In a faraway region of spacetime, I asked the question: Is this evidence against free-will?, where I start by noting: Over the past decade or more, neuroscientists have found strong evidence that we start to act before we’re consciously aware of our own actions. This is a problem to those who believe in free-will in … [Read more…]
Mind and body are not separate nor is body for real and mind a mere epiphenomenon. The body is concrete, objective stuff but mind is a set of relationships with both concrete and abstract being. During recent weeks, I picked up links to various articles which reaffirm our embodied natures. From our bodies of physical … [Read more…]
Preface This entry is the core of a larger work. It’s sketchy and incomplete but possibly worth the read. Introduction In the Gospel of St. John, we read: As [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he … [Read more…]
I’ve started reading some of the works of John Dahlberg, Lord Acton, sometimes given honorary titles such as “the historian of liberty.” Being largely cash-free, I downloaded pdf files of some of his works from Liberty Fund which has made available for free a good number of classic books on history, political theory, philosophy, science, … [Read more…]
There is an important point raised by the research discussed in this article, We Are What We Experience. I’ll quote a good part of this short article because of its importance, regardless of how well or poorly this particular study stands up to efforts to verify or explicate its results: Our life experiences — the … [Read more…]
In an earlier posting, The Liberal Mind: What is politics?, I addressed the obvious question, “What is Politics?”. I covered a lot of ground to start off a line of reasoning tightly tied to my current goal of enriching our store of words and concepts for discussing our moral and social lives. While it’s true … [Read more…]
We shape our minds by active responses to our immediate environments and maybe to greater realms of Creation. Even without active responses, something like a flabby mind takes shape. The flabby mind of a modern man is invincibly ignorant in the sense that it’s shaped to what’s pushed into it by the public school system … [Read more…]
Not long ago, I posted an essay, Is Power for the Sake of Power the Same as Power Earned by Productive Achievements? where I responded to a study which found: [T]hat individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, “The … [Read more…]
The main point of this article, Put Down That Game Controller: Researcher Suggests Video Games May Not Boost Cognition, is that we should pay attention to the ways in which social scientists recruit participants in their study. The argument is that earlier researchers claiming to find improvements in such attributes as hand-eye coordination from frequent … [Read more…]
This article, Power Corrupts, Especially When It Lacks Status, explores a very important subject and extends a line of research which is decades old or centuries old if you wish to consider the work of Jeremiah and Plato, Tacitus and Augustine, Dante and Goethe, and so on. That older understanding is substantial but poorly focused … [Read more…]