being conscious about being conscious I had been thinking about thinking from the very beginning. My original notion, drawn from my observations of prisoners, was that the internal dialogue of human thought consists of an internalized interaction between dominant and submissive mentalities. I continue to believe that thought is fundamentally the interaction between two different …
Reviewed in this week’s Science (15March2013) is philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos. “In his famous paper, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, he argued that however much we may come to know about the physiology of bats, we will never know what it feels like to be one. Accordingly, the scientific …
Freud’s observation that humans are hypersexual has become such a cultural staple to have settled in as the sitcom-with-canned-laughter cash-cow. Although I had long been steeped in Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and sexual display, I hadn’t put the two together until I read Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind (2000), the thesis of which …
The stagnant myth that has seeped unnoticed down into a pool beneath our current secular philosophy is that, when humans got smart enough to worry about what happened to us after death and to wonder about the cosmos around us, we invented first religion and then God. Freud, the philosopher: we concocted a father who …
