The Human Question

To call the problem of the unity of consciousness the “bundling problem” is misleading: it gives the impression that that what we sometimes call "consciousness" is a cluster of ideas or thoughts that have mysteriously been yoked together.  A better metaphor would be the “electromagnetic problem”: that is, the problem of how what from the outside appears to be two very different things is really both at once, always inseparable yet always distinct from each other? What is true of electricity and magnetism is true in many ways of consciousness, e.g., of desire and cognition.

One who measures with instruments and explains with metaphors.

The laws of nature are just teleology's way of acting anonymously.

Before one can talk clearly about moral relativism, one must first address relativism at a more general level, a level that includes statements that have nothing to do with practical or moral matters.  Suppose you are talking to a man about whether the sun is a gaseous star possessing a gravitational pull on the earth that keeps our planet in orbit around it.  He denies that this is true.  You cannot tell whether he is sincere or just being silly, and you don't know how to argue scientifically about matters that we tend take for granted as true.  You simply object, therefore, that science seems to show that he is wrong in his denial.  He replies, "That is true for you, but not for me." You may not at this moment have the resources to be able to present a cogent (convincing) argument about the sun and gravity, but you can point out that his last comment is incoherent.  By "incoherent" I mean that, regardless of what one thinks of astronomy, that last sentence s

Aristotle says that friendship involves a kind of equality between the friends.  I propose that our talk of equality in other contexts, such as ethics or politics, must, in order not to be vacuous, have its roots in the experience of friendship.

A humorist is one who enables us to take delight in our limitations, and to share that delight with others through laughter.

The Fifth Way of arguing for the existence of God, according to Thomas Aquinas, is taken from the fact that non-cognizant things act for a purpose.  He believes that this shows that an intelligent being is directing things now to a goal.  This argument is not an intelligent design argument inasmuch as it does not argue from the present existence of purposive activity in a thing to a previous event in which the thing so acting was engineered to act in that manner.  Rather, Aquinas argues that the fact that a thing acts now to attain a goal implies that it is now being directed by an intelligent being toward that goal. To a contemporary reductionist, this argument must seem quaintly mistaken, for what passes as purposive activity is really a mechanical process.  The sunflower's turning toward the sun is the result of the flower's components acting essentially like levers in a machine.  The same is true for all other things, both living and non-living. One procedure thought to