What, Why & How do we Know ?
I commented on a post of Johnnie Moore’s a couple of weeks ago, along the line of meme’s being mimicked by their own analogue, genes – as funghi, bacteria, virus infections, etc – affecting (human) host brain behaviour. The cordyceps fungal infections of insects are used by Dennett to illustrate meme behaviour. Over the weekend … Continue reading “Parasitic Genes”
Galen Strawson describing his four level view of free will, ends up describing it as a proof of a problem between free-will and determinism, whereas it is the solution IMHO. If I am responsible for my decisions and actions, then that responsibility is somehow related to what I am, the set of resources available to … Continue reading “Infinite Free Regress”
Leon sent me a link to this paper a couple of years ago, to which I responded “interesting” – he knows I’m interested in memes. I didn’t actually read beyond the title until today. The essence of memes is that there is something “self-serving” about patterns of information (*1) which is independent of any rationally … Continue reading “Project Management Memetics”
Interesting to contrast yesterday’s UK parliamentary knock-about between Milliband and Campbell with Obama’s call for healing in the rhetorical wars between US partizan politicians and commentators. Blaming opponents for “all that ails the world” was unhelpful, he said. Cameron and Milliband were downright personal in trading insults of each other and their colleagues – despite … Continue reading “Wound or Heal ?”
I picked up once before on Karen Armstrong as a TED speaker; a breath of fresh air in the God vs Science fundamentalist debates. I bough a copy of her “The Case For God” yesterday and just started reading. Yep, she’s good. She lumps Ditchkins (Dawkins / Hitchens) and Harris together but Dennett is listed separately. … Continue reading “The Case For God”
Marilynne Robinson on (the same edition of) Thinking Allowed. The Dawkinsian approach reduces science itself she says. Hooray. (It’s a pity that sound minds like Harris, Dennett and Hitchens got hitched to the nutter Dawkins by the “four horsemen” meme I say, but para-science is an interesting idea). In a nutshell. Positivism pervades patterns of … Continue reading “Science Reduced”
An incomplete review, notes only from this excellent article. Hat tip to Sam Norton in his comment below. And some good links in the piece, eg to Stanley Fish. Explanation … avoiding reductionism. Terry Lectures on video – nb Terry Eagleton joke ? “It was I felt, characteristic of the delightfully informal nature of American society … Continue reading “Barbara Herrnstein Smith”
Another sequence from Doug Hofstadter responding with scepticism to Ray Kuzweil at the Stanford Singularity Summit (2007 or 2009 ?) – singularity as in machine intelligence or machine aided intelligence overtaking human intelligence. Sceptical in terms of short predicted timescales, immortality, time travel, hockey-sticks, etc … losing credibility … but concerned that mainstream science is … Continue reading “Ribo, Ribit, Robot, Rabbit, Reboot”