The Splintered Mind

Okay, I'm now officially a John Ioannidis fanboy. You might have heard of Ioannidis. In 2005 he published the notorious and elegant ...

As you can infer from the picture below, the groundkeepers at UC Riverside don't like it when we walk on the grass: But I want to walk...

Today I was reading that grand old Stoic, Epictetus (what else is summer for?), and I was struck by this passage: Observe yourselves thus in...

Very interesting critique by at the Brains blog of the original Buckwalter and Stich study on this question.

Bernard Williams begins his classic Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy with a quote from Plato: It is not a trivial question, Socrates sa...

... here . Open access, triple-blind review, good list of editors. Sounds good to me! Consider submitting. If the journal gets a good t...

I'm an introspective pessimist: I think people's introspective judgments about their stream of conscious experience are often radic...

Still in China, so just a brief recollection. When my son Davy was about six or seven, I asked him what the point is in thinking about rig...

... and Blogger is hard to access. Trying to work around, but posting and checking comments will be spotty for a couple weeks.

... It was only a matter of time . The next step, of course, is aerial transmitters atop our heads which allow direct human brain-to-brai...

From the 1930s-1950s, people in the U.S. thought they dreamed mostly in black and white. Nowadays, people think they dream mostly in color....

Lightning strikes me and I die. Fortunately (let's suppose), the universe is infinite and consciousness supervenes on the arrangement ...

Imagine an essay manuscript: Version A. Monday morning, I read through Version A. I'm not satisfied. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I re...

I find myself, right now, 99% confident that I am who I think I am, living in a broad world of the kind I think I live in. The remaining 1%...

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S. I have written a story about war, two pages from the perspective of Joshua from the Old Testament -- a ce...

Readers of the Splintered Mind might be interested in this news about developments at the Brains blog, including regular symposia on articl...

"Crazyism" about the metaphysics of mind, as I define it, is the view that something bizarre and undeserving of credence must be a...

Driving her son to school, she saw the perfect tree. The perfect tree stood small and twisted upon the center divider. It commanded its co...

Maja Spener has written an interesting critique of my 2011 book, Perplexities of Consciousness , for a forthcoming book symposium at Phil...

Through a harmony of dendrites, Sarah came to feel touch upon Abraham’s skin. They were waltzing upon the beach, Ishbak on the immutable pi...

Oliver Sacks is one of the great essayists of our time. I have just finished his book Hallucinations . Sacks does not, I think, adequate...

When the doctors couldn’t cure the Tyrant’s headache, he called upon the philosophers. “Show me some necessary condition for having a heada...

Yesterday morning around dawn I sat hypnotized by “Paradise Falls”. I had hiked there from my parents’ house while my family slept, as I of...

Details here . The truth is, there are actually two homunculi in there, they've been squabbling, and this is part of a divorce settle...

... and arguably evil, too, though let's set that aside. My plan requires the truth of a psychological theory of personal identity, a ...

[This is a draft of a short story. See here for explicit discussion of the philosophical idea behind the story.] [Revised April 23] Wh...

Intriguing evidence here . Also my vote for best use of a David Lynch video so far this year. I'm dubious about the model and mechan...

A central question of moral epistemology is, or should be: Am I a jerk? Until you figure that one out, you probably ought to be cautious in...

I'm working on theory of jerks and I need data. In the comments section, I'm hoping some of you (ideally, lots of you) will describ...

The Institute for Evil Neuroscience has finally done it: human consciousness -- or quasi-human -- on a computer. By special courier, I rec...

Sesquicentmensial? Okay, I admit, I made the word up. I was going to say "sesquicentennial", but it's been 150 months, not ...