Antonio Damasio | The Short Version

Review of Antonio Damasio’s, The Feeling Of What Happens

May 14, 2017 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

In his introduction Damasio states: “The . . . fact is that consciousness is not a monolith, at least not in humans: it can be separated into simple and complex kinds, and the neurological evidence makes the separation … [Read more...]

What Knows? The Brain and the Self

March 4, 2008 by Norm Bearrentine Leave a Comment

Originally posted on 05-13-07 In the post on 05/11, I talked about the brain being a decision-making mechanism. An interesting thing about that is that the brain doesn't know how it makes decisions, any more than it knows … [Read more...]

When I realized that the idea of god was a joke, I thought that was the end of the story. Later I found that Christianity had shaped my values, and while some were worth keeping, many had lost their foundation—the meaning of life, for example. Something similar happened when I realized that the idea of free will was a joke, and I’ve spent the decades since both those realizations discovering and editing what Julia Galef calls the “orphan beliefs” they left behind. It’s a tricky business, and this blog has been a chronicle of my efforts to puzzle it all out, including reviews of related books. I hope you find it helpful.