Book review: No Two Alike
I just finished reading Judith Rich Harris’s new book No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. Harris is an independent scholar whose controver...
Category: Thinking Meat Project
Posts from my blog the Thinking Meat Project (2006–2018)
Happy memories
To some extent, who we are is who we remember being. (I am crudely paraphrasing someone, I think John Locke.) A couple of researchers at Concordia University re...
Earliest memories
My earliest memory goes back to when I was three years old and my parents brought my little sister home from the hospital (at least that’s the earliest on...
Book review: On Desire
I recently read On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, by William B. Irvine. The subject is related to happiness, because getting (or not getting) what we want or...
The scientific study of happiness
Edge has recently posted an essay by Daniel Gilbert, a researcher whose subject is happiness. Among other things, Gilbert talks about why the study of happiness...
Knowing what will make you happy
I’m in the process of buying a house, which is why I’ve been blogging a little less frequently. This week the house was inspected and a major proble...
The third culture
This essay from The Edge examines the prospects for the emergence of a third culture in which the natural sciences join the humanities in explaining why we feel...
The love of unseen things that do not die
Late Thursday night, five singers, students at IU’s Jacobs School of Music, were killed when their plane crashed coming into Bloomington’s airport. ...
Turning off the self
When I read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith recently, I was struck by some of the things he said about meditation and consciousness, like the following: ...
Explaining female orgasm: An interview with Elisabeth Lloyd
In The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth Lloyd (Arnold and Maxine Tanis Chair of History and Philosophy of Science and Prof...