Why Do We Speak? As has often been remarked, language is a rare biological accomplishment. It is not spread widely across the animal world and took billions of years to evolve. I am referring here to communicative speech not the cognitive machinery that underlies human linguistic competence (which may be directed more towards the use […]
Skepticism and Time We can’t be certain the ordinary world of material objects exists: we might be brains in a vat or perpetually dreaming. We can’t be certain that space exists, at least in the form we think of it, for the same reasons. But what about time? We are familiar with skepticism with respect […]
Anthropocentric Physical Empiricism Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge derives from something called “experience”. Alternatively, all (non-trivial) knowledge comes from the senses. Knowledge is ultimately reducible to “impressions” or “sense data” originating in the human sense organs. In some forms it takes on a metaphysical cast: all of realityderives from experience and is reducible […]
Knife Throwing I have been working on my knife throwing recently. It’s not a mainstream sport perhaps, but it has its own charm. I heard someone the other day describe it as “like darts but more macho”; indeed, but it is more than that. It is technically more difficult to stick the knife in the […]
2024 Resolutions I don’t have any, except one I can’t implement. I would like to ban all teaching of my work in American philosophy departments. Why should I let the products of my labor be used for free by people who refuse to employ me? Shouldn’t there be a law against this? Shouldn’t I have […]
Does the Mind Age? The mind has an age, but does it age? The body also has an age, and it does age. The person has an age, and that thing too ages. How old are these things? The body is probably the oldest, because its existence pre-dates the existence of both mind and person […]
Experimental Atomic Psychology Is there any evidence for the atomic hypothesis in psychology, however slender? It certainly doesn’t seem to us that our consciousness is composed of little psychic particles separated in space—the analogue of physical particles. But there is one area in which the hypothesis enjoys some phenomenological support—I mean, the experience we have […]
Atomic Psychology Atomic physics has achieved the status of common sense. It is hard now to understand why it took so long to arrive at it. Despite the efforts of a couple of pre-Socratics, it took till the nineteenth and twentieth century till atomic physics came into its own, driven by technology. People just didn’t […]
Ditto this paper. The Cruel Gene I can forgive the genes their selfishness; it is their cruelty I can’t forgive.[1] I understand their need to build survival machines to preserve themselves until they can replicate: they need the secure fortress of an animal body. But why did they have to […]
This is an earlier paper that I am re-posting because of the interest shown in “Evolution of Pain”. Pain and Unintelligent Design Pain is a very widespread biological adaptation. Pain receptors are everywhere in the animal world. Evidently pain serves the purposes of the genes—it enables survival. It is not just a by-product or holdover; […]