Arbitrary Marks

For anyone who hasn’t heard the news, a transman named Thomas Beatie is pregnant. I read about the news first in The Advocate, but it seems the story has spread to mainstream media, including Oprah. I’ve watched some clips from MSNBC and other news sources where anchors have made fun of the situation, remarking [...]

I’m thankful for my readers because they are often able to point at particular tensions in my thought that I’m aware of, subtly, but that require more propositional attention. Dru’s comment about happiness is one instance of this.

While teaching at the Newberry Library, I’ve been reading Wayne Proudfoot’s Religious Experience. One of the central questions about descriptions of so-called “mystical experience” (so-called because to categorize it begs numerous questions) is whether there is a raw, undifferentiated, phenomenal content to the experience. The basic picture is of having a single experience, in many people, times and cultural contexts, which then gets interpreted through a grid:

Suppose it were shown that pharmaceuticals in our drinking water were responsible for increasing numbers of individuals with body dysphoria, or transgenderism. What would that, if anything, say about how we ought to value the phenomenon? Should it change how transgender individuals should perceive themselves? How we should treat them?
(For fuller context and the reason [...]

Something I’ve noticed while again working through William James, Andrew Newberg and some Christian mystics, now concurrently, is how frequently pain comes up in the narrative of the mystics in contrast to the analysts like James and Newberg. This isn’t including the self-inflicted pain, like self-flagellation, or talk about evil and suffering. Rather, the desire [...]

What do Indian surrogate mothers bearing American babies for a fee have in common with undercover caterpillars, posing as ant larvae?

To anyone who identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, the question posed by the recent Tierney Labs blog post in the NY Times is not a new one.  It’s just becoming pressing, with the possibility that genetic manipulation–as opposed to reparative therapy–can influence one’s sexual orientation.
One of the researchers involved in the recent fruit [...]

Okay, so this post isn’t about the cerebellums of Chinese people, but rather an article about cerebellums and John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument. I wrote about it in my last post, here. The gist of the article, as I understand it, is that if we assume the cerebellum has cognitive function, then functionalism [...]

In philosophy of mind, a relatively popular view about the relationship between “mind” and “brain” is termed functionalism. This view claims that the brain is like a computer processor, and the mental states we experience are like the programs run by the computer. A recent paper focuses upon the potential support for this family of theories which could emerge from new analysis of the cerebellum:

Frings, M., Maschke, M. and Timmann, D. (2007) ‘Cerebellum and cognition - viewed from philosophy of mind’, The Cerebellum, 1 - 7.

The most recent New England Journal of Medicine had an interesting article in the “brief report” section, called “Visualizing Out-of-Body Experience in the Brain.” After stimulating the temporoparietal junction of a patient who had tinnitus, neurologists were able to induce the sensation of being disembodied.

Arriving at 5:30 pm for the 6:00 pm talk, I found the room already nearly full. People were spilling out into the halls, perching on windowsills and sitting in the aisles. The moderator had to make repeated appeals to the fire code and ask individuals to relocate to another room where audio would [...]