What is Consciousness? If I had unlimited time and money, I would waste it on the University of Arizona’s annual conference on consciousness, called, optimistically, “The Science of Consciousness.” Of course there is no such science. One can (I can) … Continue reading
The Economist had an interesting series of articles recently on great unsolved mysteries of science including the nature of time, what is dark matter, and the one that interested me most, consciousness: What is it? Where is it? How do we … Continue reading
What Does It All Mean? A Humanistic Account of Human Experience. Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic. This is an analysis of psychological experience, based on what we can know, not what we wish we knew, about the meaning of life, mind, … Continue reading
Mental experience occurs inside the physical body, does it not? You’ve never had an experience that happened on the other side of the room while you were on this side. No. Mental activity is always “in here.” What does that … Continue reading
We think of the mind as a unitary process. Each person has one mind. But what if the mind was not a single mental process but a concert of three concurrent channels of activity? That’s an unusual thought. Yet the … Continue reading
I just read a book review in The Economist of Daniel Dennett’s recent book, “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking” (http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21579427-tools-pondering-imponderables-pump-primer). I haven’t read the book, but I know Dennett’s philosophy of mind from reading several other of his … Continue reading
Scientific Introspection calls for psychologists to use introspection to investigate the mind. What researchers do now is study the brain, and behavior, then from that, try to guess what the mind must be like. But why guess? Remarkably, we happen … Continue reading