Philosophy, et cetera

Wired has an article exploring the seemingly ill-formed question whether Body Integrity Identity Disorder is psychological or neurological...

Robin Hanson recently wrote what strikes me as a rather misleading post , claiming that according to this paper , "the more people cons...

Ed Morrisey writes : One of the stranger aspects of Jeremiah Wright’s speech came in the supposed neurological explanation of the difference...

I take ' Scientism ' to be the view that empirical inquiry is the only form of rational inquiry , perhaps coupled with the even stro...

[My promised concluding thoughts...] Clearly our disagreements run too deep to do full justice to them in a mere blog post. But I at leas...

I had the pleasure yesterday of meeting Carl Shulman and Eliezer Yudkowsky (of Overcoming Bias fame) while they were in town, and hashing o...

The latest addition to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be of general interest: "There is a broad consensus among philosoph...

This year's question from Edge to various scientists is: ' What have you changed your mind about? Why? ' I haven't read al...

"The experience of being dead should never be expected to any degree at all, because there is no such experience." So writes David...

Is time immanent in the world - reducible, perhaps, to the ticking of an atomic clock - or transcendent , somehow beyond the physical unive...

Wow. I highly recommend Roy Baumeister's fascinating article, Is There Anything Good About Men? (Thanks, Luke, for the NYT link .) It h...

Many otherwise-intelligent people have an unfortunate tendency to dismiss entire realms of inquiry out of hand. Perhaps the most common exam...

Benoit Hardy-Vallée notes that adding the sentence “ Note that your opponent relies on you ” increases altruistic behaviour in the Dictator...

Oh dear. Via Robin Hanson , a " moral puzzle ": Consider two men, A and B. Man A steals food because he’s starving to death, while...

This is funny. Three year old children assume that their knowledge is shared by everyone else (including God). Apparently, this has "l...

In response to Edelman's claim that embryonic brain development "involves a dimension of randomness," Mark Vernon writes : It...

Peter writes : Chalmers posits that the non-physical mental properties parallel the information processing properties of the system. But if ...

I reckon not. (Well, perhaps in practice, e.g. as an imaginative aid, but not in principle.) Whenever you're tempted to appeal to empiri...

Dom Eggert writes : [T]he likelihood that life will arise in this universe does not change even if there are millions of non-life-supporting...

It's often claimed that theism is untestable, but that seems to me mistaken. Surely we should expect significant differences between an ...