Great review. I've been proselytizing the bad news of bakker for years. It's great to see a fellow traveler. I think his essays explain a lot of his major preoccupations in the book. For instance, magic, in this universe, is the attempt to solve human cognition to exploit its 'crash space', which is the area in which the mismatch between our ancestral heuristics (and really all of folk psychology) and our reshaped cognitive ecology can be gamed by those who possess sufficient 'magical powers'. This is an explicit rejection of compatibilist position wrt the hard problem that you find in liberals like Rorty. Instead of the heuristic, folk psychological view merely being a lower fidelity version of the scientific image, it becomes a vulnerability and allows those in the know (i.e. NWO types) to 'take you from behind'. Also why rape features so prominently in the book; imagine a world of blind agents taking advantage of each other for eternity. (Incidentally, I think it also reveals a fracture in the liberal consensus between the tragic view of hard eliminativism by people who inherited some version of the Christian social gospel like bakker versus the comic view of others like sunstein and harari) He also explains his theory of literature, which is pretty entertaining in itself, where lays out the idea that zogslop genre-fiction is the only form of literature compatible with his eliminativist philosophy.
The part about the end of the world having already happened made me think of the book Deadeye Dick. It was like the idea of living a life in epilogue, where your grand "point" in life comes and goes and here you are just waiting to die.
This podcast thing could be pretty good. What I mean is that they are many things you post about which I am not going to familiarise myself with, for instance that strategy video game. But I wouldn’t mind listening to an intelligent explanation of what is interesting/compelling about that thing. I’m unlikely to read a fantasy book series, but hearing your summary is interesting. Etc.
Enjoying so far. To my American ears you sound like Werner Herzog and that comforts me.
Hero, nobody discusses these gems
Great review. I've been proselytizing the bad news of bakker for years. It's great to see a fellow traveler. I think his essays explain a lot of his major preoccupations in the book. For instance, magic, in this universe, is the attempt to solve human cognition to exploit its 'crash space', which is the area in which the mismatch between our ancestral heuristics (and really all of folk psychology) and our reshaped cognitive ecology can be gamed by those who possess sufficient 'magical powers'. This is an explicit rejection of compatibilist position wrt the hard problem that you find in liberals like Rorty. Instead of the heuristic, folk psychological view merely being a lower fidelity version of the scientific image, it becomes a vulnerability and allows those in the know (i.e. NWO types) to 'take you from behind'. Also why rape features so prominently in the book; imagine a world of blind agents taking advantage of each other for eternity. (Incidentally, I think it also reveals a fracture in the liberal consensus between the tragic view of hard eliminativism by people who inherited some version of the Christian social gospel like bakker versus the comic view of others like sunstein and harari) He also explains his theory of literature, which is pretty entertaining in itself, where lays out the idea that zogslop genre-fiction is the only form of literature compatible with his eliminativist philosophy.
The part about the end of the world having already happened made me think of the book Deadeye Dick. It was like the idea of living a life in epilogue, where your grand "point" in life comes and goes and here you are just waiting to die.
Man, I really want to read this now, but I’m right in the middle of a deadline crunch!
Must resist temptation for a few more weeks when things get a little easier!
This podcast thing could be pretty good. What I mean is that they are many things you post about which I am not going to familiarise myself with, for instance that strategy video game. But I wouldn’t mind listening to an intelligent explanation of what is interesting/compelling about that thing. I’m unlikely to read a fantasy book series, but hearing your summary is interesting. Etc.