There Is No Spoon

Fascinating article I've been reading for the last hour or so over at edge.org. The goal of the article was to ask many influential intelligent people what their most dangerous idea is today. The results are…interesting. One in particular that I want to mention here is by Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at UC, Irvine and author of the book 'Visual Intelligence'.

Once one abandons public physical objects, one must reformulate many current open problems in science. One example is the mind-brain relation. There are no public brains, only my brain experiences and your brain experiences. These brain experiences are just the simplified visual experiences of homo sapiens, shaped for survival in certain niches. The chances that our brain experiences resemble some mind-independent truth are remote at best, and those who would claim otherwise must surely explain the miracle. Failing a clever explanation of this miracle, there is no reason to believe brains cause anything, including minds. And here the wolf unzips the sheep skin, and darts out into the open.

Scandolous! And yet interesting. Anyhoot, b-ball restarts tomorrow - go Panthers, huh?!?