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?

Imagine we live in a world where you can go to a clinic and choose to have certain memories wiped away, erased forever. Think of all the terrible memories you have accumulated in your life, and about the prospect of them never being able to force themselves on your consciousness ever again. Would you go…

On the surface, a surreal and fantastical story about the intertwining narratives of a teenage boy running away from home to escape an Oedipal prophecy, and the journey of an elderly mildly retarded man who can talk to cats, doesn’t seem exactly like the kind of material I normally post about on this blog. But…

What does it mean to be a victim of circumstances? What is the difference between people who take personal responsibility for their lives, and those who seemingly choose not to? Is it possible for us to live in a world where people consistently actualize their potentialities? And most importantly, what ways of thinking about human behavior will allow the last question to come to fruition?

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.