Edmund Blair Bolles

Edmund Blair Bolles (born 1942) is an American humanist and author. Bolles argues that human free will and originality are real and natural, deriving from animal memory systems. He developed this doctrine in three books written in the 1980s.

Bolles is the grandson of Wisconsin congressman Stephen Bolles.

So Much to Say (1980), regarding the of children from birth to age five. It proposes that children are driven to talk because they have "something to say," have private emotions and thoughts to report.

language

Remembering and Forgetting (1986), which opens with the sentence, "Remembering is an act of imagination." Bolles makes a sharp distinction between computer memory (storage) and human remembering (recreating sensory experiences).

A Second Way of Knowing (1991), about , which Bolles defines as knowing the meaning of what the senses present. The book contrasts the sensory-based knowledge of animal and humans with a view of symbolically based computation available to computers.

Edmund Blair Bolles

language

perception

Notable Former Volunteers / Arts and Literature

Bolles' website