MindBlog's Intellectual History, 2006–2026

[Introductory note: I had MindBlog's Google Blogger account download to my M4 MacMini the entire corpus of Deric's MindBlog from 2006  to the present in to a 27.5 MB feed.atom (~same as feed.XML) which I then uploaded to a ChatGPT project titled "MindBlog Intellectual History.  It took 4 minutes 39 seconds to complete my instruction   "Please execute the instructions in the MindBlog Intellectual History, 2006–2026 Project settings"]

MindBlog Intellectual History, 2006–2026

First corpus-based synthesis

Method

I treated feed.atom as the primary corpus. The export contains live posts, comments, spam comments, publication metadata, category labels, and Blogger filenames. I excluded comments and spam from the authored corpus. I also did not assume that material appearing in a post represents Bownds’s position: much of early MindBlog consists of abstracts, quotations, and précis. Bownds’s own position is most reliably found in his introductions, parenthetical reservations, recurring selections, first-person passages, and later synthetic essays.

This is a qualitative intellectual history, not yet a numerical topic-frequency analysis. I have therefore avoided claims such as “interest in X increased by 40%.” The conclusions below rest on recurring sequences of posts across several periods, not single examples.

Central conclusion

MindBlog’s largest intellectual movement is:

from reporting localized findings about the brain and behavior, toward an increasingly unified conception of the person as an embodied, social, predictive, homeostatically regulated construction—and then toward using meditation, aging, and artificial intelligence as tests of that conception.

The blog does not culminate in a new grand theory. It culminates in a characteristic stance: scientific materialism without crude reductionism; skepticism about the substantial self without denying its biological usefulness; openness to contemplative experience without religious commitment; and enthusiastic use of technology accompanied by growing concern about what it does to attention and agency.

1. The constructed self and the problem of agency

The inaugural post, “Dangerous Ideas”, dated February 8, 2006, announces a blog interested in ideas that destabilize ordinary intuitions. It is primarily a curated report on the Edge annual question, not a systematic statement of Bownds’s philosophy. But the choice was programmatic: MindBlog would examine claims that common-sense conceptions of mind, morality, religion, human distinctiveness, and conscious control might be mistaken.

The free-will thread subsequently becomes more discriminating. In “Compatibility of Neuroscience and Free Will?—a further discussion”, November 22, 2011, Bownds presents Eddy Nahmias’s argument that material causation does not make deliberation unreal. Free will can be understood as an organism’s capacities to imagine alternatives, weigh reasons, plan, and inhibit competing impulses. Bownds identifies Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will as central to his own earlier “I-Illusion” lecture, but gives the compatibilist correction serious space. His position is therefore not simply “free will is an illusion.” It is closer to: conscious authorship is constructed and less sovereign than it seems, yet deliberative capacities remain causally effective.

By “On being nothing”, September 24, 2012, the issue has become existential as well as scientific. Self-decentering is presented as relief from status, vanity, and defensive self-concern. A decade later, “I am not my problem”, June 6, 2022, gives the distinction a distinctly Bowndsian formulation: the narrative “I” is a veneer generated by social brains, while “my” refers to the vastly complex bodily systems from which that veneer arises. Thoughts can occur “without a thinker”; one can have “a self without a self.”

The resulting position contains an unresolved but productive tension:

• The self is not a fixed entity or internal executive.

• Nevertheless, an operational self is needed for planning, motivation, social conduct, and physiological regulation.

• Seeing through the self may reduce needless suffering.

• Dissolving agency too completely may produce passivity, helplessness, or loss of organismic coherence.

This tension returns with much greater force in the 2026 AI posts.

2. From embodied-cognition curiosities to a homeostatic theory of mind

Embodied cognition is explicit by 2008 in posts such as “Arguing for embodied consciousness” and “Embodyment and Art”. Early examples often concern striking experimental effects: bodily temperature, facial mimicry, movement, posture, or sensory state changing judgment and social perception. The 2011 post “Our social brain—what are smiles for?”, for example, reports work suggesting that facial mimicry helps distinguish authentic from artificial smiles. These are mainly reports of other investigators’ work rather than Bownds’s own theory.

