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

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

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

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