Word: grasps
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...political advice to anyone running for office in the current media-saturated environment." That environment, plus Donna Rice, was the very thing that undid Hart's candidacy in 1988. How come he didn't write about it then? "Well," says Bellow, "it took him a decade to fully grasp the implications." Somebody should have bought him a calculator...
McGinn and Chalmers are among the philosophers who have been called the New Mysterians because they think consciousness is, well, mysterious. McGinn goes so far as to say it will always remain so. For human beings to try to grasp how subjective experience arises from matter, he says, "is like slugs trying to do Freudian psychoanalysis. They just don't have the conceptual equipment...
...doesn't mean--you know--God. He's speaking as a philosopher, using the term as a proxy for whoever, whatever (if anyone, anything) is responsible for the nature of the universe. Still, though he isn't personally inclined to religious speculation, he can see how people who grasp the extraness of consciousness might carry it in that direction...
McGinn doesn't mean that subjective experience is literally a miracle. He considers himself a materialist, if in a "thin" sense. He presumes there is some physical explanation for subjective experience, even though he doubts that the human brain--or mind, or whatever--can ever grasp it. Nevertheless, McGinn doesn't laugh at people who take the water-into-wine metaphor more literally. "I think in a way it's legitimate to take the mystery of consciousness and convert it into a theological system. I don't do that myself, but I think in a sense it's more rational...
Mike recalls the painful way he was given the news. "They had a pretty crude way of telling me. They said, 'They've got one body and two heads.'" Patty, still under sedation, heard the word Siamese and couldn't quite grasp it. "I had cats?" she asked...