Lives on Earth

consciousness

  • Time and Again

    Time goes by. The future comes towards us—or, to some, we move towards it. The future arrives in the present and then both settle into the past, gone but not forgotten. Or so it seems. Here’s another possibility: there is… Continue reading

  • How Consciousness Might Have Evolved

    Human consciousness. Our mad, prodigious mind. Our personhood. Where did consciousness come from? How did it become part of us? How did it become us? Michael Graziano, a neuropsychologist I’ve posted about before, writes in the June 2016 Atlantic about… Continue reading

  • Michael Graziano on How the Brain Creates Consciousness and Spirituality

    Psychologist Michael Graziano proposes that our consciousness is more mechanical and less mysterious than we think. But he argues as well that this theory does not diminish the validity of our spiritual experiences. Graziano, in Consciousness and the Social Brain,… Continue reading

  • No Pain, No Sympathy

    Which living things merit our sympathy? Our pets? Certainly. What about human embryos? And plants? Is it consciousness or complexity or being human or the capacity for pain that makes an individual life worth our empathy? The debate over animal… Continue reading

  • The Fading Individual

    I used to see people, including myself, as individuals first and as social creatures after that. Emotions and words, my own and others’, seemed the prime movers; groups, society as a whole, seemed a context, a setting, not an essence.… Continue reading

  • The Brown Sisters: 35 Annual Portraits

    In 1974, Nicholas Nixon photographed his wife together with her three sisters, their ages ranging from 15 to 25.  He published the photo the following year, took a second that year, and then another photo every year after that. In… Continue reading