Mind Shadows Home      Tielhard de Chardin, Noogenesis, No-Self, & Implications For An Intelligent Universe

A Jesuit priest born the year before Darwin's death, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin sought the Vatican's approval for his manuscripts, but never got it. His superiors continually denied permission for their release, believing that his theories would not accord with Church doctrine. Published posthumously in 1955 as The Phenomenon of Man, the book assembles his ideas and is based on his work as both a philosopher and paleontologist. His ideas matured in the 1940s while he was in China studying the fossil remains of Peking Man.

Mind Shadows Home      Benjamin Libet & Free Won't

(An updated, clearer article can be found be clicking here.)

Hold out your arm. Look at it. Now bend your hand at the wrist. Do it whenever you want. Do it a few times.

How did this process begin? Was it you? Was it these words?

In 1985, neurosscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment similar to this. (See Free Will & Benjamin Libet's Experiments, 8 November 2003.)

< Photo of Camus

Mind Shadows Home      Beyond Science

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water, and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes--how shall I negate this world whose power I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. . . . What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on the troubled heart teach me much more.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942

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Mind Shadows       A Thought Experiment: Where Are You?

Where are you? Most people say that they are behind the eyes. Blind people often feel themselves at their finger tips when reading Braille, or at the handle of their cane when walking. Sometimes people feel themselves at the edge of a car as they almost have an accident with a passing vehicle.