I interviewed Maud Casey for my blog a few months ago. I thought you might be interested to read her take on her own novel–and on Hacking. You can read that here. Casey also wrote a short piece about Albert … Continue reading →

Quite often in the book, Noe repeats the phrase, “Where do we stop, and where does the rest of the world begin?” which I believe to be a strong summary of the point he is making with this book. We … Continue reading →

I thought you might be interested to see philosopher Ned Block’s review of Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind in The New York Times, along with Siri Hustvedt’s response. Did they read the same book?

Don’t mean to be a total downer, but Oliver Sacks wrote an op-ed today on learning he has terminal cancer. In a short space, he mentions Hume, doing/seeing in the present, and detaching from future experience. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html?_r=0

In class on Tuesday, we talked a little about species-specific perception and consciousness. Heather Spence, a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the GC, has done some interesting research on “dolphin bioacoustics.” She’s working with the New Media Lab to create and … Continue reading →

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga was on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer show today. He called “the explanatory gap”–between neural physiology and subjective experience–“the scientific question of our time.” The show just finished, but it should go online here shortly. Gazzaniga is well … Continue reading →

Damasio attempts to describe a framework in which we may hope to better understand what it is that makes us conscious, able to feel, and aware of our bodies while feeling and emulating others. He does so by describing different … Continue reading →

Damasio’s anecdote in “Stepping into the Light” involving the patient who was “bodily present but personally unaccounted for, absent without leave” made me wonder about other situations in which our consciousness if affected while in a waking state. In my … Continue reading →