People of a certain age will remember the astonishment and wonder of their first Polaroid… Click, whirr and wait as a square of plastified paper renders, first, a ghostly outline and then a smiling 1970s face – complete with bad sweaters and basin cut hair. In truth the quality wasn’t that great. Plus there was … Continue reading Polaroids
Search Results for: Consciousness
The great Dutch philosopher Spinoza has always appealed to me; but all the more so now I’ve studied more psychology. Spinoza’s ethics are ‘naturalistic’ and spring from simple real-world causes. There is no divine origin or human uniqueness. Everything stems from the simple proposition (as Michael LeBuffe explains in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) that: … Continue reading Aversion Therapy
Which comes first the thought or the emotion? Listening to more of ‘Why Buddhism is true’ by Robert Wright – it seems emotions shape more of context than the average rational actor might like to admit. In essence the argument from ‘evolutionary psychology’ is that we have a number of ‘mental modules’ which operate just … Continue reading Spitting distance
From multiple sources and stimuli this week, a penny has dropped… as Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said one of the biggest things we fear is fear itself; There’s a name and a proper medical definition for it: phobophobia. But there’s also a bit of chicken and egg about all this: which comes first – the … Continue reading The fear of fear itself
Out walking the dog, what should pop up on my podcast playlist than Keith Frankish on Philosophy Bites explaining why I was lost in thought, while the dog was 100% focused on the walk… The difference between us is he lives in the immediate, whereas we spend a lot of our time elsewhere. Why? Frankish … Continue reading Frankish
Achilles & Aristotle 