An interesting post by Rudy Rucker who is guest hosting Boing Boing and talking about panpsychism.
Which inevitably sends all the commenters into a tizzy. Here is a random one that I enjoyed.
It’s interesting to see the comments defending science from what is a philosophical and spiritual question. Science is a tool for understanding the material world, not a religion. Science doesn’t care whether a truth is beautiful or aesthetically satisfying, but most of us humans do seem to care. At the moment you close your mind to other contexts from which to experience life, you have made a religion for yourself. The interesting thing about science (for me) is that it brims with examples clearly showing it’s own limitations, e.g. Gödel’s incompleteness. Gödel proves beyond any doubt that any self-consistent system complex enough to reason about itself contains an infinite number of axioms, i.e. the information content of the system is infinite. If the universe as a whole is such a system then it seems incredibly foolish to shut your mind to possible alternative contexts from which to view it. It is quite possible that the universal substance isn’t mass or energy, but rather mind; we could quite easily be believing our experience into existence around us. There is no scientific way to prove otherwise, yet one counter-example is all it would take to open one’s mind. I put it to you that as a skeptical scientist, one should be constantly searching for the experiential counter-example which puts science-as-religion to rest, and frees science to be a useful tool in a broader human context. In that sense, entertaining hylozic or panpsychic viewpoints and challenging your dominant belief system can be very valuable indeed.
And a final one that really does settle that:
Every crackpot pseudo-scientist in history has said exactly the same thing. Just because we’re still blind to things, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. That attitude is the bane of good science.
I really want to track down folks like this and have them explain it all to me because they always seem so sure of themselves.
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On the opposite end of the spectrum is a flaccid NYTimes article by John Markoff saying nothing new about The Singularity (Rapture of the Geeks), but it does have a couple of juicy quotes:
“Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,’ ” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”
Shazzbot. Take that Kurzweil and your evil robots!