Occupation: Philosopher Birth: July 16, 1943
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….
Brains are not magical; they are causal machines..
Given how long philosophers have been at conceptual analysis (I mean the 20th century stuff), and how many have been doing it, what can we say are th….
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….
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 ….
Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very pr….
Early studies of sleep and dreaming were crucially dependent on waking subjects up during sleep to find out whether they are dreaming or not. Using t….
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….
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….
If you give up because you announce the phenomenon cannot be explained, you are missing out..
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.….
I am less attracted to guesses about what cannot be done, than about making progress on a problem..
Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was the software, not the hardware, increasing….
There are many levels of organization in nervous systems. Hence we aim to explain mechanisms at one level in terms of properties and dynamics at a lo….
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 ….
Remember, in the heyday of vitalism, people said that when all the data are in about cells and how they work, we will still know nothing about the li….
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….
Knowing about the neurobiological and evolutionary basis for social behavior can soften the arrogance and self-righteousness that often attends discu….
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 ….
Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant..
In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remai….