Blackmore Walkout

Interesting. Not sure it says much about the religion vs science debate, but it does say a lot about effective styles of interaction. If you go in “taking the piss” and showing your audience no respect, I’m not sure you can expect your audience to show any respect to you or what you might have to … Continue reading “Blackmore Walkout”

More Blackmore on The God Delusion

Checking out Sue’s web site, I see this contribution passed me by. Article on Comment is Free (UK Guardian) Podcast of debate with Alister McGrath, author of ‘The Dawkins Delusion’. (Bristol Uni & RichardDawkins.net) I have to say the text of the piece posted before the debate seems to have it pretty well right, so I’m going … Continue reading “More Blackmore on The God Delusion”

Blackmore vs Midgley

Brief interview on BBC’s Today programme with Sue Blackmore asked to explain memes (pro), and Mary Midgley asked to respond (con). As usual the disagreement is really just the words “only” and “just”. Of course conscious minds are not “just” copying machines, you do indeed have to understand the context of people’s experience and hearing … Continue reading “Blackmore vs Midgley”

Sue is the Drug

Seems I’m obsessed with Sue Blackmore – just re-read all the articles on her web site, again – particularly the mid-life-crisis post-50-years career switch from the paranormal expert to philosophy of mind novice. Such deep material, such human and witty delivery, and painfully open too. Anyway after my fix, I’m reminded of the connection I … Continue reading “Sue is the Drug”

Zero to Pirsig

This is a 2023 Annotation of a 2005 paper prepared originally for the Liverpool Conference on Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). The text is unchanged except for correcting a few obvious typos and formatting errors, and to keep me honest the original “It’s Evolutionary Psychology Stupid” remains here complete with old broken … Continue reading “Zero to Pirsig”

Consciousness and Free Energy

Just a post to capture a couple of unconnected links: (1) Sue Blackmore and Deepak Chopra revisiting their decade old “Battle of the Worldviews” disagreement at Tucson 2022 “Science of Consciousness” conference. Only managed to listen to half of it – not enough actual dialogue and Stuart Hameroff’s chairing doesn’t really help … but some … Continue reading “Consciousness and Free Energy”

Memetics – The Objectification Objection

I use memes / memetics as everyday language that fits with everyday social-mediated comms these days. How much #Brexit debate for example is about snappy branding of alternative solutions to the mess we’re in whether they are Unicorns or Norway models? How much smear or rhetorical marketing is involved in alt-naming of just about anything, … Continue reading “Memetics – The Objectification Objection”