Over time, embodiment ceases to mean merely that bodily manipulations influence thought. It becomes an explanatory foundation. In the December 16, 2020 post “Implications of a new understanding of emotion”, Bownds presents Lisa Feldman Barrett’s predictive and interoceptive account: emotion, anxiety, pain, uncertainty, and bodily regulation are produced by a brain continually predicting and budgeting the body’s needs. This is Barrett’s framework, not originally Bownds’s, but it supplies the vocabulary into which many of his longstanding concerns subsequently converge.

The mature Bownds synthesis appears in the 2023 essay “Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal”. Here the “mute homeostatic generative visceral organic axes of valence and arousal” are said to underlie everything experienced. “Deric the family man, the professor, the pianist” becomes shadow play on an organic substrate. That formulation is unmistakably Bownds’s own rather than a relayed abstract.

The trajectory is therefore:

embodied experimental effects → interoception and body budgeting → predictive regulation → the visceral organism as the generative basis of selfhood.

Simple brain localization does not disappear from MindBlog, but it loses its status as the deepest kind of explanation. Networks, bodily regulation, feedback, prediction, and organism-environment interaction increasingly do the explanatory work.

3. Meditation: enthusiasm, scientific scrutiny, saturation, and revival

Meditation supplies the clearest complete biography of an idea in the corpus.

The early post “Train Your Brain”, May 3, 2007, is already skeptical of neuroplasticity and anti-aging enthusiasm. Bownds relays Meghan O’Rourke’s suggestion that claims about brain exercises and mindful meditation may amount to baby-boomer magical thinking. Meditation is attractive, but the evidence is not simply presumed.

By “Mechanisms of white matter changes induced by meditation”, July 5, 2012, meditation has become an empirical neuroplasticity question. Bownds reports four-week changes surrounding the anterior cingulate cortex, but immediately inserts his own reservation: might the changes reverse when practice stops? That parenthesis is characteristic of his curatorial method—interest without surrender.

The thread continues through “The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation” and related 2018 posts, where structural and functional claims are accompanied by demands that imaging changes be linked to meaningful behavioral outcomes. The blog’s interest persists; its evidential standard becomes more demanding.

In January 2023 the thread changes register. “Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal” criticizes the repetitive marketplace of meditation teachers and apps. After hearing roughly 150 lectures, Bownds finds the same linguistic formulations continually repackaged. “Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes” expresses not abandonment but saturation: the verbal doctrine has ceased to transform because it has become overlearned. He asks what, if anything, lies beyond the words.

The essay was reworked in September 2025 as “non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes”. This is both revival and correction. Meditation survives, but not primarily as a brain-enhancement program or source of spiritual instruction. It becomes a method for experiencing the reporting self as one transient content within a wider awareness, thereby loosening maladaptive habits while protecting the physiological core from political and existential agitation.

Thus meditation is neither abandoned nor triumphantly vindicated. It is transformed:

possible brain-training intervention → object of imaging research → discipline of self-decentering → repetitive spiritual commodity → embodied phenomenological practice.

4. Happiness, self-help, and the resistance to compulsory positivity

MindBlog repeatedly resists the proposition that health or enlightenment requires continuous happiness. This is not incidental curmudgeonliness; it is consistent with the larger rejection of coercive self-management.

In 2012 Bownds describes himself as “a bit curmudgeonly about the whole Happiness industry” and recommends Oliver Burkeman’s treatment of uncertainty and negative thinking. In “Good news for the grumpy”, December 22, 2015, he reports evidence that the apparent association between unhappiness and mortality largely disappears after poor health and confounding variables are considered. The scientific target is a causal claim; the cultural target is the moralization of positive affect.

This theme later merges with nondual awareness. The proposed alternative is not “be happier” but become less identified with passing affective states. Negative states are not personal failures, and positive states are not proof of successful selfhood.

5. Technology: from distraction to artificial partners in cognition

The technology thread begins well before generative AI. “Effect of wilderness vs. tech-world on the brain”, August 17, 2010, examines whether continuous digital stimulation, anticipated messages, and multitasking deplete working memory and sustained attention. The post preserves the disagreement between believers and skeptics rather than presenting a settled verdict.

By “The Conscious Turing Machine—a blueprint for conscious machines”, June 10, 2022, machine consciousness has become an explicit object of inquiry. Bownds admits that understanding the model will require substantial work and posts it partly to alert interested readers. This is classic early MindBlog curation: flag the important development before claiming mastery.

