Hot Thought

Psychology meets philosophy: knowledge, reality, morality, meaning

Paul Thagard Ph.D.

Metabalance: How to Combine Balance with Imbalance

In art, music, economics, and everyday life, we can enrich experience by combining desirable balance with the excitement of imbalance, requiring metabalance.

Motivated Reasoning: A Brief History

The influence of Ziva Kunda's concept of motivated reasoning continues to spread. What are its origins?

Social Media Promote "Information Incontinence"

Misinformation and disinformation are spreading indiscriminately because of a lack of constraints on the generation and transmission of fake news.

Lost in a Metaverse of Virtual Reality

Could we be living in a simulation? Is virtual reality a reality?

The Real Problem of Consciousness

Anil Seth provides an excellent characterization of the real problem of consciousness as finding mechanisms, but his solution based on predictive processing is implausible.

Fascism Thrives on Misinformation

Retaining democracy and fighting fascism depend on combating misinformation, using critical thinking, motivational interviewing, and political action.

Fallacious Reasoning About Reality Leads to Bad Theories

A Personal Perspective: The claims that reality is mental, empirical, mathematical, or social rest on fallacious reasoning.

Regaining Consciousness

Understanding of consciousness is impeded by dualists, exaggerators, deniers, obscurers, and underraters, but can be regained by neural mechanisms.

Steven Pinker on Rationality

Pinker’s book on rationality has valuable observations on good and bad reasoning, but emphasizes critical thinking over limiting irrationality by political action and empathy.

You Are Not a Computer Simulation

The hypothesis that you are just a computer simulation is far less plausible than that you operate in reality via your senses.

Relationship Metaphors: Helpful or Toxic?

Metaphors provide concise and vivid depictions of aspects of romantic relationships that are difficult to express literally. They vary from helpful to toxic.

What Is Misinformation?

Commentary: Misinformation results from defective processes of representing, collecting, storing, retrieving, evaluating, transforming, sending, and receiving information.

Intelligence Requires More Than Reward

DeepMind researchers claim that reward learning is enough for general intelligence. But this claim ignores the contribution of creative generation of recursive representations.

Is Writing Agony or Ecstasy?

The pain of writing is balanced by the joy of creation and communication.

The Ethics of Mandatory Vaccination

Rights to autonomy and privacy are used to argue against requiring people to be vaccinated for COVID-19. But the principle of avoiding harm sometimes justifies limiting freedom.

How Feelings Can Deliver Misinformation

Misinformation doesn't only arise from false beliefs; sometimes it comes from feelings, such as defective emotions.

Changing Minds: Logic or Empathy?

People who are misinformed about vaccines and other issues can be confronted using evidence-based logic. But another method that employs empathy and questioning might work better.

Songs and Emotions for Aging and Retirement

Songs about aging and retirement convey negative emotions such as regret, but also positive emotions such as contentment and determination.

What Is Hope and Is There Any?

We can be more hopeful about social and personal problems if we appreciate the differences between kinds of hope, such as honest versus false hope.

What Is COVID Fatigue?

Pandemic fatigue is a complex of emotions that includes sadness, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, fear, anger, frustration, and resentment. These can be changed.

Deepak Chopra’s Infinite Potential

Chopra’s claim that humans have infinite potential is based on dogmas about consciousness and the universe that go against scientific evidence.

Why Do People Like Breakup Songs?

Breakup songs can help you identify your emotions, empathize with others, and find paths to overcoming the pain of romantic disappointment.

Misinformation About COVID-19

Misinformation about COVID-19 spreads even more rapidly than the disease. Its appeal has many psychological causes, including motivated reasoning and evidence-free transmission.

Mapping Emotional Change in Psychotherapy

Psychotherapists help clients to reduce negative emotions such as sadness, anxiety, and guilt while increasing positive emotions such as happiness and hope.

A Critique of Christof Koch's Account of Consciousness

Neural theories of consciousness are on the rise, but Information Integration Theory is a poor candidate.

Balancing Lives in Pandemic Decisions

Policy choices about the COVID-19 pandemic are often described as requiring a balance between health and the economy, but what is balancing?

New Quarantine Concepts

The coronavirus pandemic has brought many new concepts such as "flattening the curve" and "quarantine haircut." What is the nature of these concepts and how were they formed?

Pandemic Playlist: Songs for Crisis

Happy and sad songs can help people to deal with emotions in a crisis that is both medical and social.

Virus Ethics: Who Gets the Ventilator?

Medical systems are becoming overwhelmed by the new coronavirus disease, leading to dilemmas about how to distribute scarce resources such as ventilators. Values are crucial.

Cooking, Cubism, and Brain Soup

The development of new methods in art and science works by the same mental processes seen in the invention of cooking, cubist art, and counting neurons.

  • Previous
  • Page 1 (current)
  • Next