A running theme throughout Psybertron is the reality of conscious mind and its consequences in the real world. That’s partly because explantory understanding of our understanding and of our decision-making is my main research focus and partly because – probably not coincidentally – it’s also a prime (but not the only) example where politicised scientific dogma […]

Listening to Simon Blackburn last night at Conway Hall, indeed mulling over the title of his talk before listening to him, it is transparently obvious that he has an important agenda when it comes to his close association with humanism and the BHA. Now Blackburn is probably “the” greatest living British philosopher active and teaching […]

An atheist and a practitioner of positive psychology, Jonathan Haidt’s “The Happiness Hypothesis” reads at times like a spiritual self-help book, and in a sense it is, but it is supported by a mass of academic and scientific references. The Psybertron agenda has been on evolutionary psychology as a description of both epistemology (what is […]

I’ve been thinking of something positive to say about Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Theory since finishing “Descartes’ Error”. For anyone who believes … the common-sense view of decison-making is a logical sequence of weighing up all available options objectively. the common-sense view of mind and body involves understanding the “brain” distinct from the “body proper”. […]