Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

Ghosts serve perhaps a useful role in human lives: they could help define the nature of our selves and what it is to be human. I discuss this in this essay which was published on 29 August 2023 by Blue Labyrinths magazine. See  https://bluelabyrinths.com/2023/08/28/can-ghosts-shape-our-selves/   Hamlet and his father (William Blake, 1806) (Public Domain)

My review of Peter Godfrey-Smith's book, Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousnes s has just been published in the Newtown Review of Books . (Image: Pleine Mer, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) (Wikimedia Commons))

Jorge Luis Borges, 1968 (Credit: Wikimedia Commons) My research paper on “Jorge Luis Borges and the Nothingness of the Self” has been published in the 2016 edition of the Literature & Aesthetics journal released a few days back. In this paper, I discuss how Borges uses his ideas on selfhood to explore the “central problem of literature” that Andre Maurois highlighted and how in the process projects to the reader his idea of reality. I argue also that the self that Borges tries to present in his work may nevertheless not be always congruent with the self he may have wanted to convey. This is because his quest is influenced by a number of factors, not least the fact that the self-creation process is affected by our interplay with the external world.

We use the brain as an adjunct to our life, as a highly sophisticated tool to facilitate our actions. However, do the functions of the brain alone amply explain the whole of the human condition? W hen I throw a ball to someone else, I show the unfailing workings of a natural law. That however does not mean that I represent that law of physics, let alone become an embodiment of that law. Similarly, when a particular set of neurons in my brain gave rise to my intention to throw that ball, those neurons were merely involved in a physiological activity underlying that intention. That does not mean that this particular of set of neurons is the intention itself. My MP3 player tells me that exceeding a certain volume level may harm my hearing in the long term. By indicating that this man-made device is “telling me” something, I use here language that anthropomorphises an artefact. I could have said instead that a warning message is displayed on the music player's screen. But I use