philosophy
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Are mental disorders the same as brain disorders? Maybe not!
I am currently reading an excellent paper that will be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences soon. It raises some very important issues with popular conceptions of mental illness. Brain disorders? Not really… Why network structures block reductionism in psychopathology research These two figures capture some of the key points: Here is the abstract: “In…
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Why can’t we perceive cells? Or atoms?
I was asked the following question on Quora: Why can’t we see, touch, hear and smell on a cellular level? And what happens if we can? Here’s what I wrote: Essentially, we perceive the visible world in the way that we do because of our overall size, the shape of our eyes, and the sizes…
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The Tao that can be expressed
[This is an essay I wrote in 2008, on an old blog.] The following is the first part of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching — it’s my favourite piece of eastern philosophy. I’ve quoted it many times, ever since I started blogging, but I’ve never really written about my take on it. “The Tao that…
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“Conscious realism”: a new way to think about reality (or the lack thereof?)
Interesting interview in the Atlantic with cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman: The Case Against Reality “I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious…