BC

You are totally welcome to all the sympathy, empathy, psychopathy, skeptopathy and any other pathos I can offer, but why should you not be bothered by...

I don't know -- I tend not to spend a lot of time around cadaver labs.

What's to like about a dead body you didn't know when it was alive? It's the life of the living we respect, not the package the dead occupy.

There is also no gravity. The earth sucks.

If only 99% of the population WERE actually familiar with political maps. Along with not knowing how to balance a checkbook (or make sense of a credit...

There are climate change deniers, true enough. And there are people who shy away from affirming climate change because they can't quite grasp enough o...

"They believed the world is flat" is a 18th/19th century assumption about what people in the middle ages thought. In fact, the spherical, globular wor...

Your sociology is generally right, I think, but how right depends on what you mean by the collective intellectual life and income and wealth. Income a...

This sounds a lot like Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace": You are right that "religion is an inherently communal and institutional enterprise". It i...

The startle response upon seeing a snake might not be "unconscious" -- it's probably more of a reflex operated by the CNS below the level of higher br...

Your mind causes you to do whatever you do, whether it's done by the conscious mind, or whether it's done by some other part of the brain. It's all yo...

NK is definitely not a typical society. It is a lot like 1984, except that the Maximum Leader Kim Il Sung is a "chubby faced maniac" as Philippine Pre...

Except when a handful (just a few) are able to instigate a nuclear attack. (That might not end up being an all-out nuclear war, but it would still be ...

I am sorry that you have had the kinds of experience you mention. Like as not, there are several routes to arrival at any strongly held view about man...

Should one like Thomas Jefferson because he wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as POTUS, was an innovative architect, an intellectual, etc....

Is misanthropy a result of esteeming one's self too highly? So highly, in fact, that other people are blunt, dull, stupid, and ugly, and by comparison...

That's a great quote, but I don't think it is true. "The past isn't even past." Faulkner said. The past doesn't break off and float away like that. Ev...

Linking me to a long article in the SEP is no kind of answer. You sent me to read what somebody else thinks. I want to hear from you, here, what YOU t...

All knowledge? What about experience? You seem to have a lot of faith in this process of evaluating competing theories. That statement does not make s...

And just why the hell not?

Good advice.

Fortunately for your bank account, I'm unlicensed and can't legally bill you for professional services. That, of course, doesn't mean that my advice i...

Does being a professional psychologist suck (to use the technical term)? Yes, all professions suck -- more and more, sooner or later.

Economics is the dismal science, after all, so why would anybody like it? What you can do with x amount of education is determined by licensing codes....

Her waiter said, "Madam, how would you like your coffee?" The diva leaned back in her banquette, arms around two gorgeous black guys, and said, "I lik...

There is a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be serious and a time to joke. They who do not recognize a joke (in a jokey thread) travel u...

Garrison Keillor claimed that this joke was the funniest of that year's best jokes. One penguin said to another, "You look like you're wearing a tuxed...

Lame because the joke took too long and required an explanation. 28% funny.

Is this more insulting? "The better part of ran down his daddy's leg."

Why would that bother an Irishman?

Are you looking for a girl friend? My single 74 year old sister is available. She's totally immune to anything with double meaning--sarcasm, complicat...

"the presence of the outwardly unhappy is an unwelcome reminder of the presence of the inwardly unhappy state of the outwardly happy" is indeed someth...

"the presence of the outwardly unhappy is an unwelcome reminder of the presence of the inwardly unhappy state of the outwardly happy." — Noble Dust Oh...

Since we're talking about reality here, a reminder is apropos that "handles" (Rich, Schopenhauer1, Bitter Crank, etc.) are just placeholders represent...

"Rich tried to get himself together, but alas, discovered that he was spread too far all over everything, a fat bug smear on the windshield. Perhaps i...

I am familiar with the enteric nervous system, or brain in the belly. Familiar with the concept, not the details. Yes, it plays a large role in our li...

If interpretation doesn't go on in the brain, pray tell, where does it go on? I'm not suggesting any sort of mind/body dualism. The brain is part of t...

The news that we are going to die could be received nonchalantly, (after a certain age one can afford to be nonchalant) but because we have an imagina...

Didn't I read that line in another post, recently?

Nature is red in tooth and claw, as Lord Tennyson wrote; solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, as Thomas Hobbes put it. Just to keep things reali...

The life of the world in which we share doesn't have a purpose apart from itself. Life is it's own purpose, going on now some 3.5+ billion years. A lo...

A body IS part of the environment, quite right, and visa versa. But, the activity of the brain which we are talking about is not part of the environme...

I think what deters people from committing crimes, whether it be shoplifting, lying, or murder, is the deeply ingrained morality of their family, and ...

Our brains are locked up in our skull; there is no way for the brain to directly access anything outside the skull, except chemical signals that are d...

That is so very very true. We don't put new wine in old wineskins (but we do put whiskey in barrels that had old wine in them, which yields good resul...

The "customer service" answering and routing devices are designed to do two things: Demonstrate to the consumer just how unimportant he or she is to t...

Using some clues, one can sound as though one understands the physical mind better than one actually can. While we have made some real progress in dev...

Created by some people, imposed on and acceded to by the rest. What it will take to end, or change this system is revolution. Oh, oh, alarms go off - ...

I like American English better than any other kind, but that's the English I grew up with. BTW, a lot of Americans like the sound of "received pronunc...

IF the average school, whether you like it or hate it, dropped grades and left everything else the same, the public education would still be unsatisfa...