Building Skills by Adding Variability to Habits
The conversation around habits seems to be focused on how we need to break our bad habits, or create new healthy habits. We do this without giving credit to the…
Emotional Perception Is Action Preparedness
It is difficult to understand what is left of our animal instincts. Are they underneath somewhere operating in the unconscious? Are they practically gone, overthrown by culture or cognition and…
Internal Perception and How to Overcome Feelings by Experiencing Them
To us, feeling seems to be the most essential part of emotion. A feeling is the truest instance of embodiment connecting our internal mind to the perception of the external…
The Limits to Our Tools of Inquiry
A certain level of understanding of the world and ourselves is basically a privilege that only human beings can accomplish. We have intuitive “understanding” which signals that we have had…
Dealing with Uncertainty and Making Provisional Assumptions
In troubling times, it is the uncertainty itself that seems to burden us the most. We wish, more than anything, that we could just know what will happen. Even if…
We Must Believe Before We Understand
Belief is a word that conjures religious connotations, whether good or bad. We think of faith-like belief as what is always being tested by the trials of life, yet something…
How to Use Language as a Tool for Understanding
Giles Deleuze defines a philosopher as a creator of concepts. The philosopher creates ideas which help us to understand and act effectively and meaningfully in our lives. The philosopher may…
Tools of Inquiry: How We Discover the Truth About Our World
Our intuition about truth is based partly on our familiarity with our experiences. On the level at which we experience the world is typically what we are most inclined to…
The Truth in Subjectivity
If we want to create a theory of truth or a method of reaching truth, we must be able to define it with our own subjectivity in mind. What good…
Embracing the Emotional Intellect
We’ve probably heard “being emotional” as a criticism of someone’s argument and reason as a boon to seeking truth. Although we know the feeling of regret from actions taken under…