Let's return to a topic I've been pondering quite a lot recently. So in some of the previous posts, I have been examining what it is to be a human being. Let us refer back to a diagram I drew for one of those earlier posts. Here consciousness sits like …
So this post has been stimulated partly by a podcast chat about apophenia, and partly by the updated blog post, Dots Don't Make The Man. (It's also based on some writing that didn't make it into my final PhD thesis, which is why it has references and footnotes 😱.) Apophenia is …
(So this is an old post that was first published in 2006 that I've updated. Gone is the old graphic, to be replaced with another CSS and html animation. Spiffy.)
Look at this animation and think about it. What are you looking at and what do you 'see'? Aren't they …
So during an (as yet unpublished) episode of The Existential Files, we got into a debate about who (or what) is an existential being? I thought I would clarify my thinking. I rule out categorically any non-human on this planet. I love my cat Ziggy, but I don't believe he …
Been a bit busy this last month, but the podcast has been providing a good bit of content. Someone asked me if I had a copy of my take home essays in a more portable format. Well I'm always up for a technical challenge, so I decided to create a …
Let's look at something different, and hopefully a little amusing. Consider Charles Mackay's book, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It may well have been published over 150 years ago, but it is a wonderful illustration of how very much like our modern day, the past …
[Aside: Wow, look at this. A front page full of new posts. Who would have thunk it?]
We are a group of scientists and we have invented a time machine. Well at this stage it's more of a time probe, but if this model works we're hoping to scale it …
Once upon a time on this blog, I used to have an animation of a man falling. Well here it is updated with modern browser technology. See I'm not just a pretty face. The falling man signifies that feeling we get in the middle of angst. The drop in the …
So this post is dedicated to Matthew Smith, my partner in crime on "The Existential Files". He keeps banging on about why the universe exists. If everything is pointless, why does the universe go to all this bother in the first place? Why, oh why, oh why, oh why? Ha …
Well it took a lot longer than expected and I'm not wholly satisfied with it, but here is a very short text adventure based on the earlier post Patient-42. When I was a kid I loved the old Infocom text adventures (especially The Leather Goddesses of Phobos) and I have …