Brain, Mind, and Time Thoughts (and other mental events) occur in time and take time. Transitions between thoughts, as in logical reasoning, are temporally extended processes. Some people think more quickly than others. There is such a thing as the speed of thought, in principle measurable. Mental velocity is real. The brain also operates in […]
Is America a Cult? America has been home to a great many cults, large and small, more so than other countries. It seems prone to them—receptive, welcoming. It is generally a religious country and cults are religious in nature (though not necessarily supernatural-theist). Currently, we have the cult of Trump; before that we had the […]
Genius Project Some years ago, I came up with the idea of the Genius Project (like the Manhattan Project). This was prompted by a desire to help graduate students in the job market—to make them stand out from others (having publications being neither necessary nor sufficient). But the idea can be applied to developing intellectual […]
Second-Best Philosopher Ever Skipping preliminaries, I am going immediately to nominate Bertrand Russell. It might be thought that he can be ruled out by the principle that later philosophers have absorbed his work and so surpass him trivially. That would certainly be true of his contemporaries and predecessors, but Russell wrote so much that it […]
Descriptions and Non-Existence Semantics would be easier if there was no such thing as non-existence (if non-existence didn’t exist). Then we could simply assign an existing reference to any referential-looking term. We wouldn’t have the problem of empty terms: all meaning would be explicable by means of existing entities. We would have a fully denotational […]
Expressions of Belief and Desire Darwin investigates the expression of emotion, leaving out thought. He also says nothing directly about belief and desire, but we can attempt to fill that gap. Are there characteristic expressions of belief, disbelief, desire, and lack of desire (antipathy)? We can think of emotional expressions as the extended psychological phenotype […]
Dumbocracy It’s official, we are now living in a dumbocracy (OED “government by the dumbest”). We used to live in a democracy, but (as Plato predicted) democracy has an inherent tendency to degenerate into dumbocratic rule. The causes are somewhat mysterious (political scientists are baffled) but it is marked by the rise of ignorance, stupidity, […]
Expressing Mind In The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals Darwin goes into great (indeed excruciating) detail about the ways emotions are expressed in the body—the face, the voice, the hands, the posture. He leaves no doubt that animals and man express their emotions in characteristic bodily configurations, particularly facial expressions. But he never […]
Anger I read with interest Darwin’s discussion of anger in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (I am very familiar with that emotion, unfortunately). His discusses in detail the expression of anger in bodily posture, hand gestures, and the baring of the teeth. It made me think of Melville’s Billy Budd, a […]
Animal Respect The modern animal rights movement is now over half a century old. Someone should write a history of it. I will venture some alternative history. I was in on it from the beginning, but not at the very beginning. That can be traced to the book Animals, Men, and Morals, edited by John […]