William Irwin Thompson

20 Feb 2022 02:15 - 09 Nov 2022 08:43
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    • Writer and hippie guru of some sort. Founded Lindisfarne, father of Evan Thompson. Taught at MIT for while (before my time alas).
    • Coming Into Being - Google Books looks interesting, kind akin to All Things Shining in that it traces evolution of different modes of consciousness through texts, and touches on Orality and Literacy.
      • If one has an inappropriate vision in the imagination, one generates an inappropriate “phase-portrait for the geometry of behavior” of the self. Our culture, lacking a vision of a multidimensional model of consciousness, simply oscillates back and forth between an excessively reified materialism and a compensatorily hysterical nihilism. This Nietzschean nihilism, in all its deconstructionist variants, has pretty much taken over the way literature is studied in the universities, and it also rules the cognitive science of Marvin Minsky, Dan Dennett, and Patricia and Paul Churchland, in which the self is looked upon as a superstition that arose from a naive folk psychology that existed before the age of enlightenment brought about by computers and artificial intelligence. This materialist/nihilist mind-set controls the universities.
        • Well that's a pretty standard take, can't say that I'm interested. More interesting is that he talks about The Embodied Mind.