This book is a good ‘ol fashion philosophers slugfest at its best. But I’m getting ahead of myself… T.H. Huxley famously said: how it is that any thing so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when…

Implicit memory is normally thought of as a type of memory where past experiences influence current thought and behavior, but without conscious awareness of those previous experiences. How does this work? Is there a “thing” in the brain we can point to and say “this is an implicit memory?” And is “memory” even the best…

Is it possible to behave in such way that you’re not being yourself? What is your true self? Your ingrained desires or your explicit values and commitments? And in a world where behavior and personality arise from neurophysiology, do we even still have room for the notion of a self?

Ongoing research into the nature of memory, how it is stored, how it can be retrieved, and how the process can be manipulated anywhere along the way, is simultaneously unlocking fascinating secrets about memory and forcing us to confront fundamental questions about the nature of persons and the self. It’s conceivable that in the near…

Today I want to talk about memory, and what’s wrong with some of our standard conceptions of how memory works, and even fundamentally what memory is. If you open up a brain and look inside it you won’t see any memories. You don’t open up a neuron as if it was a storage container and memories come spilling out. What about a network of them makes this story any different? How the heck changes in the strength of connections between cells cause a memory to be stored and experienced later is not something cognitive science has been able to address yet.

I’ve always loved Science Fiction, and not just because books about the future are inherently cool. The reason I’ve always loved science fiction is because I’ve always loved philosophy. From a young age I enjoyed thinking about what makes us human, what is the nature of “self”, what is the nature of reality, and a…