Two Minds Blog

  I'm on record endorsing the use of AI by students to improve the quality of their writing and their thinking, but also expressing concern about the potential for autonomous AI to end civilization! So what's the deal here? Am I for AI or against it? As in many areas of life, the answer is "it depends ...". In this blog post, I will look at some things that AI probably should not  be doing for us, which might help to delineate the areas in which it can be more beneficial. Let's start with ethics. Although some techno-futurists have argued that AI will eventually be better at knowing what's good for us than we are ourselves, a recent report showed that a "robo-ethicist" using large language models (LLM) showed notable flaws in its reasoning. LLMs' ethics were consistently more influenced by utilitarian thinking (do what causes the least harm or the most benefit in this specific situation) than by reasoning from first principles (Kant's id...

My main purpose in writing this blog has always been to continue exploring the reasons behind health behavior. I often say in talks about my theory that the question "why don't people take their medication?" led me naturally to the question "why do people do anything ?" In pursuit of that question, I had several blog posts this year on health behavior theory: a post on Lazarus and Folkman's theory of stress and coping ; a post on self-determination theory , which has become entwined in the literature with motivational interviewing techniques; a post on Leventhal's dual-process model of cognition and emotion, which was a source for Two Minds Theory; and a look at new developments in a popular health-behavior theory that I had previously critiqued, the theory of planned behavior . I was also pleased to share a guest post by my colleague Dr. Britt Ritchie, who shared an example of Two Minds Theory in her evolving understanding of her own public-speaking a...

One of this year's most shocking developments has been a political fight over empathy -- yes, that  empathy -- with serious people disagreeing on whether empathy is a positive or negative force in the course of human affairs. Early in 2025, Vice President Vance invoked a Catholic doctrine called the ordo amoris  ("order of love") to argue that our moral duty extends more directly to our immediate friends and family than to people who are more distant in terms of race, religion, geography, or nationality. This drew a direct rebuke from then- Pope Francis I , who argued that the Vice President had misunderstood St. Augustine's writings on the topic. The Pope wrote a defense of unlimited empathy based on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, discovered "by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception." The Pope's message specifically took issue with new U.S. policies using increased force to target immigrants as criminals an...

The pace of technological change continues unabated, and many conversations turn to concerns about how our use of technology might be changing us humans in return. I wrote earlier this year about Jonathan Haidt's analysis of the ways in which two specific technologies -- smartphone and social media apps -- can have negative school or mental health consequences for adolescents. At a recent meeting of scholars on a journal's editorial board, my colleagues and I debated what uses of AI might be allowable versus not during the writing of a scientific article. And I wrote about risks that can occur when people use AI models as a companion or a counselor, tasks that it isn't always good at. In a recent book titled Jung vs. Borg (in which "Jung" is Carl the analytical psychiatrist, and "Borg" is the resistance-is-futile cyborg collective from  Star Trek ), Glen Slater argues that technology can have negative effects on us in four areas:  Loss of connection to ...

In my  Nursing Research paper laying out Two Minds Theory (TMT), I argued that a person’s sense of self is connected to the Narrative System, which "usually involves conscious thought, expressed in language or imagery" and "involves the sense of a continuous self." I might now revise this a bit.  Certainly, the Narrative Mind involves language (as opposed to the Intuitive Mind's focus on emotions, sensations, memories, "gut feelings" about truth, etc.). And definitely, the Narrative Mind's operations are normally accessible to us for reflection whereas the Intuitive Mind's workings are not. In my original paper I followed Freud , who identified the Narrative Mind with "I" ( ego meaning "I" or "myself", das ich in German), and the Intuitive Mind with "the other" ( id meaning "it," in German das es ). This dichotomy fits with Western thought dating back at least to Plato, who suggested that reaso...

  You've probably noticed how few things in life you can actually control. Can you control what happens in the world around you? Nope, there's new evidence against that every day. What happens in your own life? No, the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" come for us all. What your spouse does, or your kids? Good luck with that. Well, how about your own behavior? You can control what you do and how you react to events, right?  Well, maybe. Two Minds Theory suggests that behavior is not under your conscious  control. In the original theory diagram  (also reproduced below), notice that any new environmental event sets off a reaction going down two tracks -- the Narrative Mind on top, the Intuitive Mind on the bottom -- but the tracks never rejoin at the end. Only the lower track, the Intuitive Mind, has an arrow leading to behavior. Unlike Leventhal's model , where both the cognitive and the emotional track have arrows pointing to the endpoint of the diagram, i...