It’s time, I think, for us to revisit the idea of The Ghost in the Machine. To get a firsthand sense of what this widespread dogma that colors so many of our assumptions about ourselves, our perceptions and our decision-making is about, you and I must visit the Great Swami, renowned reader of minds. First [...]

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WHY EMPHASIZE THE LEAP!?
A GREAT PHILOSOPHER’S PERSPECTIVE
If this isn’t one of Mr. Berra’s yogi-isms, it should be: The whole idea of evolving is to get somewhere. And that, in fact, is the best justification I can think of for making the LEAP! Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett seemed to embrace the idea in the closing sentences [...]

Listening to myself—talking with my children about (grand)children or the neighbors about the (neighbor)hood or my friends about (geo)politics or my colleagues about where “descent with modification” (Darwin’s definition of evolution) has brought us—I hear myself opining more and more these days:
We need to break the cycle. Or,
We need to break the spell.
I usually use [...]

For me, one of the things that makes the estimable “times in which we live” so doggone mesmerizing is the shear scope of the questions being asked. Add to that new technologies for pursuing answers. This equates to some remarkable successes, coming one after the other, in understanding ourselves and the world around us.
Such a [...]

I’m prepared to argue that ethics evolve—and are evolving. The reason, of course, is that how we think about human nature and about ethics is evolving.
I’ll admit that this notion is off-putting to more than a few philosophers, most notably those who seem to think, or so it appears to me, that philosophical and ethical [...]