Enjoying the view from Limbo
In honor of the passing of Daniel Dennett, I offer the following foray into my misspent youth, in which I assess Dennett’s materialist critique of consciousness in some detail. Read at your own risk. Daniel C. Dennett’s Sweet Dreams, though concluding with some positive suggestions regarding avenues of future consciousness research, exists primarily as a clearing house for his most developed efforts to...
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most famous and accomplished philosophy professors of the past fifty years, has died. I choose my words carefully, though I confess somewhat (certainly without intention) disrespectfully. Dennett was not a philosopher; he was a philosophy professor, a very different entity. And in saying that he died, I know that I am insulting his thought and that of...
Pushkin wrote the following lines almost exactly two hundred years ago, describing with grim fatalism his vision of liberty’s chances in his fatherland:
“With Freedom’s Seed”
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow.”
With freedom’s seed the desert sowing,
I walked before the morning star;
A few Republicans in the U.S. Congress are finally willing to admit to themselves, and more importantly to the world, what so many have refused to face until now with regard to their populist faction’s opposition to offering any further aid to Ukraine, and to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s newfound willingness to concede the need for some form of Ukraine package. As Texas...
An Orwellian entity called the European Court of Human Rights has declared that duly elected governments which pursue paths of fiscal responsibility and rational restraint with regard to the neo-Marxist demands of climate activists are by definition guilty of violating human rights, such rights now implicitly including the right to have one’s society and economy micromanaged by unfettered climate communists. In Scotland, it is...
Q. What would Donald Trump have to do to change your mind about him? A. He would have to replace his rational faculty with that of Thomas Jefferson, his temperament with that of Ronald Reagan, and his principles with those of George Washington. Unfortunately, his life, past and present, shows him to be on the very opposite end of the spectrum on all...
Art and non-art.— Every drama worthy of the name has some sort of implied agenda. The difference between dramatic hackery and dramatic art is that the hack begins with the agenda, and manipulates his characters and scenario around as needed to “prove” it, whereas the artist begins with characters and scenario, and allows these to unfold as feels natural to him until, willy-nilly...
Fake climate activist Greta Thunberg has been fake arrested at a fake protest again. Watching her — the most famous youngster on the planet — being picked up and pulled away from the street she was sitting on by police, while her fellow “protesters” simply watch the proceedings passively, without any of them moving a finger to object to her removal, and while...
Here is a clip from a recent interview of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., directly blaming the West for the war in Ukraine while voluntarily turning himself into Vladimir Putin’s number one American propagandist, supplanting even Tucker Carlson. NEW and very disturbing: Straight out of Putin’s talking points and out of RFK Jr.’s mouth — here he is saying Putin merely wanted...
Victor Davis Hanson, the favorite historian of American conservatives, continues the magic thinking of the MAGA cult’s educated minority, which finds ever more imaginative ways of persuading itself and its lobotomized audience (the MAGA majority) that Donald Trump is somehow the solution to all the problems he causes. The key to this magic thinking is the not-so-subtle art of obscuring or denying the...
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