Published in Australasian Psychiatry, June 2017 Edition.
Tag: Sam Harris
Quarks, Quasars and the Mind – Stranger Than We Suppose
Originally published in Psychology Today, 9th May 2017. The following is a modified transcript of a presentation I gave at the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatry Annual Congress held in Adelaide, May 2017. I have included some references via hyperlinks, however the content is generally indebted to inspiration from Richard Dawkins’ TED talk “Why the Universe Seems…
Is Vegetarianism a Religion?
Over the past year, author and neuroscientist Sam Harris has made his abandonment of eating animals public – and it’s been inspiring. As I previously noted in an unfortunately titled Salon article, Sam’s secateurs of reasoning attend to the weeds in his own garden as much as those that lie over the fence. Last year…
Why Psychiatry Should Discard The Idea of Free Will
Published in Psychology Today, 30th March 2016: ‘Why Psychiatry Should Discard The Idea of Free Will’. Excerpt: “Consider the commonly used medical expressions “organic depression”, “rule out organic causes” and “non-organic psychosis”. What do these terms mean? Organic is defined as “relating to or derived from living matter” and, when used in relation to an illness, implies there is a…
Letter From The Rubble Of A Salon Article
Published in The Daily Banter, 11th January 2016: ‘Letter From The Rubble Of A Salon Article’ As The Daily Banter said, “Steve Stankevicius published an article on Salon.com, only for the editors to distort what he said and refuse to change it. This follows a worrying trend on a site that claims to be a serious…
New Atheists Must Become New Vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders
Published on Salon, 10th January 2016: “New atheists must become new vegans: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the extra burden on moral leaders”. As some of you might know, Salon altered the title of the article without my consent to include the words “must”, “moral leaders”, and include the names of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. This was misleading,…
Free Will of the Consciousness Gap
(artwork by Diana Zanfirache) Some people challenge the posit that consciousness is a product of the brain. They claim that if we do not know exactly how inanimate material can produce consciousness – how the complex interactions of billions of individual neurons actually produces self-awareness – then basing our experience in the brain is…
Steve Stankevicius 