It is good to hear an enthusiastic conversation about my book, The Myth of the Closed Mind. Also praised are David Ramsay Steele's books. Everyone should read his latest, Orwell Your Orwell. It is full of surprising insights about Orwell's intellectual shifts and reversals. Steele really knows his Orwell.
Thank you, Brian.
https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-pk87v-50117
"But sometimes she just hears an unknown sound.
A power strange, unseen, his shy face hides,
Yet these, his whistling whispers, raise the tides."
We hear a door creak in the night. Our first thought is "is that someone?"; "is it just the wind?" is relegated to a second thought.
We see a pattern in events and jump to the conclusion that there is some agency behind that. We are supersensitive to agency in the world. That's one of the allurements of conspiratorial thinking.
The enlightenment is partly a matter of becoming aware of our instinctual prejudices. We evolved in a world in which a rustle in the bushes might be a sabre-toothed tiger, a voice-like sound in the wind might be that of a friend or enemy approaching. Making the wrong conjecture in that world might mean either death or missed opportunity for trade or friendship. Nothing was lost by making a false positive - thinking it's a friend or enemy, but it's just the wind- but much could be lost with a false negative - thinking...
"Our scientific theories explain how and why a machine works, but only once we have invented the machine."
___Ray Scott Percival
The enlightenment is predicated on the possibility of unending growth. How should we explain the possibility of infinite growth?
This is something that has fascinated me for decades, beginning with my conversations with the late Julian Simon, an outstanding economist and author of the well-known book The Ultimate Resource. I published an article The Metaphysics of Scarcity in 1996 in the journal The Critical Rationalist in which I attempted to explain the potential for infinite growth from the unfathomable content of our scientific theories. However, there is a technical problem with any such approach, possibly including David Deutsch's attempt expounded in his book The Beginning of Infinity. The difficulty was exposed by my teacher David Miller, the logician and philosopher of science and close associate of Karl Popper, in the same issue of the same ...
A discussion of the "Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development".
Alex Brocklehurst raises the question is human expansion, economically, psychologically, spiritually, technologically etc, in principle better than contraction?
Alex, Roger and Ray discuss. Alex and Ray push the progressive, enlightenment view, while Roger takes the dual role of a stick-in-the-mud, devil's advocate. Roger hates mud! : - )
Alex Brocklehurst has just had a chapter published in the book Jordan Peterson: Critical Responses.
https://www.amazon.com/Jordan-Peterson-Critical-Responses/dp/1637700121
Roger outlines the Ukrainian crisis, placing this delicate strategic confrontation in its historical and demographic context. Ukraine is a vital strategic interest to the Russian state, but not to the United States of America. Roger argues that states typically regard security as paramount, trumping economic interests and will accept a great deal of damage maintaining their vital strategic interests, and so the West’s threat of economic sanctions are impotent. Is the West playing a losing hand, given that Ukraine is perceived by Russia as a vital buffer zone right on its doorstep, but is 5000 miles from the US? Roger asks us to imagine a mirror of the situation for the US: Russia stations forces in Mexico and Canada, or simply establishes alliances with those countries. Such a move would be intolerable for the US state under the well-established Monroe doctrine.
(Some sources —for example, the omniscient POLITIFACT, argue that NATO has reneged on an agreement suggested by ...
Just watching the Joe Rogan interview with Gad Saad. Gad Saad said how in doing research for his latest book he was impressed by how the Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers anticipated a lot of what they, himself included, were saying about the good life and society. He names just Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. I’m sat there flabbergasted, thinking to myself where have these people been? What literature have they read? This coincided with similar thoughts I’ve had about other contemporary public intellectuals. I’m reading Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. Sam is good on stage, he wears a nice suit and he’s got that confident but pleasantly understated salesman’s swagger. However, his sleekly marketed pamphlet is astonishingly bereft of acknowledgment of the thousands of years old tradition of ethical thought by the world’s philosophers.
Gad Saad’s honourably humble comment on the precursory thoughts of philosophy highlights the typical story. The psychologists, neuroscientists ...
It would be healthier for free opinion and a free society for corporations to become less socially minded, not more. In your pompous “social responsibility reports”, you talk of sustainability and ethics. Well, keeping your visions about society to yourself and not browbeating millions about them through your “subtle advertising” and shadow censoring vast numbers of people who disagree is truly sustainable. Because, if you keep up your overbearing teacherly behaviour, there will be increasing pushback against your self-appointed global backroom “governance” -as we’ve seen with Disney.
People have had enough and would like to watch a movie without feeling they are being “educated” in your vision. You’re becoming not so much the global elite as the global bores. I’ve read some of your reports, and your “visions” are the work of minds with the sophistication of an apprentice who has just completed an introductory course in woodwork who fancies he can build a Noah’s Ark. All...
Without confidence in the power of argument, civilisation and further progress is impossible.
I’ve spent many years arguing this, and I’ve got some conjectural assurance for you.
“People prefer to adopt means that are logically consistent and abide by the rules of logic. To sustain this, I need not be committed to the thesis that the rules of logic are descriptive laws of thought, as Kant and later Boole (1854) thought. All one needs to suppose is that the human mind strives, fallibly, for consistency as a result of our evolutionary history.
We cannot easily suppose that our ancestors had a habit
of regarding a lunging sabre-tooth tiger as at the same time dangerous and not dangerous- a safe cuddly beast simply wishing to have his tummy rubbed. Those pre-Homo sapiens that had a propensity to neglect the law of contradiction here became extinct. Similarly, to ignore the law of the excluded middle-that the tiger must be either dangerous or not dangerous (and not some limbo third ...