Tag Archives: William James

Cartesian Dualism and Brains In Vats

If you could put your brain in a nutrient bath so that it could keep on functioning outside of your body what would it (or would it still be you) experience? Would it still have your memories in it? Would it remember that they were yours? Would it still experience itself as you? Would you […]

The Ego Tunnel and the Nature of Reality

Thomas Metzinger’s new book The Ego Tunnel weaves research in out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, phantom limbs and other extraordinary human occurrences with leading edge neuroscience to create a convincing picture of how neural activity constantly creates what we experience as reality. Our entire experience of what is; our bodily sensations, our identity and our experience […]

The Evolution of Dissatisfaction

What moves us? Why do we keep going, always striving to better ourselves, our circumstances and the conditions of others? It isn’t completely rational. We all die in the end anyway so why does it seem so important for us to be here and give more and more? Why do we take life so seriously […]

Everything Exists in Relationship


We don’t create time – we freeze it in its tracks.


Experience and Understanding

There are two kinds of knowing – experience and understanding – and the confusion between them is the cause of all sorts of trouble for any thinking person. Experience is the knowing of things. It appears to our senses simply as what is there  without us doing anything. It is immediately and directly present to awareness with […]

Are Relationships Real Things?

Our sense of reality is dominated by things. Things feel real to us. We live in a universe that we experience as empty space filled with things. And some things have relationships between them. But what is a relationship? Is a relationship a thing? Is it real, or is it just a connection between two […]

Into The Human Flow


Mead, Mind and World


Alfred North Whitehead: And the Three Components of Knowledge

This week I wanted to share a quote from the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead is the originator of what is commonly known as Process Theology. And many of his ideas follow closely in a line that was drawn earlier by William James and Charles Sanders Peirce.  Whitehead in a series of lectures collectively […]