philosophy
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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…
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Science does not disprove free will
Someone contacted me through Quora recently because they were having an existential crisis — it was stimulated by the ostensibly scientific notion that humans do not have free well. Any theory that insists that we do not actually make choices is going to causes distress among many people who valorize academic thinking. Many hard-nosed metaphysicians…
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An emergence reading list
I initially wanted to devote individual blog posts to the best of these readings from our emergence journal club, but the previous post is getting an unexpected amount of attention, and there were some requests for reading material. So here is what we have discussed so far: