Humans think with meat, and while meat can store a surprising amount of information (if that’s the right way to put it), its storage capacity is limited. So, we forget things. Is this regrettable but unavoidable, like the existence of pain or death? Or could it be a positive good, rather than a necessary evil?…
Clear seeing
Does scientific understanding allow humans to outrun the capacities of other creatures? Do we see the world more clearly?
The uniqueness thesis
Suppose you have a body of evidence. Maybe you’re a detective and you’ve got hours of interviews and forensic evidence at your disposal, or maybe you’re a paleontologist with lots of fossils and lessons from comparative anatomy. Now you want to know if the evidence “favors,” in any way, some hypothesis. Does the forensic evidence…
Metaphors for evidence
Every true crime freak knows that evidence comes in many degrees and dimensions. Evidence can be weak or strong; it can be overwhelming; it can be weighty or flimsy. The metaphors for evidence suggest it works like a physical quantity, like mass. One grain of rice doesn’t have much mass, but a billion has enough…
The sage on the summit
(This one’s for my philosophers.) The traveler decided to take a break halfway to the summit. He realized with some alarm that his big gulping breaths couldn’t quite catch enough air. His lungs seemed to grasp for atmosphere in the same way his frozen fingertips had struggled for purchase on the rime-crusted handholds onto this…
Reading philosophy and the art of starting over
I always warn my intro students that reading philosophy is not like reading anything else in college. In other classes, you can approach textbooks as repositories as facts and explanations, so we allow them to be practical, but boring. You can approach literature and art as fonts of heightened aesthetic awareness, which means engaging with…
Monkey minds and Gemini brains
I’m a mindfulness meditation novice. It’s strange to admit that I’ve been living full time with a brain for more than 30 years, and even used it to get a PhD, yet have only just begun to read the manual. My practice is pretty modest — at least five times every week (weekends optional), watching…
The unreality of causation
Given two metaphysical claims, we can prove that causation is a creature of the mind, not a feature of the world in itself.