I was driving my car the other day and I decided to run some experiments on my consciousness (yes I know, brilliant time to decide to play with consciousness). I was thinking about how automatic so much of our behavior is. How amazing it was that such incredibely complicated behavior can be done all under…

Our conscious experience is so fundamental to our existence, it IS our existence, that there are certain amazing aspects of it that we tend to overlook as we go through our lives. Because we experience the world through our conscious experience, we’re constitutionally unable to experience the construction of that process. In an abstract sense…

One of the most amazing things about human consciousness is that we experience it as a holistic unified experience. As we interact with the world we see, hear, and smell. We remember. We feel. We think. It’s this seamless unification that makes us forget sometimes that all these processes that contribute to our conscious experience…

Over at brainblogger there was a post recently (Free Will is NOT An Illusion) which argued against the idea that free will is an illusion. The author argues against the idea that all choices and decisions are made by the subconscious mind, that “the brain makes a subconscious decision before it is realized consciously”. He…

If we could take you, take your essence, upload it to a computer system, and put it in a synthetic replica body, would you do it? Never mind the process, we’ll get to that later, let’s start from whether you’d even want to or not. So let me give you a plausible reason to answer in the affirmative.

This is a blog where many questions will be asked. Some will be answered. But to give you an idea of what you’re getting into, here are the basic ones that keep me up at night. What can a philosophical exploration of the research and ideas coming out of neuroscience, psychology, an evolutionary biology tell…