What, Why & How do we Know ?
There are lots of unnecessary (*) myths about free-will, and I tend to espouse free-won’t variants in response to misleading interpretations of Libet. Some people use the repeatability of a golfer’s putt, I regularly use the thought experiment of imagining being able to return the serve from a high-class tennis player (after Daniel Wegner, just … Continue reading “Free-Will – Returning a High-Class Tennis Serve”
Heard Graham Bell talk again last week, this time a LAAG event entitled: “Making moral decisions: Are ‘you’ really in charge?” (With scare quotes around the ‘you’ in the original.) Obviously with that title presented that way, I was prejudiced to expect the usual “You and your free-will are illusions” line of denial. In fact, … Continue reading ““Making moral decisions: Are ‘you’ really in charge?””
An excellent RSA (Royal Society of Arts) animation of a lecture by Iain McGilchrist. (Hat tip to David Morey on Facebook for the link.) Blogged several references to reading McGilchrist’s “The Master and his Emissary” but never wrote a complete review in one post – It so knocked me out, it led me into other … Continue reading “McGilchrist’s Divided Brain”
As a practitioner of positive psychology (and an atheist) 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 … Continue reading “Haidt’s Happiness”
And of conscious perception generally. [via Sam]. Including reference to Daniel Wegner – I blogged about reading earlier.
Interesting piece from back in January in Time magazine by Stephen Pinker entitled The Mystery of Consciousness. Thanks to David Chalmers for the link; he’s referred to in the article in connection with the easy / hard problem distinction. Lots of other good articles linked in and alongside the article. Daniel Wegner’s psychology-based work gets … Continue reading “Pinker’s Mystery of Consciousness”
I’ve barely blogged or posted anywhere in the last few months, almost none in the last month. Just too busy with the day job, and in a temporary state domestically. We move into a longer term place next weekend. I have however found some disjointed time to do some reading. I think the last things … Continue reading “Enlightened Reading ?”
I’ve made it pretty clear that I see any model of the world in terms of evolutionary psychology almost irrespective of the metaphysical foundations of and explanatory science used to relate its component parts. I’ve just finished reading Daniel Wegner’s – Illusion of Conscious Will . “A remarkable demonstration of how psychology can transform philosophy” … Continue reading “Psychology as Philosophy ?”