What, Why & How do we Know ?
I heard today that Matthew West had died just yesterday of a brief illness, thanks to a Medium post by Ian Bailey shared on LinkedIn. Matthew’s contribution to my own interest in ontology is kinda baked-in to a lot of my thinking, in the same way that (say) Dennett and Pirsig are, with only a … Continue reading “Matthew West R.I.P.”
No, he’s not. He does not say that “Consciousness is an Illusion”. End of. In short: Dennett’s position is that: Consciousness and conscious will are as real and evolved as anything else in the world. The powerful (useful, but misleading) ILLUSION is the Cartesian theatre / video screen with the homunculus viewer / user as … Continue reading “Is Dennett an Illusionist?”
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”
I gave a talk to the ISSS last weekend. Public link to PDF of the ISSTalk Slides here. Members link to the recording here (November 19, 2022). I postponed an “in conversation” session with Anatoly Levenchuk at the Russian EEMI from the previous week until early new year. I made several references to EEMI and … Continue reading “Systems – Work(s) in Progress”
Pointing out that hypocrisy has become the standard of all political discourse rather than addressing substantive content. Great post from Jamie Bartlett earlier today: Political argument is becoming one & tedious effort to identify hypocrisy in your opponents’ behaviour, in order than you can comfortably ignore anything useful they say. Gets us nowhere. — Jamie … Continue reading “Don’t Panic Captain Mainwaring #COP26”
(Editorial Note : This paper was originally prepared for the 2005 Liverpool Conference on Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). It is a personal non-technical view of the MoQ, and indeed the first part of paper is an entirely subjective and naive account of the author’s “thought journey” that led to reading Pirsig … Continue reading “It’s Evolutionary Psychology Stupid”
Jean-Luc Delatre – Only just discovered this site, following some feedback from Jean-Luc. An interesting mix of Tao (Zen) thought with epistemology and ontologies. It seems Jean-Luc has been venting his frustration with the ontology approach at SUO / SUMO, where he has crossed swords with fellow conspirator at EPISTLE, Matthew West.
Having started this blog in 2001 (a couple of days after 9/11) I’ve freely acknowledged, and made many references to, the fact that reading Robert Pirsig shortly after that in January 2002, was a game changer for me in terms of the direction of my research thinking, reading and writing. I’d started the research blog … Continue reading “Hidden Pirsig Influences”
A thread starter: One recurring theme of mine is stuff that looks like conspiracy to conspiracy theorists – the coast guy, anyone – is a symptom of having no model or accepted language to account for a felt problem. With the received wisdom of western, objective (scientific) rationality in the dominant culture – feelings don’t … Continue reading “Received Wisdom”
Often cast in the physicalism vs pan-psychism sense, it’s an argument I’ve left long behind for my “information realism”. Many reacting recently to Kastrup’s Idealism / Pan-psychism as the kind of stuff “only stoned hippies could contemplate as real”. Myself, I get why he’s contemplating (promoting) it, but it’s really just word-play in the end … Continue reading “Realism vs Idealism Saga Continues”