Meet Santiago Ramón y Cajal, an artist, photographer, doctor, bodybuilder, scientist, chess player and publisher. He was also the father of modern neuroscience.
Hunched Over a Microscope, He Sketched the Secrets of How the Brain Works. It was Joaquin Fuster who first brought Santiago Ramón y Cajal to my attention.
Galen Strawson revisits Frank Jackson’s thought experiment in a final draft made available here. For those not familiar with this thought experiment, Galen sets it up quickly and clearly.
If this line of thought is right, the mistake on both sides is—to repeat—to confuse materialism or physicalism with physics-alism. The mistake is a mistake whether it leads materialists to deny a certain truth (Mary learns something completely new about the nature of concrete reality, and hence, if materialism is true, about the nature of physical reality) or whether it leads those who reject materialism to beg the question against materialism. It is a distinctively twentieth- and twenty-first-century mistake.
I’d be deeply envious of you were you able to catch a rare appearance by (in my book at least) the legendary Shuggie Otis (see The Mystery of Shuggie Otis and write-ups in The Guardian and Popmatters).
Before you meet Otis, you encounter the myth: the vanished genius worshipped by crate-digger cultists and waylaid by the industry—a psychedelic phantom sharing a bloodline with Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee of Love and Syd Barrett. Otis has a sphinx-like elusiveness. He answers questions circuitously and describes himself as neither having nor wanting many friends. He’s generous with his memories but only to a point.
Dennett plugging his latest From Bacteria to Bach and Back. I’m with Dennett on this deeper analysis of where we are at just now and have been very concerned about this since Sokal. It was one of the primary motivations for my setting up EPISTEME. The problem, going back at least 30 years, has been that postmodernism has been either assimilated into disciplines with no philosophical culture (anthropology-, english-, gender-, communications- studies, and so on), or into philosophical departments that have lazily substituted activist ideology for disinterested inquiry (there is a socio-economic story of academia that can be told accounting for this).
I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts. You’d have people going around saying: “Well, you’re part of that crowd who still believe in facts.”
Chicago University Press have now listed that the reissue will only become available in June.
I was saddened to learn of my friend Carmella’s passing. She had a meticulous and deep aesthetic eye but moreover she was an incredibly generous and funny spirit and rather down to earth. See the obit in SFGate. (BTW, that’s Carmella’s hand on Boz’ classic Silk Degrees album cover).
Nice analytical piece by Helen Pluckrose. Consider the incoherent fuckwittery of, for example, “queers for Palestine” and the recent unholy alliance of feminism with Sharia law (I refer of course to Linda Sarsour, co-organizer of the recent Women’s March blindly followed by white middle class pseudo-intellectuals giving new meaning to Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons). The permutations of idiocy are quite considerable.
Intersectionality, by undervaluing shared human experience and rights — universality — and personal autonomy and distinctiveness — individuality — and focusing intensely on group identity and intersectional ideology, places individuals in a very restricted “collectivist” position previously only found in very conservative cultures.
According to a recent poll, more Americans set store in astrology than in science or God.
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The first question is: Why is it that both descriptions seem to fit you—or, for that matter, why do you seem to recognize yourself in the self-analysis of all twelve astrological signs? Or, to put it another way, why is it that you can recognize and identify the planets Jupiter and Venus so readily after reading a bit and taking one look, yet have so much trouble identifying yourself from twelve descriptions when, presumably, you know yourself much better than you know Jupiter and Venus?
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Can you explain why it is that there are, at last count, sixteen schools of psychotherapy with sixteen theories of the personality and its disorders and that patients treated in one school seem to do as well or as badly as patients treated in any other—while there is only one generally accepted theory of the cause and cure of pneumococcal pneumonia and only one generally accepted theory of the orbits of the planets and the gravitational attraction of our galaxy and the galaxy M31 in Andromeda? (Hint: If you answer that the human psyche is more complicated than the pneumococcus and the human white-cell response or the galaxies or Einstein’s general theory of relativity, keep in mind that the burden of proof is on you. Or if you answer that the study of the human psyche is in its infancy, remember then this infancy has lasted 2,500 years and, unlike physics, we don’t seem to know much more about the psyche than Plato did.)
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You have seen yourself a thousand times in the mirror, face to face. No sight is more familiar. Yet why is it that the first time you see yourself in a clothier’s triple mirror—from the side, so to speak—it comes as a shock? Or the first time you saw yourself in a home movie: were you embarrassed? What about the first time you heard your recorded voice—did you recognize it? Clearly, you should, since you’ve been hearing it all your life.
Why is it that, when you are shown a group photograph in which you are present, you always (and probably covertly) seek yourself out? To see what you look like? Don’t you know what you look like?
Forty years ago this masterpiece was released. See Turn Up The Volume and Observer (I do wish they’d stop using the term “punk” for these guys).
We are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves … Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, “Each is the farthest away from himself”—as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers.
— Nietzsche
O God, I pray you to let me know my self.
— St. Augustine
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How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians
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Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos—novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes—you are beyond doubt the strangest
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Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life
manwithoutqualities 
