Two Minds Blog

Image of protest against the 1918 Sedition Act during World War I. That act was repealed in 1920. Many concerning things have happened in the United States over the past month, but the one I'd like to write about today is an effort to win arguments by redefining terms. In a recent article titled "In Trump's Washington, Words Become Weaponized," the New York Times  presents a variety of examples in which the White House's recent Executive Orders use terms in ways that are unusual, or in some cases literally opposite from the term's plain-language meaning. Here are some notable instances (if you're up on all the news, you can skip to the part after the bullets, but I do like to document my sources): The term "DEI" (for  diversity, equity, and inclusion ) was used as a pejorative in President Trump's press conference after a January 30 airplane crash, in which he said that "we need to have our smartest people" as air traffic controll...

We say things like "I'm stressed this week" or "how are you coping?" with such frequency that these are almost generic terms for any unpleasant psychological experience we might have. The words "stress" and "coping" have become so much a part of the vernacular that we might forget they were originally technical terms used by psychologists. We probably have a sense that stress is on a continuum, less intense than things like depression or PTSD but also more than everyday hassles. And we likely also think about different ways of coping (if we think about coping at all), with the inherent idea that some ways of coping are probably healthier than others in some undefined way. The terms "stress" and "coping" are like the "Kleenex" of psychology -- former brand-name terms that now have acquired a much broader and more diffuse meaning than they originally had. The 1984 book Stress, Appraisal, and Coping , by Richard Laz...

  I have written previously about "bounded rationality," a behavioral economics concept that says people's decision-making is not as logical as they might believe. I have also written about various ways that we can improve our decisions, whether that's through the scientific method , the legal process , or peer review . Some of these strategies rely just as much on the Intuitive Mind as on the Narrative Mind, and other strategies like Gary Klein's Naturalistic Decision Making  or the actions triggered by situational awareness are even more Intuitive. This week, I'd like to examine the idea that even the more rational strategies don't need to be strictly true  in order to help us succeed. The philosopher Immanuel Kant described a difference between phenomena , which are the things we experience, and noumena , which is the underlying reality that generates phenomena. Unfortunately, we have no way to connect with that underlying reality. Everything we might...

By fall 2024, most schools and universities have gotten just far enough in their understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) to officially forbid its use. The problem, most professors say , is plagiarism -- the practice of presenting another person's work as your own. This is, on its face, nonsense. Courts have already determined that the products of AI are not copyrightable because there is no human author , and legal experts predict that courts will also find AI is not a "person" and cannot be held liable for its actions. (There's more disagreement about who should  be liable for adverse products of AI, though -- the user? the original programmer? the company that makes money from the tool?). The whole point of AI is that it can process reams of existing data, identify patterns, and use those patterns to produce something new . The student using AI to write a term paper therefore is not plagiarizing in the usual sense of the word; instead, they are employing a no...

As usual, I am ending the year by taking a look back at where we have been on the Two Minds Blog in 2024, with some updates on recent topics. I wrote a few posts about unusual forms of consciousness, two of them drawing on the work of philosopher  Eric Schwitzgebel . My most recent was about the psychology of octopi , who have a fascinating nervous system that's distributed among their 8 arms and allows the arms to operate semi-autonomously. You can read more about cephalopod consciousness here, and below is a great diagram  of the octopus nervous system from Instagram: I also wrote about the possibility (originally suggested by Schwitzgebel ) that the United States is literally conscious . That piece came out right after the election, and was relatively popular -- I think because it suggested some concrete steps that we might be able to take to calm things down in our national awareness. I wrote about dissociative identity disorder , which is the experience of having multip...