Philosophy Miscellany

A commonly held view of the self is that it is somehow divorced from a body, such that after death, which is to say, the ceasing to function or dissolution of a human brain, the person may still exist in some ghostly afterlife. Some people even experience themself during life on occasion as having an out-of-body experience, such as hovering above their body and looking down at it. I personally don’t believe the self exists without a body, nor “out of” one. No brain, no self; and while I don’t doubt there are experiences of hovering over one’s own body, I view these as no different from dreams, which are still firmly housed in the brain.                 The question remains: What constitutes oneself . It is one thing for there to be a self; but when is it the same self? Thus, suppose you wanted to travel to Mars as quickly as possible. A rocket ship would take too long. But you could use what the transportation...

A fairly long-standing view I have espoused and defended in many places and many ways is that the world of our experience is illusory … and delusory insofar as we sincerely believe in its veridicality. The standard illusion, however, is something we can disabuse ourselves of as a belief, although it may well remain as an appearance (for example, continuing to see the Müller-Lyer as lines of unequal lengths even when we cease to believe they are of unequal length).              A very big question for me is the degree to which various illusions are incorrigible, and in either sense: that is, simply qua illusions or also as delusions. An illusion need not be a full-blown delusion in order to hold powerful sway over us; for instance, when I have been tossed 360 degrees in a dizzy spell while lying in my bed, I do not really believe I and my bed have been fully flipped around, or moved at all, and yet I will hold on for dear l...

I believe that everything human beings do and feel and believe is the effect of some cause or causes, and was “determined” and even pre-determined by events which took place outside the individual person’s mind and perhaps going back all the way to the Big Bang over thirteen billions years ago. There certainly is not much wiggle room in there for freewill. I won’t go into all my reasons for believing all of that here (but you could take a look at my “Will o' the Wisp: Why We Are Not Free”). What I want to do in this little essay is discuss the very idea of causes … and reasons.              Teasing out a definition or analysis from the welter of ways we use a word is always a tricky task, and one that is never finished, if only because words change their meaning over time. But even at one and the same time a word may have multiple meanings. So nothing I write here is intended to be definitive. Nevertheless I sense a particula...