Odds & Ends
books, essays, music, culture
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Intrinsic Incompleteness: Deacon on ‘ententional’ processes
This is the first in a planned series of posts on Terrence Deacon’s book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. I’m calling it the Deactionary, since Deacon is fond of coining new terms and redefining old ones. Deacon outlines an ambitious goal: understanding the emergence of consciousness from insensate matter. Of course, not everyone…
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Neural correlates of consciousness – how exactly can we find them?
This is a slightly edited version of an answer I wrote on Quora: What is the best way to understand consciousness? This emoticon captures my attitude towards questions about consciousness: ¯\(°_o)/¯ Consciousness seems to be invisible to scientific methods. The only way to incorporate consciousness into science is to change the definition of science so…
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Are Selves Illusory? Emergent? Ubiquitous?
I was asked this question on Quora recently: Is the self an illusion or an emergent phenomenon? I’ve read people who use neuroscience to argue for one, the other, or both simultaneously. Here’s how I responded. No one knows what the self is. Least of all my fellow neuroscientists! 😉 Personally, I think the idea…