Tag: consciousness
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God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.
I’ve never been much on religion; my mother, an immigrant from Britain, was once an Anglican, and my Canadian father a Baptist. The compromise they settled on for my upbringing was the United Church of Canada for some reason. It was a religious choice that, unlike my father’s, allowed dancing, although it still seemed a…
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And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees
I’ve always felt a part of Nature, but now that I’m in my autumn years, there seems to be a special urgency to it. Still, the continued rebirth of green each Spring gives me hope; the longevity of trees that will continue to stand long after I cannot, inspires me; or perhaps it is simply…
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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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Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feelings as to sight?
I feel fine today; I feel fine most days, but what does that actually mean? Who, or more probably what, is it that feels fine? The words of Virginia Woolf, in her essay On Being Ill haunt me at times like this: ‘All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours,…
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Masters of their fates?
Sentience is the present participle of the Latin verb sentire –‘to feel’- but what is it? What does it imply? Consciousness? Thought? Or merely some form of awareness of the surroundings, however indistinct and vague? Is avoidance of a noxious stimulus enough to establish sentience, or does it have to involve an understanding that it…
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Peekaboo
Seeing is believing, my mother used to say when she saw I hadn’t finished the spinach on my plate despite my protestations to the contrary. But what if the belief were to persist in the absence of visual corroboration? Suppose I simply closed my eyes and pointed at the plate? My mother, no solipsist, would…
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