Close Reading

 Although it seems like the battle has been well and truly lost on this front, it still bothers me that people use 'lay' instead of 'lie'. For instance: "There's a bunch of keys laying around here somewhere. Have you seen them?" This should be: "There's a bunch of keys lying around here somewhere. Have you seen them?" 'Lay' is a transitive verb. That is, it's something you do to something . In the case of 'lay', you might lay an egg or a table (though you wouldn't lay a table in the same way you laid an egg). 'Lie' is an intransitive verb. It's something you do without there being an object of the action. For instance, when you run, you don't need to say "I ran myself" in order to have an object for the verb; you just say, "I ran." So, with 'lie', we have, for instance, "I was tired and decided to lie down." Or: "You've made your bed, now lie on it." E...

The following article is a prime example of why bowing to authority in matters of thought is not a good idea: Is it time to give up on consciousness as ‘the ghost in the machine’? [Note: For some reason, the link above no longer works, but the same article seems to be viewable here .] Let me paste some extracts and give some very brief criticism. "There are those who believe consciousness is like a ghost in the machinery of our brains , meriting special attention and study in its own right. And there are those, like us, who challenge this, pointing out that what we call consciousness is just another output generated backstage by our efficient neural machinery." Notice the biased language: "believe" versus "pointing out"; the phrase "pointing out" is, in fact, an example of the 'begging the question' fallacy of assuming one's conclusion in advance (as one of the premises of one's argument). You can't 'point out' som...