What, Why & How do we Know ?
Kevin Mitchell (2018) “Innate – How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are” [This repeats and adds to relevant content from an earlier partial review.] Several of the more important books I’ve read recently have felt mostly like syntheses and restatements of things I already felt I knew one way or another – … Continue reading “Innate by Kevin Mitchell – Review”
Posting to capture this link to presentations from the 2022 “Tucson” science of consciousness conference – in particular this one on various “dual-aspect monisms” by Harald Atmanspacher. I think what I’m proposing is similar to his psychophysically neutral monism involving a third neutral layer underlying both the mental and physical. He calls it Unus Mundus. … Continue reading “Unus Mundus”
I am again, as once or twice previously, in a “Just Write Something” mode. In many ways it’s how I came into blogging itself – when wrestling with complex issues beyond the day job – writing – putting into language in any medium – is part of the thinking processes. Dialogue about it helps too. … Continue reading “Distractions from “Just Write Something!””
I’ve actually blogged only one reference to Louis Sass – when talking about the mental illness created by crises of denial by the left of our right brain worldviews (McGilchrist, Sigmund, et al). The story of where “knowledge” went wrong in the 20thC. The denial of sacred nature beyond objective science. (Myself, above.) Following that … Continue reading “Louis Sass”
In this dialogue Bernardo Kastrup gives us his working definition of “consciousness: That whose excitations are the experiences we have. (Independent of our experiencing of them.) The sine qua non of experience. Raw subjectivity Raw basic experience. This is Pirsigian quality. He doesn’t use the formulation above in his book “The Idea of the World”, … Continue reading “Kastrup’s “Definition” of Consciousness”
Another, the first, of Richard Emerson’s interlocutors in his “Rebalancing the Future” podcast series was ex-GP writer James Willis. His “Paradox of Progress” and “Friends in Low Places” were books I reviewed very early in my own journey, and reviewed again when PoP was re-released earlier this year. We’ve been “fellow travellers” riding pillion on … Continue reading “Definitions & Rules in Technology”
Richard Emerson invited me onto his podcast earlier in the week. We’ve met Richard here before on Psybertron, his personal “Renaissance” book and his “Ancient Worlds” project discovering – rediscovering – the value in ancient wisdom, with Dante’s “cosmology” being the poster boy. Apart from having a shortlist of topics before we started – and … Continue reading “Rebalancing the Future”
Definition as a Coffin? “Hold your definition” is a plea by philosopher Daniel Dennett, often cited here on Psybertron, when dealing patiently with his scientific friends. Any discourse that starts with apparently clear definitions, manipulated solely by logic, is inherently limited by the fit between the history of those definitions and future of reality. At … Continue reading ““Definition as a Coffin” – Cybernetics to Systems Thinking”