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I am a retired engineer. I acquired an MA in philosophy along the way because I felt that my education left me as a hollow man. Also along the way I became a self-actualizing self-learner. In my study of the works of the great minds of the past I discovered the works of George Lakoff. George...

Twinkies & Chips—Sound Bites & Bumper Stickers A steady diet of Twinkies and chips will give us a fat gut while a steady diet of sound bites and bumper stickers will give us a fat head. Political parties and television commercials often depend upon well-crafted sound bits and bumper stickers...

I think that art and wit are very useful but there must be an additional component and that component is CT (Critical Thinking).

Yes, anyone who knows anything about Darwin's theory and considers his theory to be correct would be expected to have embraced embodied realism centuries ago; alas such is not the case. I think this is because we humans find our mortality to be so horrible that we try desperately to ignore our...

SGCS has introduced revolutionary theories that are incompatible with our cultural comprehension of the human sciences. I have lived with this domain of knowledge for several years and my understanding is yet very sketchy. Unfortunately new theories in the human sciences take generations...

Art and Wit are Subversive of Civilization; in a ‘Playful Way’ The repressions of modern life have lost for us the “primary pleasures of which the censorship disapproves”. Art and wit liberates repressed instinct; both rid us of our inhibitions and open the unconscious for inspection and...

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) has introduced new and revolutionary theories that I think will, in a few generations, become fundamental to our culture. Presently nothing in our culture prepares us to comprehend these theories and thus one must develop an intellectual life and...

On the contrary the mind/body dichotomy (the disembodied mind concept) is the discontinuity and the body-mind (the embodied mind) is the continuity.

Darwin informs us that there is a continuum from the first life to the present forms of life. Humans had small differences from its immediate ancestors. The big difference is that humans developed self-consciousness and the ability to create abstract concepts.

When written history began five thousand years ago humans had already developed a great deal of knowledge. Much of that knowledge was of a very practical nature such as how to use animal skins for clothing, how to weave wool, how to hunt and fish etc. A large part of human knowledge was...

Dialogue/Cooperation as Debate/Conflict Dialogue is to cooperation as debate is to conflict. Dialogue utilizes communication to facilitate harmony with the other while debate utilizes argumentation power to facilitate victory over the other. Internet discussion forums advance the human...

I once asked a professor of philosophy "what is philosophy about" he answered "philosophy is about radically critical self-consciousness". It was thirty years later that I began to understand the meaning of this phrase.

What is the definition of the American flag? It has thirteen horizontal stripes of alternating white and red color. It has a blue rectangle in the upper left corner with rows of stars for a total of fifty; the rectangle is blue and the stars are white. What is the meaning of the American...

What is the meaning of ‘meaning’? A strange question in one sense but as fundamental a question as one needs to pursue in another sense. I would say that meaning is an emotion that I recognize when the emotion engendered by an inducer are reflected back to me in the form of feelings. I...

Ego says, HOLD IT, TIME OUT! The ego allows us control the unconscous from becoming conscious. The ego is our command center; it is the “internal gyroscope” and creator of time for the human. It controls the individual; especially it controls individual’s response to the external...

Lakoff and Johnson are saying that much of our cognitive life is unconscious. However, we have a degree of freedom but it is not absolute as many might think. One might reasonably say that we are all philosophers; especially we might say that we are all metaphysicians. Metaphysics is about...

I would say that an individual seeking to develop an intellectual life would after their school daze are over spend at least seven hours a week reading what I would call disinterested knowledge. After reaching mid-life that study time would increase to about 15 hours a week. After reaching 65...

Does an Intellectual Life Endanger Peace of Mind? Few individuals discover and display a talent, a personal resonance that can truly excite public appreciation. Those who do display such a resonance are truly rewarded. However, I am not particularly interested in those few but I am interested...

Personal heroism by means of individualism is a task requiring courage and self-confidence. Courage and self-confidence are characteristics of few sapiens, young or old. It is a path less traveled because it imposes terrifying burdens; these burdens display themselves by isolation from the...

In the 1970s a new body of empirical research began to introduce findings that questioned the traditional Anglo-American cognitive paradigm of AI (Artificial Intelligence), i.e. symbol manipulation. This research indicates that the neurological structures associated with sensorimotor...