consciousness and the Eye If you look into the eye of an animal (say, a bird) you gain a strong impression of consciousness: the eye seems to brim with consciousness. The same is not true of other sense organs: you don’t get a comparable impression from looking at […]
Contradictory Concepts and Skepticism Suppose we are engaged on a project of radical interpretation of an alien population. The project is progressing nicely, with many predicates already interpreted, but then we encounter a strange case: there is a predicate “squound” that appears to be an abbreviation of “square and round” and is […]
Matter and the Limits of Skepticism The skeptic questions whether we know the external world exists, purporting to provide a proof that we don’t know that it does. The proof takes the form of describing a possible alternative to what we normally assume. Thus it is suggested that a […]
The Water Paradox It has been a while since we had a new paradox to cudgel our brains over. For your edification (and frustration) I will present what I call “the water paradox”. Like all paradoxes it aims to derive an absurdity from self-evident premises, thus demonstrating the auto-destructive […]
Intention and Possibility How does the idea of possibility enter our thought? It is generally agreed that perception is not its source: we do not see possibility—we don’t think of possibility because our senses present it to us. A more likely view is that imagination is the progenitor of the idea […]
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 […]