In Do We Survive the Major Transformations of Our Lives?, I wrote: In Rewriting the Soul, the philosopher Ian Hacking had speculated that the multiple personality phenomenon is a largely learned strategy of segregating painful memories. Is our sense of a particular individuality tied that strictly to specific memories? But our memories would not seem … [Read more…]
Some readers might access this blog in ways that don’t display the main page and might not be aware that I have a variety of books, nonfiction and fiction, available for free download. Nonfiction Books and Articles See Unpublished Nonfiction Works or go directly to Unpublished Nonfiction Books for Download or Unpublished Short Nonfiction Works … [Read more…]
God, the Creator of this universe and far more, isn’t a lunatic speaking mere syllables strung together. God is rational and all-knowing. When He speaks, He knows. When He speaks, what He says is true, already or in some state of development. When He chooses to know something about contingent being in an active way, … [Read more…]
I don’t mean by ‘adult’ the sorts of stuff once restricted to the combat zones of major cities, the sorts of stuff which wasn’t to be found in most small towns but for back closets of certain stores also dealing in numbers and sports bets, the sorts of stuff once hidden in boxes under the … [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…]
I stretch the truth when I sometimes talk as if I were the only one who sees being as a spectrum from the abstract to the concrete. Clearly, there is a sense in which Platonic and Neoplatonic Realists see being in two forms, abstract being (what they call the Real) and concrete being (the real … [Read more…]
We need some creative solutions to our problems, so long as those solutions are the right kind of creative solutions. You know which solutions I mean, the ones we already know about but we just need to try again and do it better this time. Yeah, we need creative solutions, like the ones we already … [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…]
The so-called World War I, was actually the beginning of a war not yet over in this year of 2011, though now consisting of the hugely expensive American military bumbling about in a number of countries as our political leaders dance and speak their chosen roles of blood-soaked buffoons. That first phase of the ongoing … [Read more…]
I’ve spoken of this issue before but we see a fresh study, Children’s Personalities Linked to Their Chemical Response to Stress, that indicates: Is your kid a “dove” — cautious and submissive when confronting new environments, or perhaps you have a “hawk” — bold and assertive in unfamiliar settings? These basic temperamental patterns are linked … [Read more…]