Monday, October 06, 2008
A Failed Post on the Death of the Self
Ho, ho, ho. What's the difference between a pigeon and a banker? The pigeon can still put a deposit on a Ferrari. Evening Standard apparently. Anyway, what with Mandy the drama queen and the world still crashing about our ears, I've quite lost my thread today. I woke up intending to write a post on promissory materialism, an aspect of eliminative materialism. I meant to do it because it is, I think, the most profound intellectual issue of our time. If EM is successful, common sense psychology will be dead, an event that would be in the words of my hero Jerry Fodor, 'beyond comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species....' Imagine our inner world vanishing with the same bewildering rapidity as our money. The Bundesbank would have to underwrite our sanity as well as our deposits. But that post eluded me. Perhaps tomorrow.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
If EM is successful, common sense psychology will be dead.
ReplyDeleteNo it won't. Well, it might die in the philosophy faculties, but it won't popularly - for the same reasons that creationism and astrology and alternative medicine aren't dead.
You yourself put it brilliantly the other day: mankind's problem (and one of the most interesting things about mankind) is the question of seeing the seeable.
Is there a test that can falsify it?
ReplyDeleteSurely not another bunch trying to argue us into the idea that we are animals. When the fact that we persist, with notion like freedoms, beauty, joy, proves that we are human. Why the hell are they not attempting to prove that when a cow is chewing her cud, she is contemplating that beautiful flaw in that last bit of grass she swallowed. Lift, what is the point of reducing. There are enough around who will try and do that to you.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know how to invest in the stock market?
ReplyDeleteI await the revolutionary revelations of EM with unbaited breath. Wasn't the self abolished numerous times in the 20th century? Bloody norah...
ReplyDeleteI read the title and thought you meant Will Self... weird!
ReplyDeleteIt would be quite nice if Will Self turned out to have been an illusion all along, vanishing in a puff of his own non-being.
ReplyDelete"Wasn't the self abolished numerous times in the 20th century?"
ReplyDeleteThe idea of the self was given a good kicking by Hume in the 18th, but Buddha spotted it for an illusion much further back.
Yep, you're right. Keeps coming back though, the pesky thing.
ReplyDelete