Brain Design and the Mind-Body Problem If you look at any organ of an animal body, you will find two things: a function for the organ and a design suited to that function. The organ’s design enables it to perform its function. That’s how nature works and it is hard to see how it could […]
Book Reviews I used to write a lot of book reviews—something like 80 of them over a 35-year period. I was known for it. I reviewed in all the best places. You might suppose I must have enjoyed doing it. I did not. It was hard work and not in a particularly good way. You […]
How Well Understood is Motion? Not very. It seems to be generally assumed that we have motion under intellectual control, even if once it was quite a mystery. Physics has tamed it. Consciousness is still untamed, it is agreed, but motion is a bright spot in our understanding of nature. But I think the truth […]
The New York Review of Books and Me When Robert Silvers was the editor of the NYRB I wrote regularly for them. I must have written a dozen pieces for the magazine over a ten-year period. If anything, I felt over-employed by them. I got on well with Bob and looked forward to his many […]
Skateboard Update I have been skateboarding for 45 days, doing it nearly every day for about half an hour (following tennis practice). I now own three boards. I can say that I’ve got the hang of it. The cruising and steering part isn’t that difficult, but the push-off part takes some work. You have to […]
Americans Again Americans are idiots and psychopaths (see American Idiot by Green Day and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis). It’s obvious and indisputable. The only good American is an anti-American. You know it’s true (the rest of the world certainly does). Trump is just another iteration of the same pathology: he talks rubbish, he […]
Evolution of Reflexes The reflex was one of the best ideas that Evolution ever had (second perhaps to articulated bodies). What could be better than an unlearned rapid response action to a threatening stimulus? It’s like having a lightning-fast gunslinger ready to get the organism out of trouble. You don’t have to wait ten minutes […]
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 […]