Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. —Anonymous
We have all heard the forlorn refrain Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time! This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appr...
Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
Our manifest image, unlike the daisy’s ontology or Umwelt, really is manifest, really is subjective in a strong sense. It’s the world we live in, the world according to us.
It’s just that it would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Ignorance is a necessary condition for many excellent things.
Atheists and agnostics can have sacred values, values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. I have sacred
Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having m...
There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict: consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God that was p...
The amount of information obtainable in short order by an inquisitive human being is staggeringly large.
Science properly done is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once said. The point of science is to help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the great stori...
People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, an...
But unless dualism or vitalism is true (in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you), you are made of robots—or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecula...
You can’t change your beliefs as an act of will, in the way you can decide to improve your skills with chainsaw or keyboard.
Words, I will argue, are the best example of memes, culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication—that is, by natural selection.
Some philosophical research projects — or problematics, to speak with the more literary types — are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed-upon rules are presupposed — a...
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.
Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.
Any theory that makes progress is bound to be initially counterintuitive.
Human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees...