What, Why & How do we Know ?
Although I’ve not being doing much original writing recently – very busy at work, home & garden, and learning some semantic-web programming(!) – I’m still following the panpsychism traffic via twitter and via hits on the blog. I still owe Tim Bollands a considered review – he’s in good company with my “close but no … Continue reading “Life, the Universe and Nothing New Under the Sun?”
[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”
Been distracted by other housekeeping tasks for several days but reacted to this on Twitter last week, and now bring it forward here: Although I don’t subscribe to constructor theory per se, this has two key components I hold. “Atomic” components of the cosmos are the limits of conceivability. All else (physical and psychological) are … Continue reading “No Possibility is Inconceivable”
We live in a world hemmed-in by PC rules. When I started this post about 5 tweets ago, it was about the latest “Sokal” prank poking satire at gender-based social-science research. Of course, being PC rules, they are broken ironically all the time, so the levels of irony – odd or even – become crucial … Continue reading “It’s Now Illegal to Mock Fruit”
Myles Power is an “internet nerd” with a real job. By day (or night, depending on his shifts) he’s a chemist working in an industrial lab (taking money from big business – yeah, he knows). In his spare time his podcast battles conspiracy theories on all fronts with the best research and analysis he can … Continue reading “Myles Better”