The Splintered Mind

... in my story "Out of the Jar", originally published in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction ....

I have bad news: You're Swampman . Remember that hike you took last week by the swamp during the electrical storm? Well, one biologic...

Intuitive physics works great for picking berries, throwing stones, and walking through light underbrush. It's a complete disaster when...

[Note: This is a 2015 list. For the most recent list, see here .] Last year, as a beginning writer of science fiction or speculative fict...

Sometimes what we sincerely say -- aloud or even just silently to ourselves -- doesn't fit with the rest of our cognition, reactions, ...

... other topics included rationalization and confronting one's moral imperfection, at Rationally Speaking . Thanks, Julia, for your...

A couple of years ago, I saw the ASIMO show at Disneyland. ASIMO is a robot designed by Honda to walk bipedally with something like the h...

An adapation of my June blog post What Philosophical Work Could Be , in today's LA Times . -------------------------------------- Ac...

[published today in Aeon Magazine ] None of the classic questions of philosophy are beyond a seven-year-old's understanding. If God ex...

here . Thanks, Helen!

As a fan of profane language judiciously employed, I fear that the best profanities of English are cheapening from overuse -- or worse, that...

For twenty years , I've been advocating a dispositional account of belief , according to which to believe that P is to match, to an ap...

here . Thanks to Daniel Bensen for the fun interview! We discuss the rights of artificial intelligences, whether our moral intuitions bre...

Here's my definition of a nerd: A nerd is someone who loves an intellectual topic, for its own sake, to an unreasonable degree. The n...

It would be exciting to discover life on another planet -- no doubt about that! But why would it be exciting? Let's start with a con...

Academic philosophers in Anglophone Ph.D.-granting departments tend to have a narrow conception of what counts as valuable philosophical wor...

NASA and other leading space agencies do not appear to have formal policies about how to treat microbial life if it's found elsewhere in...

Most of the philosophical literature on immortality and death -- at least that I've read -- doesn't very thoroughly explore the cons...

Among the most culturally influential English-language fiction writers of the 20th century, a substantial portion wrote science fiction or f...