Thoughts on Consciousness

Animals, Consciousness, and I-thoughts

Emotion, higher-order syntactic thoughts, and consciousness

emphasizes the role of working memory in consciousness, where he views working memory as a limited capacity serial processor that creates and manipulates symbolic representations (p 280). He thus holds that much emotional processing is unconscious, and that when it becomes conscious it is because emotional information is entered into a working memory system. However, LeDoux (1996) concedes that...

Thoughts on Social Design

Thoughts on the Bulletin.

Because daguerreotype photographs are usually reversed laterally from actuality, images of W.T.G. Morton falsely suggest that he sometimes changed the side of the part in his hair. Because of daguerreotype image reversal, a statue of Apollo in the Ether Dome at the Massachusetts General Hospital appears to have been moved for the 50th anniversary of Ether Day. Ether anesthesia was announced in ...

Thoughts on scale

I begin with a metaphor to characterize the challenges that authors and readers face when confronting issues of scale. Consider the ways that map makers use insets—devices that allow for a focus on particular areas, while situating those areas within the larger whole. The use of insets allows for characterizations at two orders of grain size. Now imagine a map of the world containing four inset...