Of all the David Frosts, I am the David Frostiest.
Philosopher Peter Carruthers at the OUP blog: You can, as it were, hear yourself as deciding to do something when the appropriate sensory-like episode — “I’ll do it now”, say — figures in consciousness. But your access to the underlying decision is just as indirect and interpretive as is your access to someone else’s decision …
When we like a TV show, why do we like it? What is it about a TV show or any media content that makes it good? Perhaps you don’t care. “It’s enough that I like it,” you say. “I don’t need to know more than that.” That may be fine for you. But media content …
Nelson is our day’s ur-thinker for nuance, our own private Susan Sontag. She calls her method “thinking out loud with others,” for she quotes liberally from other writers. It makes her text a rich palimpsest, dense with significance. A phrase is introduced—for example, “freedom and fun,” from the founder of the Proud Boys description of …
Now out with Springer! It’s my book review of The Universe as We Find It, by John Heil! My review has been online for a good while and getting daily traffic at academia.edu. But more recently, the paperback journal has finally printed. Heil’s book is available in hardback at Amazon. Heil argues for a certain …
The editors of SLAB, a literary journal, asked me: “You get a million dollars, but a snail follows you for the rest of your life. If the snail touches you, you die, and lose your million dollars. Would you take the money, why or why not?” What’s your answer? Here’s mine. “Yes, I would. A …
Read at Amazon …
Earlier I remarked on Neuroskeptic’s coverage of some new scientific research into consciousness. I’ve been wanting to think and write about the significance of this experiment a bit more. In some sense, what we are talking about is how a scientist or technician — who is, as we say, “outside” my mind — can know …
Leah Price has written a piece in the Boston Globe about how some doctors in Britain are prescribing books for their mental health patients. The National Health Service set up a program called Books on Prescription, which is just the latest example of a new wave of “bibliotherapy.” The School of Life, founded by Alain de Botton and …
Crews and Adler believe that most cases of the yips probably have a psychological basis of some kind, but that in some percentage the ultimate cause will turn out to be neurological.[The New Yorker] All philosophers of mind and most philosophers generally will recognize the error in this sentence, or should recognize it. Basically, the …