Consciousness Isn’t About the Mind, It’s About the Body

Thinking and Feeling Are the Products of the Brain's Physical Architecture

Many students of the mind have observed that consciousness—as a word or as a concept—is a placeholder, a suitcase word for multiple processes in our brains. Those processes are systems in our brains that are made of physical matter; they chug away, following physical laws, to generate our felt state, our subjective sense of life. And somehow, in the entirety of their collective actions, we are aware, we feel, we love, we sit on the porch in the evening and enjoy the sunset.

Some say the gap—between nerve cells …

Does Philosophy Hold Crucial Insights for the Neuroscience of Inspiration?

How Charles Taylor's Exploration of Language is Shedding Light on the Link Between Reading and Big Ideas

In a passage in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert wrote one of history’s most beautiful descriptions of language: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat crude rhythms …