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Henk bij de Weg
Running with my mind. Who am I? What do I do?
PublishAmerica, Baltimore, MD (USA), 2013; 154 blz.

The book is no longer available from the publishing house
but can still be ordered by sending an e-mail to the author:
 henk@bijdeweg.nl .
Price € 15.00 euros plus post and package.

Summary :

Running with my mind. Who am I? What do I do?

The mind is a strange instrument. You can’t only think with it. You can also run with it. Or rather, you can train your muscles with it. The book contains about ninety mini-essays about about what you can do with your mind and what your mind does with you; how the mind makes who you are and what you do; and also how other factors determine you and the way you act. It addresses a variety of themes such as the influence of the unconscious, free will, your identity, and responsibility. 

The book is divided in five sections. A first section contains mini-essays on unconsciousness. The central question is how unconscious factors steer our actions. For do we really have a free will? Also this question is treated here but even more so in the second section.

The central theme of the third secion is personal identity. Which factors make that I am who I am? Are they  situated in the mind or in the body or are circumstances in our environment also relevant? And are we really a continuation of the persons we have been in the past?

This leads us to the question of responsibility: If there are so many factors that we cannot influence, as it seems, are we then still responsible for what we do? In order to get a grip on the problem, the fourth section explores this con- cept. It's especially about what responsibility is, what kinds of responsibility there are and what the consequences of the concept discussed are for our acting.

The last secion is a bit different from the four foregoing sections in the sense that it has no central theme. However, the mini-essays here can be summarized by the idea of "what is moving us". They discuss the factors that determine us in the broadest sense. For instance, we think that we deal with technical problems while in fact we have to do with social problems. We want to construct an ideal society but we make a mash of it.We think that we are guided by the good or the bad in us, but we are pushed into a certain direction. These are some of the themes discussed in this section.

This summary gives only a limited view of what is treated in the mini-essays. They discuss a variety of subjects. This summary is actually an incentive for the reader to discover the book and then, as the introduction says it, to make him or her think.

The book has a list of references and it is illustrated with photos by the author.

Contents


Making the reader think


Body, Brain and Mind

The Internet and our brain

Our mind is not only in our heads

Tagging my mind

The smile on my face

What it is like to be a zombie?

What it is like to be a zombie?

Me ad my zombie

Who steers the body?

Am I responsible for my actions or is my zombie? (1)

Am I responsible for my actions or is my zombie? (2)?

Running and my body

Body scheme

Body knowledge and propositional knowledge

Words and knowledge

Running with my mind

Superstitious like a pigeon

The fluency of reality

Hallucinating reality

Human maps

Dangerous ideas

Being guilty of what one hasn’t done


Free will

The contextual embeddedness of the free will

Freedom of the will

Freedom to act

Freedom and determination (1)

Freedom and determination (2)

Do my hormones make my choices?

What are we voting for?

What are we voting for?

 

Person and Identity

Personal identity (1) to (22)

(23) Am I different persons?

(24) Do my eyes see or does my person?

(25) Our future piggish identity

(26) Personal identity and those who are watching you

(27) Personal identity and Big Brother who is watching you

(28) Big Brother and Bentham’s Panopticon

(29) The contextuality of personal identity

(30) Culture and the person I am

(31) The group a person belongs to

 

Ethics and Action

Ethics as a neuroscience

Feeling guilt for what one hasn’t done

Doing and allowing

Allowing and responsibility

Praising the one who deserves it

Being responsible depends on what one does 

Objective and subjective responsibility

Responsibility and the levels of meaning

Bad actions, good effects

Responsibility and how we describe what we do (1)

Responsibility and how we describe what we do (2)

Responsibility for what one doesn’t do

The measurability of responsibility

What does being responsible mean?

No responsibility for what one did?

Good and bad actions (1)

Good and bad actions (2)

Good and bad actions (3)

‘Bij accident’ and ‘by mistake’

Being praised for what one does

The relativity of action

The development of man and the capacity to act

Destructing actions

Producing and practicing

How long does an action last?

Trust

 

What Is Moving Us?

Social problems cannot be solved as if they were technical problems

Man-made future

Our technical limits are human

Responsibility for what happens

Arcadia

The devil in your mind

The hero in your mind

‘If you start a man killing, you cannot turn him off like a machine’

The banality of banality

Liberty of conscience

Body and soul in the garden

How to enjoy my bike rides

Running as an art and as a way of life

Time as distance

A passport to the world

Can one desire without suffering?

‘Only those who can see can also dream’

Some thoughts about a quotation from Martha Nussbaum

What is wrong with science?

The bucket of the mind

On philosophical puzzles

 

References