What do we really know about the relationship between the world and our experience of it? That is an important question and there are at least three things that we can be sure of. We …
Cartesian Dualism and Brains In Vats
If you could put your brain in a nutrient bath so that it could keep on functioning outside of your body what would it (or would it still be you) experience? Would it still have …
The Ego Tunnel and the Nature of Reality
Thomas Metzinger’s new book The Ego Tunnel weaves research in out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, phantom limbs and other extraordinary human occurrences with leading edge neuroscience to create a convincing picture of how neural activity constantly …
Society and the True Self: Part 4 “Up from Inside the Matrix”
In my last post I described how many of us awaken to find ourselves in the middle of a life that is more a reflection of social mores than our own autonomous choices. We look …
Society and the True Self: Part 3 “Waking Up in the Matrix”
In my recent posts I have been developing the idea that individual human beings might be more accurately seen as individual expressions of social preferences, attitudes and beliefs than as separate autonomous individuals. We live …
Society and the True Self: Part 2 “The Socially Conditioned Self”
In my last post I described how other peoples’ outside opinions about us get incorporated into our own internal experience of ourselves. Now I want to show how the opinions about us that become part …
Society and the True Self: Part 1 “How the ‘me’ became the ‘I’”
>Human existence is punctuated by distinctions – self/other, me/you, in/out, here/there, us/them, up/down – and the list goes on and on. These distinctions are what we use to locate ourselves in reality. For those of …
A World of Sentences, Part 4: Living in a Background of Affirmed Commitment
I have been developing a thought about language and reality and suggesting that it might be better to think about the sentences that we use as commitments to reality rather than descriptions of it. Of …
A World of Sentences, Part 3: The Transformative Power of Language
In my last two posts I have suggested that it may not be valid to think of language as a description of reality. So if our language does not describe reality, what does it do? …
A World of Sentences, Part 2: Language and the Reality of Reality
When we begin to suspect how much language might be influencing our perception of reality our fundamental conception of what is real and true starts to unravel. Have we been wrong to assume that language …
A World Made of Sentences, Part I: Sentences and the Perception or Reality
My last series of posts showed how our sense of self can be seen to be composed from an unending string of conclusions about who we are. In discovering this something interesting becomes apparent. We realize …
Self, Reality, Truth and Language: Part 4 – A Model for Human Transformation
This will be the final post in this series and it brings the ideas we have been working with together into a model for how human transformation happens. Human beings change in many ways. We …
Self, Reality, Truth and Language: Part 3 – Psychological Development vs. Spiritual Transformation
Over my last couple of posts I have been writing some thoughts about our sense of self. One way to think about our sense of self is to see that it is formed by a …
Self, Reality, Truth and Language: Part 2 – Sentences In Your Head
We are all trapped in a self-image – a set of ideas that we identify with as who we are. If you want to discover radical freedom then you have to look closely at what …
Self, Reality, Truth and Language: Part 1 – The Discovery of Radical Freedom
The most important relationships that we have are the ones that we have with the thoughts in our heads. Our relationship to thought determines everything that we experience and everything that we are. Let’s start …
The Evolution of Agency
What matters most about human beings is our capacity for active agency. We can do things, we can change things, we can create things. One way to think about evolution is to think about it …
The Evolution of Dissatisfaction
What moves us? Why do we keep going, always striving to better ourselves, our circumstances and the conditions of others? It isn’t completely rational. We all die in the end anyway so why does it …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
Evolutionary Love
“The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.” Charles Sanders Peirce In 1893 a publication called The Monist printed an article by …
We don’t create time – we freeze it in its tracks.
We have learned to see time as if it appears in chunks – minutes, hours, days, and years. But if time comes in chunks how do we experience past memories in the present? How does …