In his review of The Infinite Staircase, Bill Bartlett has done me the honor every author most cherishes—he has read my book thoughtfully and has engaged directly with its claims. He and I don’t see eye to eye on many of these claims, but we both have deep respect for Western philosophy and religion, so I welcome the opportunity to do a kind of Point/Counterpoint with his review.  In this context, I am reproducing what he says first and then interspersing my commentary in a different font color.  Here goes. Book Review: The Infinite Staircase When I first came across The Infini ..read more

It is more than commonplace these days to lament that truth has become a casualty of our digital era.  It is also baloney.  There are clear tests for truth that have served humankind for centuries, and there is no reason to abandon them now.  We just need to bring them back into focus. Among philosophers there are three broad schools of truth, each foregrounding a different attribute, as follows: The Correspondence theory of truth, which says that if a statement can be verified by a large number of observations undertaken by a diverse population of observers, then it is true.&n ..read more

This post, like those that precede it, is based on reacting to an article that one way or another has captured my imagination.  In this case, the article was actually about Artificial Intelligence and whether it could really be called intelligence or not.  What interested me, however, was the way it organized itself around a set of philosophical positions that evolved historically.  What I have done, therefore, is to cut and paste those bits in order to create a context for discussing my own philosophy of mind.  This is, of course, totally unfair to the authors of the artic ..read more

We human beings like to believe we are special—and we are, but not as special as we might like to think.  One manifestation of our need to be exceptional is the way we privilege our experience of consciousness.  This has led to a raft of philosophizing which can be organized around David Chalmers’ formulation of “the hard problem.” In case this is a new phrase for you, here is some context from our friends at Wikipedia: . . .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorizatio ..read more

Free will means just what you think it means, despite all the poppycock you may sometimes hear to the contrary.  That poppycock comes in a number of forms.  The simplest is based on materialist reductionism.  In this worldview, we inhabit a clockwork universe in which all interactions obey the laws of physics and are thus deterministic, every effect being the result of a prior cause, all present reality being therefore predictable as the outcome of an unbroken chain of cause and effect, all the way back to the Big Bang.  This is simply wrong.  No effect is the result o ..read more

The Infinite Staircase takes on two mega-topics—metaphysics and ethics—connecting the two by positing that ethics represent strategies for living that align our behavior with metaphysics, the powers that be.  Esthetics, in contrast, does not get much attention in the book beyond a passing glance in a chapter on culture, where, from an evolutionary perspective, it is associated with “good tricks.”  It deserves more than that, and this essay is my contribution to the dialog.  The form of this essay represents something of an experiment.  Rather than build it on its own, I hav ..read more

A blog calls for a blogger to hold forth on whatever is top of mind at the time and for readers to chime in when and as they choose.  Based on my experience with it on LinkedIn, I think it is a terrific communications medium.  This is not a blog. The Infinite Staircase purports to provide a Theory of Everything.  From the outset, we know that this is impossible, so for its author to hold forth any further would simply be extending what is an already extended hubris.  That would not serve anyone.  This is a forum A forum is a place to debate ideas.  The Infinite S ..read more

One of the earliest reviews of The Infinite Staircase on Amazon was submitted by Ryan Boissonneault.  It is both lengthy and thoughtful, and I am delighted and honored that he made the effort to write it.  That said, he did give the book only 3 stars out of 5, for reasons he clearly explains below.  As the author, you will not be shocked to learn I took exception to some of those reasons, hence my desire to reply.  I reached out to Ryan for permission, which he graciously granted, all of which has led to this post. But set all these dynamics aside.  The whole point of ..read more