Introduction For thinkers who want to avoid dualist models of consciousness, panpsychism is an increasingly attractive notion that claims phenomenal consciousness is a property that originates in microscopic physical constituents such as electrons and protons. While these particles are not held to possess the same phenomenal experience as humans do, … More A Computationalist Reply to Constitutive Panpsychism
A Computationalist Reply to Constitutive Panpsychism
A Skeptic in Search of Belief
I sit here typing this from a desk in a Manhattan hotel room. After months of burnout and an all-around lack of inspiration, I suddenly feel compelled to write a new article. Conveniently, my own experience of burnout and, more specifically, disillusionment with philosophy, can readily be framed as a … More A Skeptic in Search of Belief
Ritual and Art: Part 1
This is a two-part essay where I look at the characteristics of art through the lens of ritual. Part 1 gives an outline of what I’ll call the Precipitate Metaphor of art. Part 2 will look at the effects of ritual in inducing powerful trance states, which I argue is … More Ritual and Art: Part 1
Berkeley and Nature
In his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (PHK), Berkeley proposes a purely mind-based universe in which only mental things—perceptions, volitions, and their cogitative substrates, i.e. minds—exist. He argues that our knowledge of Nature, what is conventionally believed to be “external reality”, is actually not based on the … More Berkeley and Nature
seeing through the fishbowl
Alfred Korzybski once pointed out that “the map is not the territory.” In an important way, maps function as models, or compressed descriptions, by which we refer to elements of the large compilation of sense-data we could call the “territory”. There’s no question that we’ve learned to make better maps … More seeing through the fishbowl
On Self Understanding: Methods and Modes of Inquiry
On Self Understanding: Methods and Modes of Inquiry As an armchair philosopher, I am sometimes also an armchair psychologist. Armchairs are great for lots of things, besides, perhaps, actually getting things done out in the “real world”. But who needs the “real world” anyway? (Berkeley, other philosophical idealists, are you … More On Self Understanding: Methods and Modes of Inquiry
The Twilight Zone and Philosophy
The Twilight Zone and Philosophy “A Nice Place to Visit” Have you ever seen an episode of the Twilight Zone? Each is a small, beautifully strange slice of the human experience. The episodes take on a definitively moral, existential undertone and overtone. That is to say, they’re moral and existential … More The Twilight Zone and Philosophy
The Complex Nature of the Individual
The Complex Nature of the Individual INTRODUCTION I journal extensively; I write not merely about the mundane and everyday (in fact, I usually leave that out altogether—to my chagrin later on) but instead I focus on the thoughts and ideas I have, which often have a long developmental history of … More The Complex Nature of the Individual
The Passage of Time
The Passage of Time Introduction… When we consider the passage of time, we can investigate two different sets of relations or properties: relations of ‘earlier than’, ‘simultaneous with’, and ‘later than’ (e/s/l relations), and properties of past, present, and future (p/pr/f properties). Evidently, e/s/l relations are different from p/pf/f properties; … More The Passage of Time