Empathy and Racism I want to discuss a sensitive topic: the cause(s) of racism. I will not discuss all aspects of what is doubtless a complex phenomenon, especially virulent, violent, institutional racism; I will discuss a specific universal non-malicious cause of racism. And by racism I will mean lack of empathy for people of races […]
How Many Mind-Body Problems? We tend to speak in the singular about the mind-body problem: the mind-body problem. But is that realistic? Couldn’t there be many mind-body problems depending on what aspect of the mind we are considering? They may not present the same problem or have the same solution. How many life-matter problems are […]
A Trump Ukraine I have come to a disturbing conclusion: Trump actively wants Ukraine to lose the war with Russia. What triggered this realization was the cessation of intelligence-sharing with Ukraine. This cannot be justified in terms of expense, as the cessation of arms can. It seems gratuitous—the kind of thing you would do if […]
Cult Politics Last night’s State of the Union was pure cult: Trump spouted a stream of lies, crazy fantasies, and groundless grievances while his Republican supporters cheered, chanted, and became teary-eyed. They would have wildly applauded anything he said no matter how ludicrous. They seemed happy in their delusions. Vance and Johnson gave whole-body Nazi […]
Cold War Over The Cold War went on for, oh, 75 years, give or take. Now it’s over. How did this miracle happen? Trump brought Putin to the negotiating table—he used diplomacy. He achieved this feat by not criticizing Putin. Yes, there were territorial concessions: Trump gave him Ukraine and any other chunk of Europe […]
Future of Philosophy The future of philosophy in America looks dismal. I am not going to sugar-coat it. The root cause is job scarcity—a matter of supply and demand. There are very few jobs for too many people and it’s not going to change any time soon (probably never). Not many new people can get […]
Consequences Is it too much of an exaggeration to say that last Friday’s berating and insulting of the prime minister of Ukraine by the president and vice-president of the United States marked the end of the Cold War? The USA and Russia are no longer at loggerheads, no longer foes, but rather in harmony with […]
Mental Ontology A certain way of conceiving mental ontology has become entrenched: there are mental tokens and mental types, and token identity does not entail type identity. In other terminology, there are mental particulars and mental properties, and the former may be identical with physical particulars in the brain without there being an identity of […]
Trump Psychology Recent events support the following conjecture: the whole thing arises from the fact that Trump thinks (correctly) that European leaders dislike and despise him, while be believes, falsely, that the dictators of the world like and admire him. He also envies Zelensky’s ability to draw standing ovations. The only reason he stays in […]
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 […]