The double look on complex dimension
Switch Charles Pépin makes a brilliant essay on How to Take Action. His advice can be summed up as follows: “Prepare to never be ready.” Certainties hinder action, disorient us if the course is not compliant. To decide is “to go there to see […] go there because we don’t know enough […] otherwise, we … Read more
Pretentious turtle and dumb rabbit In psychology, theories with double thought processes generally oppose unconscious automatic mode and conscious controlled mode. They were popularized in particular by Daniel Kahneman in ‘System 1 / System 2, The Two Speeds of Thought‘ (2012). If the book has been so successful, it is because it is easy to … Read more
Morals Test Bench Philomag’s newsletter is back in force after the summer break with a study of 1098 students in 10 countries comparing utilitarian and deontological morals. By testing students’ behavior through games of dice and sums to be won, researchers come across a counterintuitive result: those who proclaim their attachment to an intangible moral … Read more
The nature of mental objects Before answering this question, let us judge its relevance. Are lucidity and happiness comparable, opposable, associable? Certainly lucidity seems a brake on happiness, pointing to all the reasons to lack it. But are these concepts of the same nature? What is a mental “nature”? We admit that an emotion and … Read more
Warning The very idea of “ontological” classification is suspect. What is the being of a thing by reference to the thing alone? By definition it is the only one to experience it. A hook for knowledge: being results from a constitution. But if we think we know the constitution per se —the being of the … Read more
This article will be of interest to philosophers of the mind. It develops the principle of mental inner scene and explains it neurologically. It connects the notions of reactive and cognitive agent, in other words our automatisms of perception and our decision generators. Is a place a framework or an agent? Perhaps the question seems … Read more
Where are the E.T.? The Fermi paradox is the contradiction between two claims:a) The number of stars and stable planetary systems is so large that life must be spread throughout the galaxy, including intelligent species with detectable artifacts. b) There is no serious evidence of a visit to Earth by aliens, and no sign of … Read more
It’s clear! Bertrand Perier, lawyer: “It is quite clear to me that words create the idea and not the other way around.” Amazing divinization of communication, words that would be there before their constituent abstractions. It is the transposition to the language of creationism; a God formed of all possible words is at the origin … Read more
Early or lost? If I make a passion my job, I am forced to adopt the consensus that is at the heart of the discipline. I study it, deepen it, delimit it, support it with laymen. The profession is the collectivist pole of the discipline. The more I attach myself to it, the more I … Read more
The philosopher’s outstretched hand I have not found a better synthesis on this subject than a remarkable issue (60) of Cités published in 2014 (french): “What do cognitive neuroscience think and want?”. The theme allows the confrontation between philosophers and neuroscientists about the mind/body problem. Yves Charles Zarka, for philosophers, begins by giving a hand: … Read more