January 2012
27 posts
Bertrand Russell, as he entered old age, wrote: “The best way to overcome [the...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
The evidence is all around that people will attempt to pack in as much...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
I will review—or at any rate visit—three strategies of restoring meaning to life...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
(…) living and dying have different tenses: the first requires continuing...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
(…) your fear of losing the core self will in some circumstances motivate you to...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
The acquisition by a child of what scientists call a theory of mind, which can...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
In which case the question becomes: what brings about the unification that will,...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
If fearing death is, indeed, a uniquely human trait, if fearing death is one of...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Inevitably, you see that it is coming your way too. Yet, being no less in love...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
It could work like this. If natural selection can arrange that you enjoy the...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
So here is the question. Why should feeling that you exist—and valuing the...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Conscious creatures enjoy being phenomenally conscious. They enjoy the world in...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
In short, I want to suggest that what having phenomenal experiences does is...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Imagine yourself looking at a cascading waterfall or listening to the song of a...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
What is sensation? In modern human beings, sensation—for all its special...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
(…) humans may be more capable of expressing publicly what it is like to be...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
The hard problem is to explain how an entity made entirely of physical...
– Humphrey, Nicholas. Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Life is grand. Writing a biography is divine. It allows the biographer to...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
Life is cruel. Writing a biography feels cruel. The writer knows when the...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
Possibly as a result of his own neurological dramas, int he mid- to late 1970s...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
New sorts of ideas obsessed Marshall after 1970. One of them was a biblical...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
[Understanding Media] is in two parts. In Part One, Marshall states, “The...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
Structurally, The Gutenberg Galaxy used four stages to outline the social...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
The biggest intellectual leap during this era was Marshall’s ever more precise...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
There are, perhaps, no practical political, religious, or financial applications...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
Andy Warhol (also a devout Catholic) once discussed driving across the United...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
As with F.R. Leavis giving him permission to study popular culture, [Siegfried]...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
December 2011
31 posts
Marshall was also deeply engrossed in researching his dissertation on the...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
In a way, McLuhan’s ideas become like a song we all know the tune of but not...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
The medium is the message” means that the ostensible content of all electronic...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
So here is Bill Gates and all those people going off to sweat lodge retreats and...
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
Geography has become irrelevant. Our online phantom world has become the new us....
– Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern...
– Marshall McLuhan qtd. in Coupland, Douglas. Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! New York: Atlas & Co., 2011.
Let us assume that the naturalistic turn in the image of Homo sapiens is...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Yes, the self-model made us intelligent, but it certainly is not an example of...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
The emerging image of Homo sapiens is of a species whose members once longed to...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Strictly speaking, there is no essence within us that stays the same across...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
The self is not a thing but a process.
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
But the decisive step to an Ego Machine is the next one. If a system can...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
(…) consciousness is the presence of a world. In order for a world to appear to...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Being conscious means that a particular set of facts is available to you: that...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
We may soon have a functionalist theory of consciousness, but this doesn’t mean...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
In thinking about artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness, many...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
(…) let us call any system capable of generating a conscious self an Ego...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
[Vittorio] Gallese: Scientists who believe that their discipline will...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
[Vittorio] Gallese: For most of history, the culture of our species has been an...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
[Vittorio] Gallese: The notion of simulation is employed in many different...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
From a philosophical perspective, the discovery of mirror neurons is exciting...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Converging empirical data show that when we observe other human beings...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Our brain does not simply register a chair, a teacup, an apple; it immediately...
– Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009.