I Thinked I Telled You Before

When I tell people that I am a revisionist about English they often think I am joking (I had a very interesting discussion with a grade school teacher who came to look at my old apartment as I was moving to my new apartment). I often say that in English we form the past tense [...]

Fly Philosophers?

It looks like my wife Jennifer and I might be appearing in the new CW reality show Flygirls. I just saw the commercial on tv (available here)…it is basically as Perez Hilton points out The Hills in the sky! What part could I have in it? You will just have to wait until after the [...]

Secular Christmas!

Well, the holiday season is upon us again… As some of you may know, I am no fan of Santa Claus. It is immoral to lie to children and to abuse their credulity. Some argue that we are not lying to children but are rather pretending that Santa exists with them. I doubt that most [...]

Brain Broadcasting Corporation

I have previously argued that synchronous neural activity is a candidate for a theoretical account of  what a brain state is.  Here is an Interesting article reviewing a new paper that suggests an interesting role for neural synchrony.

A Couple More Thoughts on Shombies and Illuminati

Towards the end of the discussion we began to discuss what was involved in conceiving of the shombie world. Dave seemed to think that doing so involved conceiving of a possible world where physicalism was true. This amounts to the claim that <>[](P–>Q), i.e. that it is possible that it is necessary that the physical [...]

Shombies & Illuminati

On Tuesday I attended a discussion with Kati Balog of her paper Zombies, Illuminati, and Metaphysical Gridlock which was very interesting. She begins by thinking about zombies and the things they say. If there really is a world that is microphysically identical to ours but that lacks consciousness and one of those creatures is a [...]

The Truth About 2012

The Singularity and Simulation

(cross-posted at Brains) There is a nice video of a recent talk by David Chalmers on the singularity available here. Dave also summarizes the argument in a recent post at his blog Fragments of Consciousness (here). He also gave this talk at the Graduate Center, which is where I saw it last Wednesday. It is an [...]