Take the Cognitive Science Quiz
What do you think the answers to eight questions are about the nature of the mind and intelligence?read more
View ArticleInterdisciplinary Collaboration
There are good theoretical and practical reasons to collaborate with people from other disciplines on projects such as trying to understand how the mind works. Here is some advice about how to...
View ArticleEthics, Caring, and Reason
Being ethical requires good reasoning about rights, consequences, and principles; but it also requires caring about the people affected by actions. Ethical thought needs to be both cognitive and...
View ArticleEleven Dogmas of Analytic Philosophy
Philosophy attempts to answer fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and morals. In contrast to the dominant approach that uses the study of language and logic to analyze...
View ArticleMotivated Ignorance
People succumb to motivated ignorance when their goals lead them to avoid learning potentially valuable information. Such avoidance of knowledge naturally happens with respect to important personal...
View ArticleWhy Memes Are a Bad Idea
Memes are bad ideas because of the substantial differences between biological and cultural evolution. The lumping of all cultural entities together as memes neglects the variety and complexity of...
View ArticleWhat Is Evidence?
Medicine, psychology, and even philosophy should be based on evidence that is reliable, intersubjective, repeatable, robust, and causally correlated with the world. read more
View ArticleWhat are Values?
Values in science and technology are mind-brain processes that combine cognition and emotion, and they can be objective if they reflect human needs. read more
View ArticleIrregular Emotions
Bertrand Russell devised a word game he called “irregular verbs” with examples like: I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pigheaded fool. These constructions provide excellent illustrations of the...
View ArticleThe New Synthesis in Cognitive Science
Chris Eliasmith's amazing book, How to Build a Brain, provides a new way of thinking about how brains make minds and synthesizes the major approaches to cognitive science. read more
View ArticleKarma—What Goes Around Comes Around?
The idea of karma is used to mean that good deeds will be rewarded with good results, with the opposite for bad deeds. But like fate and destiny, the idea of karma is not based on any good evidence....
View ArticleBetter Than Resilient – Prosilient
Resilience is important in many spheres of life, from personal psychology to ecology and economics. It’s important to be resilient and bounce back from life’s difficulties, but it’s even better to...
View ArticleWhat is Time?
In response to students’ questions about whether time is real and time travel is possible, I’ve been reading what physicists and biologists have to say. My conclusions are that time (as a system of...
View ArticleEmergence in Social Groups and in Brains
A system such as the current U. S. Congress is demergent rather than emergent in that the interactions of parts prevent the whole from having valuable properties. read more
View ArticleThe Extended Breath
The extended mind hypothesis claims that it is a mistake to identify thinking with brain processes. Analogously, we argue that breathing should not be identified with lung processes. read more
View ArticleThe Origins of Morality
The origins of morality lie in a combination of brain and social processes that support caring, understanding, and social learning.read more
View ArticleHow to Write Productively
Tips for writing productively include: conform to your body rhythms, have a daily quota, produce outlines, expect multiple drafts, read just in time, know your audience, revise well, and backup your...
View ArticleWhy Good Intentions Often Fail
Why is there often a gap between the intentions of people like Rob Ford and their actions? My radical view, based on a new model of how intentions in the brain lead to action, is that there is no free...
View ArticleIs Consciousness a Property of Everything in the Universe?
Panpsychism claims that consciousness belongs to everything, not just people, but it is implausible for many reasons. Consciousness is an emergent property of brains resulting from several neural...
View ArticleCan a Thermostat Have Beliefs?
New thermostats are capable of sophisticated forms of inference, so it is worth considering whether they have beliefs. read more
View ArticleHow Accurate Are People’s Beliefs About Psychology?
Because people are largely ignorant about how their minds work, psychology and philosophy of mind need to go beyond introspection, intuitions, thought experiments, and surveys.read more
View ArticleWhat Is Free Will?
Human actions that result from complex neural processes of intention, emotion, and consciousness are at least freeish, even if they are not produced by the traditional kind of free will. read more
View ArticleThis Is Your Brain on Empathy
Empathic understanding of other people's emotions can result from an automatic mode based on mirror neurons and emotional contagion by facial and bodily mimicry, and also from a deliberate mode based...
View ArticleWhat Is the Self?
Your self is not an immortal soul or a mere fiction, but a system of social, psychological, neural, and molecular mechanisms. read more
View ArticleBelieving What Scares You
Fear-driven inference occurs when people acquire beliefs with little evidence because the beliefs scare them. David Nussbaum and I propose that the mechanism underlying fear-driven inference is gut...
View ArticleHard Decisions
Understanding decision making as a psychological process of emotional coherence provides a better explanation of why people often get so paralyzed by crucial decisions, which is mysterious on the...
View ArticleHow to Analyze Concepts: What Is Intelligence?
Complex concepts like intelligence are rarely amenable to strict definitions. But they can be informatively characterized by specifying exemplars (standard examples), typical features, and...
View ArticleIs Human Thinking Optimal?
Philosophy and psychology should abandon assumptions that human minds are at all optimal or rational, and instead concentrate on identifying the neural mechanisms that make us good at but far from...
View ArticleConsciousness Is a Brain Process
Debate continues on whether consciousness operates in brains, in non-material souls, or in anything capable of integrating information. Rapid progress is being made on the neural mechanisms responsible...
View ArticleExplaining Social Change
A new approach to explaining social change needs to combine recent theories about the brain processes responsible for cognition and emotion with understanding of social communication that is both...
View Article