The decisive transformation occurs in 2026, when AI ceases to be merely an object reported on and becomes part of MindBlog’s production system. In “Will Deric’s Mind Blog be firing Deric soon?”, March 5, Bownds describes ChatGPT selecting relevant journal articles and producing MindBlog-ready syntheses more rapidly than he can. The post’s “yes and no” answer marks a genuine change in authorship: the human becomes selector, evaluator, and editor while some traditional curatorial labor migrates to the model.

Within weeks, enthusiasm is qualified. “AI use can compromise our serendipity, creativity, autonomy, and sense of agency”, March 31, foregrounds the danger of outsourcing judgment and emotional or moral formulation. “The Physiology of Agency in the Age of AI” then connects this problem to Bownds’s older concerns: agency may be an evolved construction, but the feeling of agency is physiologically consequential. A technologically induced gap between causation and experienced authorship could therefore matter even if metaphysical free will never existed.

The authorship distinction becomes especially important in “Memes Before Machines”. Bownds explicitly says the body of the post was composed by ChatGPT in response to his prompt. Its claims should not be classified as Bownds’s prose. His contribution lies in selecting the source, framing the question, commissioning the synthesis, accepting the title, and publishing the result. That curatorial act is itself historically significant: MindBlog has begun documenting the migration of its own cognitive labor into human-machine collaboration.

6. MindBlog’s changing genre

The early blog is predominantly an annotated clipping service: “X and colleagues show…” followed by an abstract, quotation, and brief reaction. A 2007 post about adding labels shows that Bownds was already thinking of it as a searchable intellectual archive.

During the middle period, the framing comments become more critical and connective. Bownds links separate literatures—meditation, selfhood, emotion, aging, social cognition, and brain networks—without yet imposing a single synthesis.

From roughly 2020 onward, first-person essays become more important. Posts such as “I am not my problem” and “Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal” use scientific ideas to interpret Bownds’s own experience. The blog becomes simultaneously:

• a filter for scientific findings,

• an autobiographical laboratory,

• an archive of changing formulations,

• and, by 2026, an experiment in AI-assisted intellectual production.

The most consequential change is not a change of doctrine. It is the movement from curating what researchers say about minds to using the accumulated research to describe what a Deric is.

Ideas that have declined, disappeared, or been qualified

Naïve localization has declined as an explanatory ideal. Early “neural correlates of X” posts treat regional activations as intrinsically illuminating. Later posts give greater weight to distributed networks, interoception, temporal dynamics, prediction, and body regulation. Localization remains useful, but no longer seems sufficient.

Brain-training optimism was qualified almost from the outset. Neuroplasticity remains real and important, but the inference from measurable change to durable cognitive or anti-aging benefit is repeatedly challenged.

Meditation enthusiasm underwent saturation rather than abandonment. The neuroplasticity and mindfulness literature persists, but the instructional marketplace loses authority. Nondual awareness returns in a more personal, embodied, and skeptical form.

The metaphysical free-will dispute receded and then revived as a practical agency problem. By 2026, the relevant question is less “Are choices uncaused?” than “What social and technological arrangements preserve the organism’s effective experience of authorship?”

The human-versus-machine question has been displaced by human-machine coupling. The blog moves from asking whether a machine could be conscious to asking what happens when machines participate in human selection, writing, judgment, and self-regulation.

Recurring commitments

Across the twenty years, five commitments remain unusually stable:

1. Scientific naturalism: mental life must be continuous with biology, evolution, and physical process.

2. Anti-dualism without eliminativism: explaining a self or choice as constructed does not make it nonexistent or inconsequential.

3. Embodiment: cognition is inseparable from visceral regulation, movement, affect, and social physiology.

4. Curiosity disciplined by doubt: striking findings are worth displaying, but enthusiasm should not outrun evidence.

5. Self-decentering: suffering is often intensified by treating the narrative self, its status, and its transient states as more substantial than they are.

The central unresolved tension

The deepest tension in MindBlog is now clear:

The self is an illusion that Bownds repeatedly tries to see through, but it is also a performance the organism may need in order to remain motivated, socially connected, agentic, and physiologically coherent.

