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General Battuta posted:His Blind Brain Theory is the syllabus summary of an undergraduate class. It's the beginning of modern neuroscience, not the end. Your desire to feel smarter is at least muddying your judgement. If BBT is the beginning, why is not widely accepted? Of course BBT won't shock someone in the field who studies neuroscience and is accustomed to the various theories and interpretations. The debate is very alive and it goes on all sort of directions. What is sure is that we are NOWHERE close to final, satisfying explanations that clear the field from other speculations. No one has won that lottery yet, even if many claim they did (like you, apparently). If you think that lowly of Bakker then what do you think of Nagel? Your big error is this desire to draw very distinct lines between what you judge as valuable debate and what is instead just baseless speculation. But you're just trapped in the same pattern: you're applying your biases, you determine your identity and claim some superior judgement. You know how the brain functions and every other theory is unsatisfying. The field of neuroscience and philosophy is interesting BECAUSE it splinters in all directions. BECAUSE it gets people to think and discuss with very different backgrounds. BECAUSE it is contaminated and cross-disciplinary. That's why what Bakker does is important even for the scientific side. It helps opening it up, since this discussion is NOT one that has to be circumscribed to just the scientists and the specialized. This is something Bakker actively fights against. He writes "fantasy" to breach into readers, to prove that these arguments matter for everyone and shouldn't be closed in a lab. The argument isn't exhausted after you finished reading a paper. It begins there. It opens to the world outside. the trump tutelage posted:Are there any good Modern Neuroscience 101 type textbooks that address these concepts? A simple Google search doesn't turn up much and also I'm lazy. You could go at Bakker's blog and starts from wherever, it tends to be redundant in what he writes about : https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/ But his writing can be very dense and filled with jargon. If you want an easy introduction there's a recent short story that is very good: https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/the-dime-spared/ There are a million of blogs commenting this field, another good one is: http://www.consciousentities.com/ I also thought his (self-published?) book is very good (and short and a good introduction): https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Consciousness-Little-Less-Wrong/dp/1507869177/ Neuroscience isn't a monolithic thing you read in a manual. It's active research and it is extremely cross-disciplinary. I think the problem with General Battuta is that he studied something certainly interesting, and now he uses that lens to dismiss everything else. It happens to everyone. We always cling to our certainties and will put up an incredible fight before consenting to let them go. He got his own tool for comprehending stuff, and now he uses it for everything. Even where it's not pertinent. Isn't Bakker writing about this too? I'm just the same. I believe the stuff I studied provides the best explanations, and I always read Bakker's stuff through that lens. The only difference is that I naturally try to recognize patterns and similarities to build a bigger pictures. Whereas General Battuta seems just interested to praise his own superior knowledge and prove he's one step above, as if he has to prove to us he's smarter than Bakker. That's the problem, very often it's hard to find something that isn't just childish bragging, and it's not easy to take it seriously. Abalieno fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Jul 7, 2016 |
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Jul 7, 2016 17:13
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General Battuta posted:Bakker's not helpful in starting discussions because he hasn't said anything new to scientists. He's a philosopher and what he thinks of as a Big Deal is the demolition or marginalization of the philosophy of mind by neurosciences. That's only important if you're invested in philosophy of mind or lay theories of cognition. Uhm, the difference between scientists and philosophers is that scientists only talk to other scientists, whereas philosophers talk to all of US. How on earth you came to believe that writing a Fantasy book would have made a worthy contribute to NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH? Close all the labs and go read Prince of Nothing? quote:Lay speculation on how the mind works is also irrelevant. No number of blog discussions will make any progress. A better grasp of experimental statistics is what the field needs right now. Are you serious? Bakker is not stepping in a lab and saying "Stop everything! I have the solution!" Bakker is not a scientist, nor pretending to be one. He doesn't open brains to put probes into them. He's not "in the field", he's not trying to steal your job. quote:Bakker's a popularizer, although not a very good one, because his treatment is so shallow. He's so shallow that he describes your persona accurately. "Shallow" is a relative term. What's shallow for one guy is an immense depth for another. There's no universal measure that distinguishes "shallow" from "deep". So what's the point of all you're writing? I tell you: the point is to prove your own personal status. You want to declare Bakker's stuff is "shallow" because you're interested to prove you're smarter. It all bogs down to penis size measurement and taking it personally between you and him, and it is quite ridiculous. The superb tone is the one *you* use, don't you notice?
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Jul 7, 2016 17:51
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The Ninth Layer posted:I haven't finished it yet, but I was under the impression that TUC was wrapping up this story arc but wasn't ever planned as the final book of the series. As far as I know from Bakker's blog, this completes the cycle he had in mind since the beginning. The final duology is something that I think was conceived later.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:32
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