The Splintered Mind

A guest post by Regina Rini If you are on a college campus or read anxious thinkpieces , you’ve probably heard about ‘microaggression’. A...

... on topics related to consciousness and belief, about ten minutes each, here . This interview is a decent intro to my main ideas abo...

Hypocrisy , let's say, is when someone conspicuously advocates some particular moral rule while also secretly, or at least much less c...

a guest post by Regina Rini You’re at a cocktail reception and find yourself talking to a stranger. She mentions a story she heard today o...

Two separate announcements, not one. Though now that I think about it, joining the topics might make for an interesting future post.... L...

a guest post by Regina Rini Moral attitudes change over generations. A century ago in America, temperance was a moral crusade, but you’d...

Maybe you've heard about huge psychological replication study that was released on August 28th. The headline finding is this: 270 psyc...

is cooking along. You might want to check out this week's lineup , on Perception and Consciousness: Nico Orlandi (UC Santa Cruz): ...

... a new essay in draft, which I've done collaboratively with a student named Mara (whose last name is currently in flux and not final...

... 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...