Enjoying the view from Limbo
The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said of a famous American director (I quote from ancient memory), “He points the camera somewhere, I suppose, but he doesn’t see anything.” Today, four billion would-be cinéma vérité auteurs are pointing their own cameras “somewhere,” as we may suppose, but the assumption that all this pointing and shooting constitutes seeing, or revealing, anything —...
In 2018, reacting in part to an endless litany of cases over the years of university students telling me, usually in matter-of-fact tones, that they and/or their friends had been prescribed brain-altering psychological drugs to treat depression, anxiety, sleep problems, or what have you, I finally decided to sit down and sort out in writing some of my various frustrations at this mass...
The specialist’s mind.— The problem with specialists, as Socrates reasoned with perfect clarity, and as modernity exhibits ubiquitously, is that the specialist knows about one thing, but through a combination of the pride of competence and the disproportion of exclusive focus, gradually comes to imagine that the one thing he knows is the lynchpin of all reality, such that he mistakes his extremely...
If the mind — consciousness, thought, will — is an illusion of the brain, as our modern scientific religion insists, then whose illusion is it? After all, the brain itself, as a recognizable and definable entity, would, on this view, have to be nothing but another facet of the illusion. In other words, the brain itself is an object of conscious thought, and...
Experts, contrary to the popular connotation of that word, are simplifiers. More precisely, at their worst, which is to say at their most expert, they are simplistic people who, for the sake of their egos or to assuage their insecurities (or both), carefully and systematically evade the unknown — which is to say almost everything — by reducing the complexity of the cosmos...
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