We modern human beings have separated our minds and hearts from reality, our hands not nearly so much. We’re strange creatures who believe the Christian Creeds long enough to recite them at a Catholic or Orthodox Mass or to keep some of the creedal teachings in mind at other sorts of Christian worship services and … [Read more…]
I repeat myself to a lesser or greater extent in many of my essays. I don’t do so to annoy or bore readers but rather in an effort to gain a new perspective which might bring new insights, if only a whisper, and might reach new ears and maybe inspire new thinkers. After all, I … [Read more…]
Years ago, I proposed that the immaterial feel of our minds might be the result of fields playing a major role in our thinking. An article, Neurons Talk Without Synapses, discusses recent work that shows neurons `talk’ to each other by way of changes in electromagnetic fields and not just by direct electrochemical contact. I … [Read more…]
I’ve nearly finished reading The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel J. Boorstin. I didn’t have any particular plans to comment on the insights and delicately ironic prose of Professor Boorstin until I read these words: For while Eliot, reformer though he was, still thought and talked about “subjects” of study, Hall, Dewey, and their … [Read more…]
[This is an essay which I though had been posted on 2012/06/02, but I left it in draft status. I don’t think this glitch in publishing date matters much.] In an essay I published in April of 2012, Intelligence vs. Intellect, I quoted Jacques Barzun from The House of Intellect: We [in the United States] … [Read more…]
I have uploaded another small sampler of essays from my weblog writings. This small collection deals with the subject of the human mind. The new sampler can be downloaded at The Human Mind. I have also made some minor changes to the first sampler: Making Peace With Empirical Reality and consequently uploaded a new file.
One of the problems with a good understanding of some domain is that we adopt such understandings as rigid habits of thought even when they deal with empirical matters and should be rethought as we learn more or as new possibilities emerge as a result of human activities. We forget we’re mortal creatures in a … [Read more…]
What do you do with a frozen soul? You could lick it because, speaking in general terms, a Popsicle is as much a piece of frozen soul as a human being is. And so are rattlesnakes and monkeys and rocks hurtling through space. You can also saw frozen soul, beginning the process of making a … [Read more…]
I’m finishing up with that profound and profoundly frustrating work by William James, The Meaning of Truth. He claims: It is between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms. [page 165] No, but, once again, his error carries more insight than the truest thoughts of … [Read more…]
I’ve written several times about my opinion that William James held back from the full implications of his teachings or, at least, held back from a viewpoint that would have led him to a plausible conjecture of some sort of fullness of knowledge, however impossible the complete realization of that full knowledge. James saw how … [Read more…]