Category: TtBLG

Consciousness Despite millennia of analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being "at once the most familiar and [also the] most mysterious aspect of our lives," said Susan Schneider. Perhaps the only widely agreed notion about the topic is the intuition that consciousness exists. [John Searle] Opinions differ… Continue reading episode #109 creatures of consciousness →

Questions about the nature of cognition and the relationship between the knowing mind and external reality have been debated by philosophers since antiquity starting with Plato and Aristotle. Plato's approach to the study of the mind suggested that people understand the world by first identifying basic principles buried deep inside themselves, then using rational thought… Continue reading episode #108 creatures of cognition →

“Emotion” is a term that came into use in the English language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. French émotion, from Old French, from esmovoir, to excite, from Vulgar Latin *exmovēre : Latin ex-, ex- + Latin movēre, to move). "No one felt emotions before about 1830. Instead they felt other things – 'passions', 'accidents… Continue reading episode #107 creatures of emotions →

Intuition is defined as the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.  The word intuition comes from the Latin verb intueri translated as "consider" or from the late middle English word intuit, "to contemplate”. In the past decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have made enormous strides in… Continue reading episode #106 creatures of intuition →

Instinct is an innate impulse or motivation, typically fixed pattern of behaviour in animals in response to certain external stimuli. Today instinct is generally described as a stereotyped, apparently unlearned, genetically determined behaviour pattern. Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing both innate (inborn) and learned elements.… Continue reading episode #105 creatures of instinct →