Month: July 2007

Linked from David’s own Fragments of Consciousness blog is this Interview on Bloggingheads he did with John Horgan.

A full hour and wide-ranging … from David’s roots in the Woodstock of Consciousness, via the “hard problem”, free will, pure (non-objective) concsiousness, blurring the science / philosophy boundary, to rational mysticism and peyote and LSD induced states of mind, and modern research into psychedelics.

Interesting to see David downplay “the hard problem” as just his statement of the obvious that, when it comes to consciousness, any theory which ignores explanation of the subjective experience of it would seem to miss the point. He sees many physionomic approaches as doomed to making progress on the behavioural aspects (the easy problem) only. It seems he too sees a lot of mileage in the “fundamental information” angle providing not just the basis for the physical aspects, but also the phenomenal aspects. Excellent.

John loses his way a little bit on the nihilistic downside of the “illusory reality” worldview, but David reminds us illusion or not, reality is reality – like life and consciousness too. A point I’ve made before. Illusion means it may not be what we believe it is, it doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Interesting that John found David’s work refreshing and intelligible compared to others in the field – I have to say hearing him talk I would agree – but I also have to say I found his book “The Conscious Mind” deeply technical and jargon-laden on many issues – like “supervenience”.

New Yorker article on the confusion of “technical innovation” with “technology” – technology being the useful stuff, the stuff we use, independent of how old it is. [via Rivets again]

Reminds me of an essay I wrote some time ago about the myth of technology de-skilling the workplace, where I used the example of a cave-dweller shaping a flint with which to hunt. (Need to check if I have an electronic copy ?)

You know it makes sense. Brilliant. Love all the disclaimers at the end … lends that air of autheticity. [via Rivets]

I’ve never been a smoker, but I have to agree with Ray Girvan and say I too miss smoking in pubs. Some of the essential character seems lost. As Ray says, they’re going to have to work at their atmosphere. (Ray’s piece is principally about the importance of the sense of smell in cultural memory … baking bread and brewing coffee to make the house you’re trying to sell appear homely, etc.)

Oddly at my sister’s house last week, she had an electric “fire” room heater that involved small pieces of real coal laid on the heating element, to evoke that “real fire” smell in the room, as the volatile tarry hydrocarbons are released when the coal is warmed.

A smell I can instantly recall from the very thought itself … takes me back to a time making coal-gas over the kitchen stove in my youth …. don’t ask. Another meta-meme.

Nick Maxwell’s most recent work “Is Science Neurotic ?”, was published last year, coinciding with his formation of the “Friends of Wisdom“, a campaign to promote the values of wisdom – the wisdom of value – in science generally, from basic education to the highest academic research.

Nick’s message coincides very closely with my own, that “basic empiricism” – the accepted logic that “scientific” knowledge is and should be based entirely on the apparent objectivism of refutation by empirical testing – is a fallacy, and that the preservation of that “faith” in the face of reality is fundamentally a psychological problem, a neurosis. Furthermore that neurosis is such a serious problem “of our time” that the very existence of what we value in the cosmos is threatened unless we wake up and face the facts.

Unusually, rather than my normal one-liners, I was moved to write a fairly lengthy review of Nick’s latest work – here.

Yes that’s an erstwhile battery powered Sinclair C5, fitted with a turbojet. Mad. Via Rivets

Seems the people at Steorn just did a public demo of their anomalous energy machine. Link via Nova Spivak. But they had a technical hitch. Hmmm, oh well.

Nice link here from Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science”.