Friends: When I said I was going to change the format, I meant it was going to be longer, better thought out, and truer to my sentiments. For better or worse, that means that most of these entries are going to be more texty and a little less funny. To make up for that, and for my own personal gain, I've decided to also make the entries more interactive. I'm starting a little work on the mind/body connection, and I would really appreciate feedback, constructive or otherwise. I hope to be adding entries once a week or so, depending on how fast I can read. If you have good advice, and I turn it into an admission essay or anything like that, I'll buy you a beer, or be your wingman, or something. Anyway, thanks for making it this far, and keep in mind that I'll probably throw in a few of the old-style entries once in a while...maybe when I'm high. Welp, enjoy.


One evening while standing in my parents’ bright, busy kitchen, I got to thinking about how things had been before I was born. Fiddling absentmindedly with my toothpick, I was struck by that odd sensation when some common scene or word strikes you as though you’re experiencing it for the first time. But instead of a sight or a sound, it was the realization that before a very specific moment in time, I had not existed in any way. Strange, I thought: Before I wasn’t, and now I am.
For a long time I have been adverse to the thought of discontinuities in nature, including those that deal with human development. I don’t see the beginning of life itself as disjointed, but rather as an unbroken, fantastically complex reorganization of what’s already there. The ingredients needed to make any organism are in the air, the dirt, or sitting in a grocery store down the street, and those constituents somehow work together to climb and balance on sheer thermodynamic ridges, sometimes for thousands of years. But the mind is a different beast; if consciousness is indeed made of physical objects, there don’t seem to be any constituents of it in our food, waiting to be incorporated into developing organisms. But it can’t be denied that consciousness is a real thing, a sense of being that in most humans develops concomitantly with the body and serves as our internal sense of identity for our entire lives.
So what is consciousness really, and what is its relationship with the brain? Though novel imaging techniques and countless autopsies have allowed medical research to gain great insights into this field, we are only beginning to develop the technology to study consciousness in any methodical, empirical way; and so theorizing remains a main thoroughfare for advancement[i]. I find this a very pleasing irony, considering that philosophy is a field from which modern science has worked for centuries to separate itself[ii].
Both western and eastern philosophies have attempted to define the mind, and though many theories have fallen by the wayside, the grandchildren of some of the originals remain today. I’d like to follow this evolution of thought, to look at how early theories influenced the latter and how contemporary theorists have woven empirical observations into the newest philosophies.



[i] Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) can take wonderfully detailed pictures of the human brain at work on given tasks, without the addition of radioactive markers. However, it is based on estimates of blood flow which, though informative, still limits it to resolutions of thousands of cells.
[ii] Science was not actually referred to as such until sometime after Newton. Before that it was termed “natural philosophy”

Photo Credits:

Subject of 50% of 70's songs: http://svana.org/sjh/images/marijuana_leaf.gif
Somewhere in China:http://images.pennnet.com/gallery/cgw/1204_fertilization.jpg
Pedro, the Miracle Worker:http://www.energysmartgrocer.org/images/main_grocer.jpg
Brain: http://neurorad.klinikum.uni-muenchen.de/33_mrt/0333_fmri/fmri_bild_3.jpg
The great philosopher: http://www.briansbar.com/Thomas.jpg