Brains are not magical; they are causal machines..

Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whet….

Being engaged in some way for the good of the community, whatever that community, is a factor in a meaningful life. We long to belong, and belonging ….

I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, co….

Many mammals and birds have systems for strong self-control, and it is not difficult to see why such systems were advantageous and were selected for.….

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant..

Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was the software, not the hardware, increasing….

Knowing about the neurobiological and evolutionary basis for social behavior can soften the arrogance and self-righteousness that often attends discu….

Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the ….

If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out..

It seems that the brain has a "small world" architecture - or at least the cortex does. Everything can connect to everything else in a few synaptic s….

Suppression of impulses that would put you in danger is obviously an important neurobiological function..

Studies of decision-making in the monkey, where activity of single neurons in parietal cortex is recorded, you can see a lot about the time-accuracy ….

Even philosophers who did not mind psychology, claimed the brain was irrelevant because it was the hardware, and we only need to know about the softw….

If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come fr….

When that theory is isolated from known facts, it is likely not to be productive..

In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remai….

It is surely important that the differences between coma, deep sleep, being under anesthesia, on the one hand, and being alert on the other, all invo….

I used to suspect that in the brain, time is its own representation. I now think the problem is so much more complicated. Initially I was rather impr….

If you want to understand the nature of something, to find out the truth, that is one thing. If you want to play semantics, make up wild thought 'exp….

Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead t….