Michael Flynn's Blog, page 19

ROFLOL

Some jokes from Slate magazine

The Catastrophe: 28 June 1914

"Sophie, Sophie! Don't die! Live for our children!"-- Last words of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 28 June 1914

The Journeyman (excerpt)

There is a new excerpt on BOOK AND STORY PREVIEWS from "The Journeyman: In the Stone House."

In it, Teodorq sunna Nagarajan and his companion Sammi o' th' Eagles have been captured by the ironmen, who have come down to the lowlands from the great plateau that rims the north of World.  Also captured is Karakalan sunna Vikeram, who has been stalking Teo in vengeance.

Teo and Sammi are being questioned by the Wisdom, advisor to the kospathin of Cliffside Keep.  His niece (the kospathin's daughter) is sitting in.

This story is done in first draft and is presently being reviewed by yr. obt. svt.  A third Journeyman story, "The Journeyman: Against the Green" is also done and is also awaiting review and revision.

After this, the sciatica having subsided, I am getting back to The Shipwrecks of Time. Been a long time since we saw Frank, Carol, Wilma, and the Peruzzi Manuscript.

Thought for the Day

The desecration of this feast [Nativity of John the Baptist] in Quebec began around the time of the uprising in 1837. It developed into the, by now, commonplace modern story of the appropriation by nationalists of what never had belonged to them. By increments it became what it is there today – the fully secularized “Fête nationale du Québec,” associated with demonstrations of power & aggression, riot & ugliness, violence & satanism. Nationalism, & its handmaid socialism, became the new “religion of man,” again overwriting the most ancient customs. Its own defining light is that which glints from the blades of the guillotines at Paris...
-- David Warren. St. John Baptist

Mochua

Another old poem from a forgotten folder: Mochua

If the Only Tool You Allow Yourself is a Hammer...

...you'll have a hard time painting your ceramics.

Ed Feser, over on his philosophy blog, makes the following useful observation:

[T]he problem [of consciousness] is a problem in principle, and ...it isn’t going to be solved by further application of existing methods precisely because the problem is generated by the application of existing methods.  ... [T]he problem of consciousness is a result of the move Galileo, Descartes, and Co. made of taking color, sound, heat, cold, and other sensory qualities out of the material world and relocating them in the mind’s experience of that world.  Having thus made matter essentially devoid of qualia and qualia essentially immaterial, there is no way on this picture of things you are ever going to “naturalize” qualia.  You are stuck either with a Cartesian-style dualism ..., or with an incoherent eliminativism.  (Incoherent because the qualitative experience whose existence you will be denying in the name of science forms the evidential base of science -- a problem Democritus and Schrödinger saw but Dennett does not, pushing ... his usual line that consciousness is an “illusion.”)  The only true solution to the problem is to see that the post-Cartesian conception of matter does not capture the entirety of its real nature in the first place, but is merely a useful simplification.

Or to put it another way, materialism does not even completely account for matter.
There's Another Cow Off the IceRead more »

The Hermeneutics of Perry Mason

These are the rules, gleaned after a weekend-long Perry Mason marathon on cable.
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Picking the Brain

In "Beyond the Brain," NYT op-ed columnist David Brooks makes the quotidian observation that mind is not brain.[1]  He is not the first to do so.  Searle, Kuhn, Lucas, and others have walked this ground before him.  He points out that:

One region of the brain will handle a wide variety of different tasks. "As Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld explained in their compelling and highly readable book, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, you put somebody in an fMRI machine and see that the amygdala or the insula lights up during certain activities. But the amygdala lights up during fear, happiness, novelty, anger or sexual arousal (at least in women). The insula plays a role in processing trust, insight, empathy, aversion and disbelief. So what are you really looking at?"
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Contra exteros crustulum circumdatos

Sure and 'tis all in the hermeneutics.
The Never-Ending War Between Science and Humanism... Read more »

Advance Warning

TOF will be autographing and reading from On the Razor's Edge at the Rt.33 Barnes and Noble at 7PM on 2 July 2013.  Be there or be square.