AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
"... the scientistic view that animals can't have minds, that no other non-human can have a mind....shift to unembodied minds...the most radical is the ultramaterialist that there is simply nothing that is not material, which can lead to a position like Daniel Dennett's that you aren't actually conscious." (paraphrased)
This one may be a tough one for me. I balk at astrology, spiritualism, parapsychology. Not sure why I should be ashamed of that. I guess I'm just confused, don't know how to reconcile my science urges with my weird-spiritual urges.
At 11:40 or so, the dichotomy between materialism and mind is mentioned. Argh. I always have the same reaction. I should write it up, although I'm not sure I can make it interesting.
Also of course my worldview incorporates cybernetics and computation; earlier thinkers didn't have the benefit of material models that could do mind-like stuff. But the WS hosts don't have that excuse.
Frederic Myers was a researcher into psychic crap. Fragments of Inner Life | Scholarly Resources. Myers lived right after Darwin. "The collapse of all matters of soul and spirit into (spit) mechanism". A real sincere hatred for it.
Fragments of an inner life, breaking out of prison. The file in the cake was a seance. Rationality and materialism seen as a prison, hm, seems kind of gnostic to me.
Intimacy of art. Taking the hand of the spirit.
Materialists who don't believe in animal minds or UFOs or disembodied minds
These are all very different but IME: of course materialists believe in animal minds, depending on what you mean by mind, but since our minds are brains and brains are evolved versions of what is found in animals, of course they have minds.
UFOs: materialists love stories about aliens as much as anybody, in fact, they are a staple of hard science fiction. But they believe aliens are going to be biological like we are, not spiritual (or no more so than we are). That is to say, they may be strange, they may work on a completely different biological or cognitive basis than we do, but they share our fundamental nature as finite, material, embodied minds. That is, they may be strange but not Weird. UFO enthusiasts seek the weird, I think its safe to say. They are looking for something beyond the ordinary, something enchanted.
Disembodied minds, well, yes they mostly would doubt those, hard. I personally am trying to accept those, but its a struggle.
OK this is an honest question for Phil, as a Buddhist. Why is it so easy to scoff at Dennett's assertion that consciousness is an illusion, while adhering to the Buddhist view that the self is an illusion? They are saying very much the same thing, from different angles. In both cases, they aren't exactly saying that out experience as an individual does not exist, more that it is something whose nature we tend to get wrong.
Note that Dennett's position, properly understood, can support yours, which I will call Weirdism. That is, if everyday consciousness is an illusion, no nasty scientist can dismiss your psychic and spiritual phenomenon as illusions, because everything is. What we are really doing is arguing about what kind of illusions are allowable in polite sophisticated discourse, which are culturally acceptable and which are not.
24:17 – there can be no intelligence like ours (the enemy believes). Intellect unmoored from a physical body
JFM: degrees, ultramaterialist, 25:12, which can lead to Dennet's "you're not actually conscious"
Around 57:00, saying science can't study purpose as if Darwin and cybernetics didn't exist. (Well, maybe he is talking about Grand Purpose of the Universe)
Finished the episode, JFM said something about putting magic underneath science, meaning I guess science can answer mundane questions of fact but the big mystery is more important and unapproachange through science (not sure what how magic gets at the Foundation of Things but what do I know)
In Q/A PF starts going on about "ideas that might destroy you", does he know about SCP Foundation and memetic hazards ?
Late answer about how logicians go crazy – the Oppenheimer movie touched on Gödel , who exemplifies the type.