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 …
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 …
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 …
Experience and Understanding
There are two kinds of knowing – experience and understanding – and the confusion between them is the cause of all sorts of trouble for any thinking person. Experience is the knowing of things. It …
Are Relationships Real Things?
Our sense of reality is dominated by things. Things feel real to us. We live in a universe that we experience as empty space filled with things. And some things have relationships between them. But …
Mind is not Brain
What is the mind? Most of us think about it as a storehouse of ideas and memories. It is the place where we experience the world. Sometimes we think about it as a movie screen …
American Common Sense – or – How to Change the Truth
The American mind has been constructed on a few obvious attitudes and assumptions about life. One is a pronounced idealistic streak. The Europeans that settled in this land believed that they were creating a new world …
Is a Dog Really a Dog?
One of the great philosophical dividing lines has always been the line that separates the particular from the universal – the unique from the general. We live in a world of both particulars and universals …
The Objective Reality of Language
We live in a universe of discourse – a flowing ever-adjusting transfer of information. If you want to see the world the way that George Herbert Mead and the other American Pragmatists saw it you …
Learning to be a Self
George Herbert Mead said a self is a subject that is an object to itself. A subject is a perceiving thing and a self is a perceiving thing that can perceive itself. Human beings are …
Into The Human Flow
I am currently completely captivated by the image of a Human Flow. The American Pragmatist philosophers developed a view of humanity as a constant flow of activity and society was a flow of flows. There …
Worldviews and Ways of Being
Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher of the 18th Century, presented the radical idea that the world is not the way it appears to be. What we see as the world is not a real …
Mead, Mind and World
George Herbert Mead is the fourth major figure in Classical American Pragmatism. Mead studied philosophy at Harvard while William James chaired the department. He taught with John Dewey at the University of Michigan before they …