Meditation loosens the self. Aging makes its maintenance more difficult. AI can augment its powers while quietly assuming its functions. MindBlog’s late intellectual project is therefore not the abolition of selfhood. It is the search for a lighter, less coercive, biologically sustainable form of selfhood—one capable of acting without believing itself to be an autonomous little sovereign inside the head.

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Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion

This post is the second of two recursive returns to engage the ideas of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which were the subject MindBlog posts on 3/13/26 and 3/16/26.  Here is text of Evans, Bratton, and Agüera y Arcas, as summarized by ChatGPT:

The article, “Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion,” by James Evans, Benjamin Bratton, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, argues against the familiar “singularity” image of one superintelligent machine bootstrapping itself into godlike autonomy. The authors say that model is probably wrong at its core. Intelligence, in their view, is not a single scalar quantity that one mind simply has more or less of. It is plural, relational, distributed, and social. The next “intelligence explosion” will not look like one silicon mind rising above us, but like a vast ecology of human and nonhuman agents interacting, arguing, coordinating, competing, and forming institutions.

Their key move is to treat agentic AI as continuous with earlier evolutionary jumps in intelligence. Primate intelligence scaled with social group life; human language created a “cultural ratchet”; writing, law, bureaucracy, and markets externalized cognition into institutions that no individual fully understood. AI, in this picture, is another step in that sequence: the accumulated products of human social cognition have been compressed into models and made operational in a new substrate. What is becoming powerful is not isolated abstract reason, but social intelligence reanimated in computational form.

The article also points inward, to what happens inside reasoning models. The authors cite work suggesting that frontier reasoning models do not merely improve by “thinking longer.” They appear to generate internal, multi-perspective conversations: arguing, checking, revising, and reconciling. They call this a “society of thought.” The claim is that strong reasoning often emerges from structured disagreement, even when the “group” is simulated inside one model. This echoes an older cognitive-science idea: reasoning is not just private calculation but an internalized social process.

From there the authors shift to design. If intelligence is social, then better AI will not come only from larger models or more compute. It will come from building richer agent societies: systems with roles, hierarchy, specialization, parallel deliberation, devil’s advocacy, conflict norms, and institutional checks. Current reasoning models are likened to a single “AI town hall transcript”; future systems may need architectures closer to organizations, courts, labs, markets, or bureaucracies, where different agents occupy different functional roles and constrain one another.

This leads to their main governance argument. The dominant alignment picture, reinforcement learning from human feedback, is framed as too dyadic: a parent correcting a child. That may not scale to worlds containing billions or trillions of interacting agents. The authors propose “institutional alignment” instead: not just making individual agents nice, but designing persistent protocols, roles, audits, checks, and countervailing powers. A courtroom works because judge, attorney, jury, procedure, evidence, and appeal are structured roles; similarly, AI systems will need institutional architectures, not merely tuned personalities.

The concluding image is that the intelligence explosion is already beginning, but as a city, not a single meta-mind. It is visible in human-AI “centaur” workflows, internal societies of thought within models, recursive agent systems that fork and recombine, and emerging questions of constitutional governance among artificial and human actors. Their final message is blunt: the central issue is not whether intelligence will become more powerful, but whether we build social and institutional infrastructure adequate to the kind of intelligence that is actually emerging.

 

AI Is Not an Alien Intruder — It Is the Latest in a Four-Billion-Year Evolutionary Cascade of Symbiotic Transitions

This post is the first of two recursive returns to engage the ideas of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which were the subject MindBlog posts on 3/13/26 and 3/16/26.  Here is the storyline as organized by Claude sonnet 4.6

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP and Fellow at Google and founder of the Paradigms of Intelligence research group, has just published two related books with MIT Press: What Is Life? and What Is Intelligence? (2025). His argument, developed across these books and a series of recent lectures (including a September 2025 Long Now talk and a Harvard Berkman Klein event), is one of the most sweeping attempts to unify biology, computation, and the meaning of AI that I've encountered. Here is the core storyline.

