-
-
-
-
-
Gaming Newcomb’s Paradox III: What You Actually Decide
This is the third and final essay on Newcomb’s Paradox. In it I will discuss Nozick’s stipulation about the effect of how the player of the game decides. The paradox itself is described in the first essay in this series. Nozick’s condition is that “what you actually decide to do is not part of the…
-
Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity
“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.” “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the first great gauntlet thrown at the Cartesian dualism of body versus mind. In the century and a half since,…
-
-
What Happens When We Die
“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?” When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive…
-
The Man Who Thought with His Heart: George Forster and the Birth of Sensitive Science
Every mind, even the greatest, is a product of its time and place. The true visionaries are those unwilling to mistake the figments of their culture for facts; those daring enough to look at the world not through the microscope that magnifies the concerns of the present, not through the telescope that squints at the…
-
