The Brady lunch, no, dinner

Thank the powers that be for Stephen & Susanne Brady, who hosted a sumptuous Thanksgiving Dinner last night, with too much of everything, and all of it made from scratch as usual. “Hi, I’m Bob, I’ll be your turkey tonight.”
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Tart on consciousness

Oh how I hate to read papers on the mind/body problem that announce I’m not trained in philosophy, but... Thus Charles Tart on “An Emergent Interactionist Understanding of Human Consciousness”. Struggle on. What’s good among the speculative coining of distinctions that don’t buy anything is:

1. Well-established psi-phenomena demonstrate the incompleteness of our physics. Since psi-phenomena are widespread, and distinguished primarily by escaping any obvious extension of our physics, Tart calls them not paranormal but paraconceptual.
2. Materialism claims that everything reduces to physics. If the physics it reduces to is some ideally-completed physics we haven’t got yet, then Materialism is a tautology that tells us only that physics will be complete when it includes everything. Materialism is only interesting as the stronger claim that everything reduces to our present physics, or to something like our present physics. Psi phenomena make Materialism look like a bad bet. Monism currently dominates thinking about minds and bodies: the view is that mind is just the brain at work. This view draws heavily on Materialism. If Materialism is true, then it makes sense to be monistic about mind and body. But psi undermines Materialism, and monism too must yield some space to Dualist theories: that minds and bodies are very different kinds of things.
3. Dualists all have the same question to answer: if minds and bodies aren’t the same, how do they interact? Tart presses the various psi powers (telepathy, psychokinesis and so on) into service. This is neat. The clairvoyance and PK that mediate between minds and the external world also mediate between minds and the internal world, that is, the brain. But it won’t do at all. If self-PK and self-clairvoyance are how minds and brains interact, then we’d expect the regular (external) varieties to be common too. But this isn’t so. Telepathy and precognition are widely distributed, clairvoyance and PK are not. And there is a problem of reference. If I bend spoons by PK, I envisage a state of affairs in which the spoon is bent, and somehow that occurs. If want to raise my arm, what state of affairs in my brain do I envisage and bring about? Tart might say “some brain state such that your arm goes up; fortunately you don’t need to visualise it”, but in this case might I not leave my brain undisturbed and just use PK on my arm? A new spin on Wittgenstein’s question: What is the difference between I raise my arm and My arm goes up?

Thanks to Andrew Gaines for passing on this paper. No, really.

Iced Vietnamese

Coffee or dessert? Out of milk this morning, so running on a kind of sweetened cortado adapted from the Iced Vietnamese at the Living Room coffee house in La Jolla: quadruple espresso poured over sweetened condensed milk. Whoof.

Happy birthday

Happy birthday to my sister Caroline Macdonald, who organised a great celebration last weekend: badminton and fireworks and a family dinner, and a long tramp through the Cotswolds. Mum, all three children, and their partners: she’s experimenting with having the whole family together.

Scam 'em high

Scamorama produces free entertainment from email scams.

The doctor is out

Deborah Branscum reports that John Gray, author of best-selling Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, is a fraud.

I remember being impressed twice: when I read Chapter 12, the core of the book, next when I saw his portrait photo. I was trained as a Gestalt Therapist; I would never consult a man with eyes like that.

Down but not out

Absorbing a bucket of new technology:

PHP, MySQL and Blogger and trying a new open-source text editor, SciTE, which adds useful syntax colouring but I have yet to find the handy clipbook feature with which I customise NoteTab Pro. Although 5jt.com is my official sandbox, all the results are appearing in a redraft (no, you can’t look yet) of the Vector website, revamped for on-line publishing.

So, lots to report, but we may be off the air for a bit yet.