Debbie Foster

It comes down to your metaphysical assumptions. If you are a computational functionalist, if you assume that computations, carried out on digital computers, are sufficient for consciousness, then sooner or later, computers will imitate all human functions, including consciousness. If not today, then soon. If, on the other hand, you assume that

Anyone who didn’t allow dogs in her house had something wrong with her.

…a philosopher by training, I, too, am prone to regard reality as thin fodder for theorization. Yet as dull and distasteful as the facts may be, they make up the edifice on which principles are erected…

How do you isolate the relevant causal factors behind any event, or any two events that seem to coincide? Any calculation depends on how you define an event, how you draw lines around pieces of data, how much weight you attach to which causal arrows, decisions that in the end must be arbitrary or guided by your particular interests and biases.

The inability to switch off, to switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation, is a hot topic in medicine and psychology right now. It is measured by heart rate variability (HRV). Which should, if you are well balanced, be high: your heart rate should vary a lot. If you can gear up when you have to, and then switch quickly and comfortably

The couple's negative power source will start burning out. They'll lose the shielding torque of pessimism and feel more threatened by the external environment. A to-do list or an inane conversation or a politician's face will push their bodies into the blind anxiety of survival mode. They will start turning against thinking itself, the volatility

Relaxed minds seem to spew meaning on whatever’s in perception.

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”

… we must never forget the lesson of Oedipus with which we began: that the urges to confront or to flee the truth are present in all of us. The harder the truth, the greater the temptation to escape it.