The world doesn’t just exist, it shows up for us. It appears as the pure experience of the present moment. And one of the most amazing things about the world is that it changes – …
Thinking About Thinking Series: The Circumstances around us are changing faster than we can
The world and everything in it is changing all the time, and our beliefs about it all must change at least as quickly. Often they don’t. We find ourselves stuck in beliefs whose time has …
Thinking About Thinking Series: You May Not Be Who You Think You Are
We think we are a “something”—an entity that emerged in the universe on a planet called Earth. Are we really? What is a human being? What am I? Am I my body, my brain, my …
Thinking About Thinking Series: Human Life is a Risk
Every step we take, every action, every choice to do anything is ultimately an act of faith. Most of the time, thankfully, we live with an ongoing sense of certainty. We imagine that the world …
Are we just Thinking Things in a World?
What do we really know about the relationship between the world and our experience of it? That is an important question and there are at least three things that we can be sure of. We …
Cartesian Dualism and Brains In Vats
If you could put your brain in a nutrient bath so that it could keep on functioning outside of your body what would it (or would it still be you) experience? Would it still have …
The Ego Tunnel and the Nature of Reality
Thomas Metzinger’s new book The Ego Tunnel weaves research in out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, phantom limbs and other extraordinary human occurrences with leading edge neuroscience to create a convincing picture of how neural activity constantly …
Society and the True Self, Part 4: Up from Inside the Matrix
In my last post I described how many of us awaken to find ourselves in the middle of a life that is more a reflection of social mores than our own autonomous choices. We look …
Society and the True Self, Part 3: Waking Up in the Matrix
In my recent posts I have been developing the idea that individual human beings might be more accurately seen as individual expressions of social preferences, attitudes and beliefs than as separate autonomous individuals. We live …
Evolutionary Love
“The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.” Charles Sanders Peirce In 1893 a publication called The Monist printed an article by …
Eight Confusing Philosophical Terms Explained
Anyone who reads philosophy will inevitably bump into certain terms that will cause consternation and distress. Eight of these are; Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, Empiricism, Realism, Nominalism, Dualism and Monism. Just reading them induces stress. And …
Experience and Understanding
There are two kinds of knowing – experience and understanding – and the confusion between them is the cause of all sorts of trouble for any thinking person. Experience is the knowing of things. It …
Are Relationships Real Things?
Our sense of reality is dominated by things. Things feel real to us. We live in a universe that we experience as empty space filled with things. And some things have relationships between them. But …
American Common Sense – or – How to Change the Truth
The American mind has been constructed on a few obvious attitudes and assumptions about life. One is a pronounced idealistic streak. The Europeans that settled in this land believed that they were creating a new world …
Is a Dog Really a Dog?
One of the great philosophical dividing lines has always been the line that separates the particular from the universal – the unique from the general. We live in a world of both particulars and universals …
The Objective Reality of Language
We live in a universe of discourse – a flowing ever-adjusting transfer of information. If you want to see the world the way that George Herbert Mead and the other American Pragmatists saw it you …
Martin Heidegger and The Worlds of Sense and Purpose
I am still thinking about Heidegger’s three ways of being. The first two of these he called ‘presence-to-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand.’ Both of these are defined in what could be seen as human terms and I …
To be or not to be: What is Ontology?
What does it mean ‘to be’? When I say “I am…” or “It is…” what am I saying? What does it mean to exist – or to not exist, to be or not to be? …
Substance, Utility, Existence: Heidegger’s Modes of Being
Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German philosopher, believed that for thousands of years human beings had misidentified the nature of what it means ‘to be.” From the time of the great Greek thinkers the fundamental …
Why Philosophy is Still not a Luxury?
I am about to go on retreat to withdraw from the world for a time an let go of thought and sink into the experience of pure being. The experience of deep meditation is probably …