Contiguity: From Perception to Idea (and to Life Itself)
The way our consciousness works is to hold some object in its spotlight but with tendrils that extend to make the next conscious thought come more readily to mind. This…
Everything Is Emotion: Questioning the Rational by Feeling
Emotion is the bane of conscious, deliberate actions. Right? Is it not when we are in our fury or lust when we make our most rash decisions—those decisions we quickly…
Natural Representations: The Meeting of Instinct and Symbols
When we talk about instincts, we refer to innate reactions to innately recognizable stimuli. What is implied here is that there are images and perceptions programmed into our biology. There…
What Is a Thing? Or the Not-So-Basic Object of Attention
Philosophy is notorious for asking the esoteric questions about apparently the simplest of notions. And for the most part we scoff at them as irrelevant to our actual lives. Who…
A Curiosity of Attention
Especially today, we have a hard time understanding the erratic behavior of our own attention. It is our gateway into the conscious world, and for some reason, we can barely…
Qualia and the Roots of Experience
Have you ever been unable to describe to someone what your experiencing? Not simply because it is so complicated or the person you are talking to just won’t understand, but…
The Question of Being & Why Knowledge Isn’t Enough
Before diving into the domain of psychological mechanisms and structures, we need to be conscious of our whole approach to the subject.