Very good conversation. When Sean questions him directly, Dennett reveals his view of consciousness to be a hopeless muddle. All DD can say is that "it's not what you think it is." But Dennett can't ever say what it actually is. At least everyone agrees that panpsychism is just speculative nonsense.
My article in Aeon on Paul Tillich, a liberal philosophical theologian who opposed authoritarian rule and dogma in whatever guise it appeared, from the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany to literal mindedness and conformity in religious and philosophical thought. aeon.co/essays/my-gr...
Nice essay at Aeon on Paul Tillich, whose ideas seem to (because I'm not sure and need to learn more) resonate within me.
Paul Tillich was a religious socialist and a profoundly subtle theologian who placed doubt at the centre of his thought
The Road to Annihilation. All ideologies contain the seeds of authoritarianism. The absence of doubt is the greatest danger to civilization. Cf. Paul Tillich Dynamics of Faith. Nationalism & purity of origin myths enabled & actualized the Holocaust. It can happen again. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...
Religion is an expression of ultimate concerns, but it is not an answer to ultimate questions as those answers are beyond our grasp. Or so says Paul Tillich.
Trump's China agenda is WW III.
It would be churlish not to.
Yes as Sapolsky points out many things influence behavior. However, they do not determine it. Sapolsky makes a great and completely unwarranted speculative leap from the obviously true point that many things influence other things to the idea that we live in a completely deterministic universe.
Gleick is a first class mind.
As Country Joe and the Fish would have told you "then it's open up the pearly gates...because whoopee we're all gonna die." www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft0v...