December 2019 - Better Right Than Happy

The Best Records of the Decade 2010-2019.

In my humble opinion, of course, cognizant of the fact that there was a lot of worthwhile music I will likely never hear, and in no particular order:

An Attempt to Solve the Dualist Problem of Interaction.

Substance dualism is the philosophical position that the mind is composed of a fundamentally different substance than is the body, and therefore the functioning of the mind cannot be explained or understood in terms of physical entities and processes. While it has roots going as least as far back as classical philosophers like Plato, it is probably most strongly associated with Rene Descartes. Today, the position is a decidedly minority one among philosophers of mind and neuroscientists. In large part, this is simply a reflection of the prevailing attitude, particularly in intellectual and academic circles, which does not take seriously claims of the immaterial and supernatural. But there are also specific problems with substance dualism that, while long recognized, remain insuperable.

Music Reviews #1

Something a bit different, now: My thoughts on some of the recordings I have listened to in recent months, as well as an old favourite. My personal listening is about evenly divided between classical, jazz, and everything else. However, I feel more on top of what is happening in the “everything else” category, and also find I have more to write about it. So if this becomes ongoing feature of this blog, I expect most of the reviews will come from there.

Michael Gazzaniga on What We Are

As a corrective to that rather disappointing lecture discussed in my last post, I offer this series of lectures by Michael Gazzaniga, one of the major figures in cognitive neuroscience. In fact, he coined the very term “cognitive neuroscience”, and is responsible for much of the well-known split- brain research that has been instrumental in demonstrating the neuroanatomical localization of specific cognitive functions, and the degree to which cognitive processing occurs at the sub-conscious level.

Another Failed Attempt to Promote Supernatural Neuroscience

Over on the Discovery Institute’s “Mind Matters” website, my arch-nemesis ( 🙂 ) Michael Egnor recently posted a lecture which he describes as “a fascinating overview of neuroscience and the philosophy of mind (which) explains the fallacies of materialism and the logical and scientific strengths of dualism”. I thought I would give it a look and see if I agreed. The lecture is by Dr. Sharon Dirckx, who holds the positions of “senior tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics (OCCA) and… RZIM (Ravi Zacharias International Ministries) apologist.”