Passing by the house of the mathematician, a lecturer at the university, we could see into his living room. The bungalow was down an incline and the arrangement of chairs about the single arm chair had each its load of papers and books. It’s a natural organization and one that is missing entirely from the zoom room. Clean well lighted places without the incipient entropy, pace Hemingway, were the rooms of Richard Brown and Evan Thompson as they discussed mind and consciousness. Evan shied from the term panpsychist preferring biopsychist as more amenable to naturalism which is true up to a point though it staves off the bitter hour when the harder question must be faced. How did consciousness arrive from the big bang? Shunting that up the siding and considering the movement of the simple organism, if indeed it be an organism, towards the sweet side of the petri dish is certainly more scrutable than the nous sphere.
Both men were intrigued by the rise of panpsychism. Brown offered the idea of clever forests but both I think saw that as verging on Gaiaism or something. Transcendentalism in the philosophic sense or how things must fundamentally be for things to appear as they do was approved by Thompson. Could it be that life was sustained by a sea of monads, all those myriad switches that contribute their morsel of information till it erupts as a thought - we’re out of milk or hydrate now? Why does the combination problem clear the room? Is it too obvious?
Zombies received the head shot. Very stimulating conversation. Brown had a bad cold at the phlegm softening stage. He was in his office or what appeared to be an office in epistemic terms. Thompson was in a living room, a very nice one with a Shiva nataraja in the background and a fine mahogany desk.
View at: Brown & Thompson
No comments:
Post a Comment