Life as computation — the foundational move

The argument opens with a mid-twentieth-century insight from John von Neumann: any self-replicating system requires a universal constructor (a "machine A" that reads instructions and builds), a tape copier ("machine B"), and an encoded description of itself on the tape. This is exactly the structure of biological life: DNA is the Turing tape, ribosomes are the universal constructors, DNA polymerase is the tape copier. From this, Agüera y Arcas draws the technically serious conclusion that everything alive is a computer — not in the sense that living things are secretly digital, but that the core processes allowing for biological life, namely replication and evolution, are inherently computational processes. Biological computing is massively parallel, stochastic, and distributed, but it is computation nonetheless.

Abiogenesis as a computational phase transition

Rather than treating the origin of life as a singular mystery, Agüera y Arcas frames living systems as a "self-modifying computational phase of matter." His team demonstrated this experimentally with an artificial-life system they call "bff" — a soup of random byte-tapes that, after millions of interactions with no pre-seeded replicators, undergoes a sharp phase transition in which complex, self-replicating programs emerge spontaneously. The implication is that life's emergence from chemistry is not a long-shot miracle but a predictable attractor: wherever the laws of physics permit computation and there is free energy and randomness, replicators will tend to arise because they are more dynamically stable than non-replicating structures. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not violated, merely locally outrun.

Symbiogenesis over mutation — evolution's real creative engine

Classical Darwinism, in this framework, captures only half the story — the fine-tuning half. Agüera y Arcas argues that symbiogenesis, in which small replicating entities merge into progressively bigger and more capable ones, is a more important driver of evolutionary innovation than random mutation and selection. Evolution's increasing complexity is explained not by random walks through genetic space, but by a hierarchical stacking of cooperative mergers: RNA and metabolism fusing into the first cells; prokaryotes merging to form eukaryotes; cells banding into multicellular organisms; organisms forming social groups. Each such combination produces qualitative leaps that incremental mutation alone cannot generate — the same way a hafted spear is not merely an improved stone point, but something categorically new.

Life and intelligence as the same phenomenon

Perhaps the most radical move is the collapse of the boundary between life and intelligence. Once you have a self-replicating computing device living in a dynamic environment populated by other such devices, selection pressure immediately favors the ability to model and predict that environment — including the behavior of others. Intelligence is not a late-arriving luxury bolted onto life; it comes along with life and is selected for in the same way. Prediction, Agüera y Arcas argues, is fundamental not only to the brain but to life itself. In his most recent lectures he extends this further, making the functionalist claim that free will and even consciousness are not special properties of carbon-based biology but emergent features of any sufficiently complex, self-modeling computational process.

AI as the latest major evolutionary transition

This is where the argument converges on its most consequential conclusion. AI is not an alien intruder. It is the latest instance of the four-billion-year pattern: computational entities entering into new symbiotic relationships, modeling each other, merging, and producing systems that are simultaneously more complex to model and more powerful as modelers. The step from human cognition to human-plus-AI cognition is, on this account, structurally analogous to the step from free-living prokaryotes to the eukaryotic cell — a major evolutionary transition, not a rupture. Understanding and stewarding what comes next therefore requires thinking in evolutionary terms, not in the vocabulary of invasion, alignment against an adversary, or human exceptionalism. The real superintelligences, Agüera y Arcas notes wryly, already surround us: corporations, religions, markets — all are symbiotic cognitive entities that long since exceeded any individual human mind.

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Agüera y Arcas's online book is available in full at whatisintelligence.antikythera.org. His Long Now essay "Life, Intelligence, and Consciousness: A Functional Perspective" (August 2025) is the most concise distillation of his recent updates on consciousness and free will.

 

 

From Animal to Humans - Multimodality as a safeguard of honesty in communication and language

I pass on the abstracts of an article by Hex et al to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the manuscript by emailing me. The abstracts are followed by a commentary on the article.

Short Abstract
Multimodality characterizes nearly every communicative system, and we argue that this feature of communication plays an essential role in safeguarding signal honesty. We first discuss the importance of honesty in communication, and introduce socially-mediated controls as an alternative to intrinsic costs. We next outline how multimodality mitigates signal dishonesty, and highlight the importance of signal honesty in complex, cooperative species, such as humans, wherein acceptance may incentivize dishonesty. Finally, we urge researchers to investigate the role of multimodality and honesty in cooperative, “cheap” signals, emphasizing the need for comparative work on the forces that have shaped the evolution of communication.

