What, Why & How do we Know ?
Noted only in the past year, after getting very engaged with the work of Whitehead recently that I needed to give credit to a strong link between him and Pirsig that had crossed my path unnoticed back in 2006. With information and computation proving an ever more fundamental part of my agenda since the outset … Continue reading “Linking Links – It’s Already Connected”
Busy, Busy, Busy. Mentioned strange times regarding work-load and productivity a few posts ago; my pipeline stuffed with unread bookmarks and unresolved references, and a to-do-list with at least seven dimensions of priorities to juggle, personally and professionally. Not exactly “treading water”, but difficult to discern progress going anywhere. Ironic that the immediately previous Wittgensteinian … Continue reading “A remarkable book. It changes everything.”
HTLGI (How The Light Gets In) had a remote event – their “Winter Revel” – this past weekend, similar format to their twice-yearly Hay-on-Wye and London events, but hosted remotely on-line (*). I’m a big supporter of IAI/HTLGI, attending events over several years and reporting many excellent sessions and experiences here, as well as many … Continue reading “Reproduction Can Lead to Lower Complexity?”
Preamble This is probably as close as I’ll get to an actual review of Tim Bollands “Life the Universe and Consciousness”. I’ve made significant comments and references here three times already: Problems, Problems — Life, the Universe and Consciousness Life the Universe and Consciousness #2 Life, the Universe and Nothing New Under the Sun? And … Continue reading “The Review at the End of the Universe”
[Posting a draft from 2017] As a rule of thumb, any headline phrased like that kinda question was almost certainly created by an editor as click-bait and invariably demands the obvious answer “No”. So despite being Tweeted by @AnitaLeirfall – generally a reliable source 😉 – I didn’t actually read it beyond a skim of the … Continue reading “Is Matter Conscious? No it isn’t, but …”
I’m beginning to realise that in the UK philosophical canon Whitehead took up the radical empirical monism I associate with James, Bergson, Northrop and Pirsig, and which is seeing a resurgence in those increasingly rejecting a material metaphysics underlying the physical world. New-realists like Smolin, the new-panpsychists like Kastrup, Tononi and the Integrated Information Theorists … Continue reading “The Process Ontology of Whitehead’s Metaphysics”
Although Lee Smolin (realism) and Bernardo Kastrup (idealism) have quite different views of the cosmos, so much so that I’m pretty sure they’d reject each other outright, they share a common view of the problem they’re solving. I’ve been struck by several parallels in the last couple of years, but was particularly impressed with Amanda … Continue reading “Inside Out Appearances?”
From the Horgan / Katstrup “Meaning of Life” TV podcast, this is Katsrup’s elevator pitch, or breakfast TV interview response, to the request to explain his thesis in one minute: (1) There isn’t really a mind-body problem and the hard problem of consciousness doesn’t exist. The problem is we corner ourselves in a impossible situation … Continue reading “Kastrup’s Mind & Body Revisited”