One wonders if high-profile neuroscientist David Eagleman is aware that he’s expressing such a historically Protestant understanding of the brain. At this point, someone has to have mentioned The Bondage of the Will to him, right?! He’s essentially providing the biological evidence to support Martin Luther’s inspired polemic, extending the notion of the “inheritance of […]
That’s Bound To Help: The Strange World of Precommitment Devices
Over at Slate, there is a fascinating look into the lengths people will go to protect themselves against, well, themselves. In an article entitled, “The Odyesseus Option: How “precommitment devices” will force you to lose weight, stop drinking, and not sleep with that jerk on the first date,” Daniel Akst introduces us to a future […]
Somerset Maugham on Love, Duty and Free Will
Two inspired passages from W. Somerset Maugham. The first comes from chapter 68 of his 1925 novel The Painted Veil. The words are spoken by the Mother Superior of the French convent in the Chinese village where a young married woman begins to come to herself after being caught by her husband in an adulterous […]
Casuistry
Strictly speaking, casuistry is a case-based system of flexible moral reasoning which relies upon abstract methods in order to achieve an ‘optimal solution’ to a dilemma. The video speaks to the very problem with this sort of arbitrary, human reasoning (as opposed to definite laws which are given by God) because no such human-derived solution […]
The Illusion of Conscious Will (Quotes from Ch. 1)
One thing that fascinates me is the contrast between implicit (or un/sub/pre-conscious cognition of which we are unaware) and explicit cognition (the thoughts that we are actually aware of having), and the relationship between these two types of cognition to our behaviour and how we actually live our lives. I’ve been reading a really fascinating […]
