A Day in the Life I began the day by putting the finishing touches to my essay “A Triple Aspect Theory”, on a subject I have been thinking about for over fifty years and still find inexhaustibly interesting. This was the usual intense intellectual effort in which the mind seems both to […]
A Triple Aspect Theory Does pain have a nature that goes beyond the feeling of pain? Pain has a phenomenology, which we experience internally, but does it have any other properties? Apparently it does, since it has a functional role—a way it functions in the mind and in relation to the body. […]
The Prudent Gene Humans are capable of two types of selfishness, the prudent kind and the imprudent kind. Imprudent selfishness is quite common: a glutton grabs the cake from someone else and gorges himself on it, much to his future detriment. The genes, however, do not go in for this kind of […]
Addition and the Origin of the Human Mind How did language and arithmetic evolve? [1] It is natural to ask about both in the same breath because of certain broad similarities between the two, particularly regarding discrete infinity, recursive rules, and computation. It would be nice if a common feature could be revealed […]
Soiled, Torn, Dead Chapter 7, Part II, of Lolita is an extraordinarily powerful piece of writing, even by the standards of that work. This is the chapter that begins: “I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals”. In this chapter Humbert Humbert describes how […]
Metaphysical Pluralism I will discuss a question at the outer edge of human comprehension. Some metaphysical views are monist, some dualist, and some pluralist. Monist views include materialism and idealism; dualist views typically divide reality into the mental and the material; and pluralist views include a variety of disparate types of being. […]
A Paradox of Democracy A democratic state could decide democratically to abolish democracy. The people have come to the conclusion the democracy is dysfunctional, tyrannical (of the majority), and inefficient, so they vote to replace it with something better. According to democracy, they have a right to do that, and indeed a duty. Not […]
Potentiality Potentiality is not the same as possibility. Potentiality is a kind of power or capacity; possibility is a way things could be. Someone might have the potential to become a concert pianist but this might not actually be a possibility because of circumstances (no pianos to practice on, no teachers, etc.). And […]
Puzzles of the Unconscious When was the unconscious mind discovered? The question makes sense in a way the comparable question about the conscious mind does not. The conscious mind was “discovered” when it came to exist, just by being conscious: being conscious and knowing one is conscious are inseparable. But that isn’t true […]
Thinking and Speaking Is thinking a type of speaking? There is a tradition that says it is: thinking as “saying in one’s heart”, the language of thought, voices in the head, thoughts as sub-vocal speech. The idea is that just as we produce outward speech by using our speech organs so we […]