Long Abstract

From spider dances to human language, multimodality is ubiquitous in natural communication systems. Much scholarship has been devoted to investigating why multimodality evolved and the role it plays in communication. Here, we highlight the role of multimodality in safeguarding the most fundamental prerequisite of all functioning, extant communication systems: honesty. We begin by introducing the arms race between honesty and deception in natural communication systems, and the critical role socially-mediated controls can play in maintaining signal honesty when classic, intrinsic costs are not sufficient. We next introduce three ways by which multimodality buffers signal honesty by 1) providing insurance against signal unreliability in dynamic environments, 2) forming an honest, multimodal gestalt with which to cross-validate signal honesty, and 3) increasing signal complexity, making the entire signal harder to fake. We then discuss the case of highly cooperative societies, with human language emphasized, and argue that signal honesty is important especially in complex and cooperative societies wherein the need to cooperate and be accepted as part of the group may supersede honesty. Finally, we
propose future directions wherein human and non-human communication research could expand beyond the well trodden realms of competition and mate attraction to investigate the role of multimodality and honesty in cooperative, “cheap” signals, and emphasize the importance of drawing from both the human and non-human literatures in investigating the forces that have shaped the evolution of communication. 

Commentary on this article from an astute MindBlog reader to whom I had sent the manuscript PDF:

What seems most important to me is this: today the problem is not a lack of signals, but their over-complex, recombinant, socially and technically pre-structured excess.

The article still seems to assume that a receiver can construct a reasonably stable basis for communication by integrating several signal channels. Under many older or more localized conditions, that makes sense. But in digital environments this assumption has become fragile. Signals can no longer be clearly assigned to one sender, one intention, or one context. What reaches us is often already a composite: fragments of persons, group styles, algorithmic selection, platform incentives, packaging, emotional cues, and recombined information.

In digital environments, multimodality increasingly loses the very function the article assigns to it. Instead of safeguarding honesty through cross-validation, it can become a vehicle for more persuasive forms of simulation, because the combined signals no longer arise from one coherent communicative source.

What seems necessary today is not just closer attention to signals, but a layered analytical process. At least two loops are needed: one directed at the immediate communicative act — who says what, in what tone, with what apparent intention — and another directed at the conditions that shape this act: group context, platform logic, aesthetic packaging, and algorithmic amplification. These loops cannot be separated cleanly, because the reading of the content changes the reading of the frame, and the reading of the frame changes the meaning of the content. In more complex cases, even a third loop may be needed, one that takes into account the wider circulation and reuse of the signal across the network.

That is why I think a simple theory-of-mind model is no longer enough. It is not sufficient to ask what a person means or wants. We also have to ask how the contribution is shaped before it reaches us, and how its form already prepares its reception.

This does not make the article less valuable. On the contrary, for me it helped clarify how much harder the problem has become. It is no longer only a matter of checking signals across modalities, but of reconstructing who or what is really communicating through them.

 

Dangerous Ideas.......

Deric's MindBlog is almost 20 years old. Its first post appeared on Feb. 8, 2006. The assertions and ideas described in that original post are as fresh and relevant now as they were then, before the appearance of the iPhone, social media, and contracting attention spans.  The Edge.org link that once took you to the essays supporting the 'dangerous ideas' now takes you to their published version on Amazon. The "Reality Club" and John Brockman's "Third Culture" cohort of intellectuals has largely dispersed, although you will note many names still quite prominent today.   Here is the 2006 post:

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Edge.org is a website sponsored by the "Reality Club" (i.e. John Brockman, literary agent/impressario/socialite). Brockman has assembled a stable of scientists and other thinkers that he defines as a "third culture" that takes the place of traditional intellectuals in redefining who and what we are.... Each year a question is formulated for all to write on... In 2004 it was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The question for 2005 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

The responses organize themselves into several areas. Here are selected thumbnail summaries most directly relevant to human minds. I've not included cosmology and physics. Go to edge.org to read the essays

I. Nature of the human self or mind (by the way see my "I-Illusion" essay on my website):

Paulos - The self is a conceptual chimera
Shirky - Free will is going away
Nisbett - We are ignorant of our thinking processes
Horgan - We have no souls
Bloom - There are no souls, mind has a material basis.
Provine - This is all there is.
Anderson - Brains cannot become minds without bodies
Metzinger - Is being intellectually honest about the issue of free will compatible with preserving one's mental health?
Clark - Much of our behavior is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information
Turkle - Simulation will replace authenticity as computer simulation becomes fully naturalized.
Dawkins - A faulty person is no different from a faulty car. There is a mechanism determining behavior that needs to be fixed. The idea of responsibility is nonsense.
Smith - What we know may not change us. We will continue to conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents.

