https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/Recent content in Blog on Dr. Nishanth K SHugoen-USTue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/the-self-as-story/Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/the-self-as-story/We tell ourselves we are the authors of our lives. But the neuroscience of memory suggests the narrator is unreliable — and perhaps always was.https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/qualia-and-the-redness-of-red/Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/qualia-and-the-redness-of-red/The problem of qualia — why there is something it is like to see red — remains the hardest knot in the philosophy of mind. I examine why functional accounts keep falling short.https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/free-will-in-an-age-of-neuroscience/Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/free-will-in-an-age-of-neuroscience/Benjamin Libet’s experiments suggested that unconscious brain activity precedes conscious decisions. Decades later, the implications remain fiercely debated.https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/the-predictive-brain/Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/the-predictive-brain/The brain does not passively receive sensory data. It generates predictions about what is out there and checks them against incoming signals. The implications for our understanding of consciousness are profound.https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/why-philosophy-matters-for-ai-ethics/Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/why-philosophy-matters-for-ai-ethics/The ethics of artificial intelligence cannot be reduced to engineering trade-offs. It requires the kind of conceptual clarity that only philosophical inquiry can provide.https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/memory-identity-and-the-self/Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/memory-identity-and-the-self/John Locke argued that personal identity consists in continuity of memory. Modern neuroscience suggests the relationship between memory and selfhood is more complex — and more interesting — than Locke imagined.https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/what-would-a-conscious-ai-feel/Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/what-would-a-conscious-ai-feel/The question sounds like science fiction, but it demands philosophical precision. I argue that asking ‘what it’s like’ to be an AI is already making a loaded assumption about the structure of experience.https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/the-emotions-of-machines/Wed, 30 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/the-emotions-of-machines/If a machine behaves as though it is in pain, does it matter whether it actually feels pain? The question forces us to disentangle what we mean by emotion, and why the distinction between performance and experience matters.https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/descartes-was-half-right/Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://nishanthks.pages.dev/blog/descartes-was-half-right/The Cogito is one of the most audacious moves in the history of thought. It also contains a subtle equivocation that has haunted mind–body debates for four centuries.