The double look on complex dimension
Were you looking for formal proof of God’s existence? Edward Feser listed five, exempting you from looking for a small miracle to strengthen your faith. What is his book worth? Should you finally fall into the great theistic family of Humanity, ugly atheist that you are? Let’s take a closer look at the demonstration. Part … Read more
A brain that gets brushed! A baby looks at a brush. The object has no meaning for her. She sketches one when her mother grabs it to straighten her hair. Years later, the brush is part of a rich mental universe of utensils with well-defined functions. It proposes itself to the consciousness of the baby … Read more
Proven usefulness in psychotherapy Eric Berne is a pioneer in the description of psychic persona , that is to say recognizable states that can take the ego of a person. He sees 3 fundamentals, Parent Child and Adult. The Parent is protector and director, the imaginative Child plaintive and playful, the Adult objective and independent. … Read more
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