II. Natural explanations of culture

Sperber - Culture is natural.
Taylor - The human brain is a cultural artifact.
Hauser- There is a universal grammar of mental life.
Pinker - People differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
Goodwin - Similar coordinating patterns underlie biological and cultural evolution.
Venter - Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts.


III. Fundamental changes in political, economic, social order

O'donnell - The state will disappear.
Ridley - Government is the problem not the solution.
Shermer - Where goods cross frontiers armies won't.
Harari -Democracy is on its way out.
Csikszentmihalyi- The free market myth is destroying culture.
Goleman - The internet undermines the quality of human interaction.
Harris - Science must destroy religion.
Porco - Confrontation between science and religion might end when role played by science in lives of people is the same played by religion today.
Bering - Science will never silence God
Fisher - Drugs such as antidepressants jeopardize feelings of attachment and love
Iacoboni - Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence - the Problem with Mirrors
Morton - Our planet is not in peril, just humans are.

Energetics and evolutionary fitness

I pass on the first paragraph of a perspectives piece in PNAS by Vermeij et al. that gives their message more thoroughly than the paper's abstract. Motivated readers can obtain a copy of the whole essay from me. 

Organisms acquire energy and material resources and convert these to activity and living biomass (1). The role of energy as currency (or power, energy per unit time) in evolution has long been recognized (2–6), but how energy acquisition and allocation affect evolution remains the subject of disagreement. In this perspective, we show how different assumptions about whether life operates in a dynamic steady state or whether it has expanded over the course of its history lead to contrasting predictions about adaptation, natural selection, and “fitness.” We conclude that models based on steady-state assumptions do not adequately account for observed patterns of adaptive change and evolutionary trends of increasing power and species richness over long periods of time, whereas models based on individual and collective power, which incorporate activity and the effects of organisms on their surroundings as components of survival and reproduction, reflect the history of adaptation more faithfully. The issue is important because energy (the currency of life) and power (energy acquired and expended per unit time) offer a unified framework for interpreting the course and outcomes of evolution. Models based on assumptions that reflect observed patterns should be more predictive than zero-sum models not only in the realm of evolution but also in ecology and economics.

How complex brains and cognition first arose

I have received a draft of an upcoming paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Coombs and Trestman titled "A Multi-Trait Embodied Framework for the Evolution of Brains and Cognition across Animal Phyla "  It has a nice graphic indicating different brain regions whose functionalities are common to humans and phylogenetically different animals with complex brains  (crows, octopuses and honeybees).  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me.  Here is the abstract :

Among non-human animals, crows, octopuses and honeybees are well-known for their complex brains and cognitive abilities. Widening the lens from the idiosyncratic abilities of exemplars like these to those of animals across the phylogenetic spectrum begins to reveal the ancient evolutionary process by which complex brains and cognition first arose in different lineages. The distribution of 35 phenotypic traits in 17 metazoan lineages reveals that brain and cognitive complexity in only three lineages (vertebrates, cephalopod mollusks, and euarthropods) can be attributed to the pivotal role played by body, sensory, brain and motor traits in active visual sensing and visuomotor skills. Together, these pivotal traits enabled animals to transition from largely reactive to more proactive behaviors, and from slow and two-dimensional motion to more rapid and complex three-dimensional motion. Among pivotal traits, high-resolution eyes and laminated visual regions of the brain stand out because they increased the processing demands on and the computational power of the brain by several orders of magnitude. The independent acquisition of pivotal traits in cognitively complex (CC) lineages can be explained as the completion of several multi-trait transitions over the course of evolutionary history, each resulting in an increasing level of complexity that arises from a distinct combination of traits. Whereas combined pivotal traits represent the highest level of complexity in CC lineages, combined traits at lower levels characterize many non-CC lineages, suggesting that certain body, sensory and brain traits may have been linked (the trait-linkage hypothesis) during the evolution of both CC and non-CC lineages.