Stimulus-Response Science Stimulus-response psychology has been out of fashion and favor for a long time now, not without reason. It is associated with behaviorism, physicalism, and conditioning theories of learning. We are not just physical mechanisms triggered into reflex behavior by outside stimuli! Indeed not: we are full of “intervening variables”, cognitive structures, streams of […]
Digital Weapons Suppose the Germans at the time of the Second World War were secretly working on a new weapon with lethal potential. The plan was to manufacture small handheld devices that could be distributed to enemy populations (how they weren’t sure). German psychologists and brain scientists had discovered that a certain kind of propaganda […]
Blog Profile I thought readers of this blog might be interested in its readership; at any rate, I’m going to tell you. My website gives me a top ten of readers by country, with an indication of relative volume. The top two are always the same but the other eight vary from week to week […]
Spock Logic It is quite obvious that Spock doesn’t know any logic. He clearly knows a lot of science, but he is ignorant of the science of logic. Why do I say this? Two things: (a) he doesn’t know what “logic” means, and (b) he never refers to anything in the logical canon. He is […]
2025 Intentions I don’t make New Years Resolutions (a pitiful concept) but I do intend to do certain things going forward. The main one is to go on hating—hating evil, corruption, and stupidity. I invite you to join me. This won’t be easy: I am not by nature a good hater. Hating is unpleasant, it’s […]
Chemistry I used to love chemistry. It was my first intellectual interest. I was ten. It was my gateway science. Why, I don’t remember; it might have had to do with Dr. Dolittle. I persuaded my parents to equip me with a chemistry laboratory one Christmas. I selected the apparatus and chemical samples from a […]
Limits of Intelligence Does intelligence have limits? What might these be? Where do we humans stand on the intelligence scale? I will discuss these questions by reference to a Star Trek episode and a well-known philosophical contention involving bats. Don’t expect anything too definitive; these questions are very difficult (we may not have the intelligence […]
A Puzzle in Zoology Isn’t it strange how animals vary in their natural defenses? Some are poisonous, some have armor, some have horns, some have thick skin, some have spikes, some have tough scales, some live in shells, some just taste bad; but some—many—have none of the above. Some can only run and hide. The […]
Beatlemania Beatlemania has always been something of a mystery. True, these were four handsome young men, stylishly dressed, who made great records; but why the hysteria, the extreme adulation? No other band or individual has ever come close, before or since. It seems hard to believe, a kind of collective madness. I think the answer […]
Knowing Minds What is the main thing that minds do? A survey of psychological (and philosophical) theories through the centuries suggests a variety of answers: copy, interpret, react, introspect, sense, repress, think, remember, reason, imagine, learn, believe, create, compute, process information, and no doubt others. Each of these might be proposed as the central operation […]