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Brain Foundational Human Mind Philosophy Pre-Human Minds

What Is It Like to Have a Mind?

Introduction If you were to ask a human being and a bat, “What is it like to have a mind?,” you would expect to get unimaginably different answers. What is less expected is that if you asked four different people the same question, you could receive four unimaginably different answers.  In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked […]

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Contemporary Issues

Fences, Neighbors, and Zoos

My friend and colleague, Dr. Paul Lehman, writes an informative and incisive blog, America’s Race Problem. In his most recent post, “Paul R. Lehman, Our history tells us why the mob stormed the Capitol,” Paul describes the attitudes of America’s earliest “white” settlers toward the indigenous people—an attitude he links to the violent assault upon the U.S. […]

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Contemporary Issues Foundational

The Content of Our Mind Does Not Determine the Level of Our Consciousness

(Understanding What Is Good, Great, Evil, and Human) Introduction Most of us believe that people possess one mind. Sometimes that mind has the wisdom and courage to declare in the face of widespread civil violence: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies”—a thought that surely comes to us from “the better angels of our nature.” Other […]