Dear God, You make, I make. You make me to make. What am I to make today? What are You making today, and what is the plan for how our making? In every small corner of every large nation, human beings are setting out to take disparate materials and fashion them into a piece …
The Crisis of Knowing How We Know: Postscript
There's knowledge, and there's faith. A final salvo in my rumination about epistemology, or the study of knowledge, and knowing how we know. Those things that require faith cannot, by definition, be proven to be true in the sense that epistemology demands if a thing is to be counted as "knowledge." Faith, by definition, is …
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Justified True Belief: The Crisis of Knowing How We Know – 5
From the days of Plato, here's what philosophers have said knowledge is: "Justified True Belief" Interesting that such a jumble of ideas connect to create a fairly solid place to stand. (Since the 60's, Plato's formulation has apparently come under fire, but let's just stick with that one idea for a moment.) Simply stated, knowledge …
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Placebos and Shams: The Crisis of Knowing How We Know – 2
When healing happens, what (or who) exactly, is in charge of the healing? Years ago, in Bill Moyers' 1993 publication Healing and the Mind, I came across an interview with Dr. Candace Pert in which she makes a stunning claim. She told Moyers that in multiple personality disorders, it could be shown that within the same …
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Brain, Free Choice, and the Limits of Knowing: The Crisis of Knowing How We Know – 1
In August 1966, I was seven years old heading into second grade. My memory of the guy that went up into the tower at the University of Texas to kill a bunch of people is vague, but it's there. Turns out, according to David Eagleman's Atlantic Monthly article "The Brain on Trial", Charles Whitman knew …
JEFF BERRYMAN 