I’ve started to think that the customary way we divide up the mind into the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious is too crude and unrevealing. The connection between, say, a perception and an immediate memory of it is far too close to be captured by these categories. Isn’t it the same thing that exists in memory and exists in perception? Thus I want to introduce the idea of the paraconscious–that which exists in parallel with consciousness but isn’t present to consciousness. The question is whether this notion makes sense.

The world has been becoming steadily more insane for the last few years, but the era of the Great Orange Blob marks a new high. It would be funny if it weren’t so scary. Are we seeing the dawn of a new fascism or is it just a passing phase of the overheated media? I wish the madness were localized to this but it seems to engulf everything.

For those wondering where I’ve been recently the answer is that I’ve been working on a collection of new papers which I intend to publish soon. The thing is there are 125 of them, so it took a lot of work to finalize them.

I was watching (as is my wont) another nature program yesterday, about penguins. Among many marvelous things I was struck by one scene in particular: after showing the remarkable parental devotion of the parents, the camera caught them feeding their chick for the last time and then waddling off to leave it to fend for itself, quite contrary to its wishes. You wondered: why so much love and then such sudden abandonment? But then you remember: those selfish genes are primarily concerned to maximize their numbers and the best way to do that is to get the parents to produce another chick, not spend more time on this one. You could almost hear the genes speaking: “That’s enough with that one, now get to work to produce another!” Evidently there are penguin genes for strong parental love but also penguin genes for turning this love off. Could anything similar be true for humans?