Entries from April 2007

Lavery on the Web

Comments   0   Date Arrow  April 29, 2007 at 1:31pm   User  by Psybertron

I updated links with David Lavery’s work recently, but I also just noticed a recent post of his summarizing his various web projects. As well as the “Descartes – Evil Genius” pages, take a look at the commonplace book “The Imaginative Thinker” which as well as being an extensive collection of quotes, actually includes an [...]

Tagged   UncategorizedComments  Add Your Comment

Alan Rayner’s Inclusional Science

Comments   0   Date Arrow  April 29, 2007 at 12:39pm   User  by Psybertron

I’ve been communcating with Alan Rayner on and off the Friends of Wisdom e-mail discussion group. I find we have a common understanding on many issues, and Alan is a particularly poetic writer, so a joy to read. Recently he shared copies of his paper “Inlcusional Science – From Artefact to Natural Creativity” (no link [...]

Tagged   UncategorizedComments  Add Your Comment

Pinker’s Mystery of Consciousness

Comments   2   Date Arrow  April 22, 2007 at 9:03pm   User  by Psybertron

Interesting piece from back in January in Time magazine by Stephen Pinker entitled The Mystery of Consciousness. Thanks to David Chalmers for the link; he’s referred to in the article in connection with the easy / hard problem distinction. Lots of other good articles linked in and alongside the article. Daniel Wegner’s psychology-based work gets [...]

Tagged   UncategorizedComments  Add Your Comment

Roger Boscovich 1711 – 1787

Comments   0   Date Arrow  April 22, 2007 at 8:29pm   User  by Psybertron

Just collecting links for future follow-up. Roger Anderton over on Friends of Wisdom has a special interest in Boscovich’s relativity work pre-dating Einstein, and in Lancelot Whyte a co-worker of Einstein, who also documented Boscovich work. The Wikipedia introduction is as good a summary as any to start with. (Beware confused nationality and consequent variants [...]

Tagged   UncategorizedComments  Add Your Comment

A Little Book of Plagiarism

Comments   0   Date Arrow  April 22, 2007 at 8:09pm   User  by Psybertron

Interesting PBS broadcast featuring a discussion on Richard Posner’s “Little Book of Plagiarism” – brought to my attention by Marsha over on MoQ.Discuss. Not listened thoroughly yet, so captured here for future linking. Picked-up so far, the modern interpretation being closely linked to the business value of the content copied, rather than the morality of [...]

Tagged   UncategorizedComments  Add Your Comment

Mind-Blind in Meat-Space

Comments   1   Date Arrow  April 22, 2007 at 3:25pm   User  by Psybertron

Kat Herder appears to be Chris Locke’s latest nomme de plume on Mystic Bourgeoisie. Crossed paths before with Chris over Abram Maslow, when following up the “Criticisms of Maslow” meme. Personally, whilst obviously wary of any prescriptive “objectivisation by numbers” of human psychology (see my manifesto), I still find Maslow’s Jungian rules of thumb informative [...]

Tagged   UncategorizedComments  Add Your Comment

Brain Booster ?

Comments   0   Date Arrow  April 21, 2007 at 5:12pm   User  by Psybertron

Interesting to see Modafinil presented by the Academy of Medical Sciences as boosting brain power in this BBC News Story. Like Amphetamine it induces wakefulness, but unlike the psychedelics doesn’t seem to act on dopamine / norepinephrine receptors directly, yet still seems to produce the “enlightening” effect.

Tagged   UncategorizedComments  Add Your Comment

The China Syndrome ?

Comments   1   Date Arrow  April 13, 2007 at 5:14pm   User  by Psybertron

Excellent opening lecture in the BBC 2007 Reith Lectures series by US economist Jeffrey Sachs. A large part of the opening to “Bursting at the Seams” was a call for a “new enlightenment” based on a speech by JFK following the Cuban missile crisis. The main thrust of Sachs talks, of which this is just the [...]

Tagged   UncategorizedComments  Add Your Comment

Liverpool Uni Inter-Disciplinary Forum

Comments   0   Date Arrow  April 8, 2007 at 8:48pm   User  by Psybertron

Upcoming presentations at Liverpool University’s (IDF) “Inter-Disciplinary Forum” inlcudes one on 6th June by Mark Maxwell on “The Metaphysics of Quality and the Unity of Disciplines“ Be interesting to hear how that goes down. A potted summary of Pirsig‘s MoQ, a shift from physics to life sciences, and a reference to Frijtof Capra’s “Web of Life”. [...]

Tagged   PirsigComments  Add Your Comment