The Splintered Mind

The past few days, I've been appreciating the Grinch 's perspective on Christmas -- particularly his desire to drop all the presents...

I don't often attempt to fly when walking across campus, but yesterday I gave it a try. I was going to the science library to retrieve ...

You know the trolley problems . A runaway train trolley will kill five people ahead on the tracks if nothing is done. But -- yay! -- you c...

Ernest Sosa has argued that we do not form beliefs when we dream. If I dream that a tiger is chasing me, I do not really believe that a t...

If someday we can create consciousness inside computers, what moral obligations will we have to the conscious beings we create? R. Scott B...

In "The Unreliability of Naive Introspection" ( here and here ), I argue, contra a philosophical tradition going back at least to...

Nick Bostrom has argued that we might be sims . A technologically advanced society might use hugely powerful computers, he says, to run ...

Probably you have some opinions about the relative merit of different metaphysical positions about the mind, such as materialism vs. dualism...

In 2010, I worked up a post on what I dubbed The Spelunker Illusion (see also the last endnote of my 2011 book ). Now, hot off the press a...

In the world of Linda Nagata 's Nanotech Succession, you can be two people at once. And whether you are in fact two people at once, I...

Here's a hypothetical, not too far removed from reality: What if I discovered, to my satisfaction, that moral reflection -- the kind of ...

As you might know, I'm working on a theory of jerks . Here's the central idea a nutshell: The jerk is someone who culpably fails to...

What is it to desire something? I suggest: to desire (or want) some item or some state of affairs is just to be disposed to make certain ch...

You know the trolley problems , of course. An out-of-control trolley is headed toward five people it will kill if nothing is done. You can...

I'm a fan of the Philosophy Bites podcasts , put together by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton. In their 15-minute podcasts, Nigel and ...

That no new form-filling be added to our lives without retiring an existing form that takes equal time to complete. I will consider any ar...

Regular Splintered Mind readers will notice that I've started posting short speculative fiction about once a month (labeled science fict...

MIT Press is listing it at $16.95 , and Amazon has it at $13.05 , last I checked. MIT Press has been terrific about keeping the book afford...

An infinite and infinitely powerful God set the world in motion. Nothing remained to be created, so He became finite. He dwelled magnifice...

Every night I dream. And often when I dream I seem to think that I am awake. Is it possible, then, that I'm dreaming now, as I sit her...

I'm traveling around Britain. (Oxford, Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and St Andrews so far, Sheffield and Bristol again tomorrow and ...

Philosophers rarely seem surprised or unsettled when I present my work on the morality of ethicists -- work suggesting that ethics professor...