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The outward shows be least themselves
I read somewhere that in less than a second of talking to someone you don’t know, you begin to determine their trustworthiness, and that after only a few seconds more, you have formed an opinion about them. It could be their appearance, their manner, or even their face that sways the decision; I suppose that…
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The temple in which we live
I realize I’ve been obsessing about this for quite a while now, but my progress has been slow, and the chances of resolution seem to recede further and further each time I make the attempt. It’s easier, of course, to analyze it, measure it, and categorize it in someone else, but for this… for this,…
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The liability of intelligence
As I age, what I once thought I knew about intelligence has evolved, partially because knowledge has itself changed over time, of course, but also because what we value, what we regard as appropriate, unfolds differently as society develops. It’s why we seem to espouse new ethical standards, find new ways of interpreting History, and…
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Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?
Have you ever wondered why things like pleasure and happiness, are so evanescent? For some things, we accommodate to their presence and after a while cease to notice them even though they are still present; pleasure is fleeting as well, and yet it is not simply because we no longer notice it, but rather because…
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How bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another’s eyes
Something I read a while ago started me thinking again about how we perceive things[i]. Some conditions, like hot and cold, lie at opposite ends of a spectrum I suppose, but is it necessarily the same with happy and sad? Binaries tend to mark edges -boundaries, by and large- but they don’t really define the…
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What is it like to be a…?
When I first read the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ essay, I was intrigued by his idea that ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism’. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Empathy -the ability…
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Who are you?
I suppose I should admit that over the steadily increasing pace of years, I’ve had a grandstand view of reproduction -albeit not in the front row seats; as an obstetrician for over forty years I was involved in ‘l’accouchement‘, rather than in the arguably more exciting ‘fécondation’. Still, I came to think of reproduction as…
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Believe me
What is it about religions which endorse beliefs that often seem so… well, irrational? And for that matter, why do those beliefs seem so compelling? Is it merely the other-worldly components that capture our attention: the mysterious and inexplicable outshining the everyday unpolished world? Or is it more than just magic? Does it instill in…
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