It has come to my attention recently that I started this blog ten years ago back in May of 2007. Since that time I have written 487 posts and had over 120,000 visitors. It’s been a wild ride, to say the least!

I had begun blogging before starting this blog at The Brains Blog and had had some of my paper online since 2002/2003 when I was at the University of Connecticut, but this was my first real exposure to philosophy in the online world. At the time I was in the habit of jotting down ideas in Word documents. Some of these would get developed into conference presentations or papers for a class, but I had begun to accumulate quite a few of them.  At some point in March or April of 2007 I became aware that Pete Mandik had a blog and then found out that blogs were interactive. At that time I hadn’t quite realized that you could comment on the postings at the blogs and up till then I had just been reading the articles. It sounds absurd now but that is the way it happened! I recall we were waking somewhere after some talk or something and someone said ‘oh yeah that’s what’s fun about them!” I began hanging out online and arguing with Pete about his recent paper ‘Beware the Unicorn’ paper and eventually I thought that maybe I should contribute to a blog. I approached Gualtierro Piccinini who was the owner/manager of Brains at that time. He allowed me to become a contributor and I started posting regularly there in April and early May of 2007.

Soon afterwards I got an anonymous email from someone saying that people would enjoy my posting more if I did so less often and that if I had that much to say perhaps I should start my own blog. The email was sent from an anonymous gmail account and whoever it was said they did not want me to know who they were. That was a shock and I was pretty pissed at whoever sent the email. I forget what I said back but I don’t think it was nice. I never did find out who sent that email but I certainly do have my suspicions….Even so, though, they did make a good point. Maybe I should start my own blog, I thought to myself, and so I did!

I was still a graduate student when I started this blog and I certainly had more time to write back then! Once I got my tenure-track job at LaGuardia I had less time to write but blogging here was a very important source of excellent feedback on many of my ideas. I also learned a lot about how online interactions could spiral towards non-productivity. In fact some of the more unpleasant experiences I had here at this blog led me to include some kind of video component when I started the Online Consciousness Conference. I figured that if people could at least see and/or hear the person they were responding to it might change the tone of the conversation. I think it (mostly/somewhat) worked but who knows!

I am hoping to continue to blog here if only to work out my own thoughts about various issues. Just for fun here are some of the more active posts from the past 10 years.

Top 5 most viewed posts of all time (probably due to their being among the oldest but still):

1. Why does 1+1=2?
   • [August 2007] -The basic mathematical truths are either true because of how the world is or independently of the world. How could we ever know which?
2. A Simple Argument against Berkeley
   • [May 2008] -“last week I talked to this guy at the DMV who told me I need to file an address change” –are you now thinking of the guy I talked to in a way that defeats Berkeley’s master argument? I think so
3. What is Wrong with Eating Meat
   • [November 2007] -a vegetarian/vegan reflects on eating meat (brought on by Thanksgiving and the resulting callous humor surrounding killing and eating turkeys). Can we separate the issue of eating meat from that of killing animals?
4. The Philosophical Method
   • [August 2008] -‘A good argument for the conclusion that P is a reason to believe that P is true’ -I defend the claim that the method of philosophy commits one to reason and argument as a source of knowledge
5. God Vs. The Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser
   • [February 2008] -If knowing which path a particle takes entails that the particle displays classical particle properties then God, who always knows which path every particle takes, cannot know about the wave-properties of reality. The main pushback to this line of argument was that this is a by-product of our way of coming to know but I think this interpretation of quantum mechanics isn’t right. It is knowing that matters.

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