Fooling Houdini

Human consciousness is unlike all other varieties of animal consciousness in that it is a product in large part of cultural evolution, which installs a bounty of words and many other thinking tools in our brains, creating thereby a cognitive architecture unlike the “bottom-up” minds of animals. By supplying our minds with systems of representations

I want to reemphasize the miraculous existence of any form of consciousness by paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein: Not how consciousness is, is mystical, but that it is.

That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.

I am not interested in fooling people. Or at least that’s why I’m so uncomfortable performing as a magician. It’s not about deception. It’s about the deception of truth. To know illusions is to know reality. How can we know what’s true if we can’t recognize what’s false?

The brain sorts through an abundance of information and decides what salient information to include in its stream of consciousness.

the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go as far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly, im

Conjurors fake paranormal phenomena; illusions of the supernatural are their stock-in-trade. Major stage productions incorporate themes of death, dismemberment, and rebirth. Mentalists counterfeit ESP. None of this is new. Shamans in earlier cultures did the same thing. The paranormal has been affiliated with trickery for thousands of years, and th