Hi List,

  Welcome to the book tour of John Horgan’s Mind Body Problems. I hope you will consider joining me on this tour. It represents a great opportunity for us to the “disorder of things” (to borrow a phrase from John Dupre’s book that offers a similar perspective).

  My hope is that we might be able to use this survey to map out these problems and, having done so, explore how the problems are organized and framed by the ToK/UTUA system. My central thesis is that the academy lacks a language game that is up to the task of being consilient across our broad systems of knowledge and that the ToK can advance the ball strongly in the positive direction here. Crucial to this is getting the right frame on the relationship between mind and body (and consciousness, subjectivity, awareness, experience, matter, energy, information, the concepts of self and personhood, brain, and so forth).  

  I see this book tour as being similar in spirit to the wonderful tour that Steve Quackenbush provided us when he explored Pepper’s 1942 book, World Hypothesis back in January. That tour allowed us to see the various metaphysical systems and root metaphors that have been developed. Similarly, this book allows us to map the many mind-body problems that are all tangled up. For each chapter, I will offer some summary thoughts, and include an attachment that has the book along with my free-floating commentary in red.

  The plan is that each Monday I will post a new summary of a chapter. Below is the Intro Chapter, The Weirdness.  Next Monday, I will post my thoughts and reactions to Chapter I on Christof Koch and his views from neuroscience and information integration theory (Neuroscientist: Beyond the Brain).

>>> 

Summary of The Weirdness (see also attached):

Horgan’s introductory chapter provides an overview of the “weirdness” that is the tangled mass of knots that make up the “mind-body problem(s).” It highlights the fact that there are many issues intersecting with each other simultaneously. Tied up in the “mind-body problem” are problems associated with conscious experience and subjectivity, the problems of self-reflection and free-will, problem of moral values, and so forth.

 What is striking to me in reading it was how “unmoored” it is. Not in a looney or crazy sense or disorganized sense. Rather, as I read it, I felt like I was a tumbleweed drifting across the conceptual problems tangled up in talking about mind and matter. There is no effort to box things in, or separate and sort out. Rather the focus is just that they are knotty and knotted together. This is partly the point, as it reflects Horgan’s own admitted position of being a skeptic on knowledge, mind, and science. That is, he thinks we have approached our limits in terms of our capacity for coherent understanding of the world via science. That is the narrative that he wants us to internalize overall. This book adds to his previous works (such as The End of Science) by highlighting what I would call the fragmented pluralism of our current knowledge systems.   

  That experience of being a tumbleweed bouncing across a field of problems is highly consistent with what a person can feel like who tries to understand the field of psychology. Indeed, that is one of the things that draws me to this book. The problem of psychology in the academy has strong parallels with the mind-body problems that Horgan bounces around.

  As such, this affords us a welcome opportunity. We have a reasonably well-informed skeptic highlighting all the various problems tangled together. That means that via the book we are being given a tour of the confusion that the ToK System is designed to untangle. That means we can use this book to see if the ToK is up to the task of effectively framing and untangling the problems. My running commentary allows you to see how I am constantly wanting to map and frame the problems he is talking about. At the end of the chapter in the attachment, I start to sketch out an inventory of these problems, which I have a feeling might be a helpful frame for a paper or some other work.

  One more comment. Particularly striking to me is that absence of the talk about behavior. The concept of behavior and the various kinds of behavior is at the center of unraveling these knotty problems. 

  We can now consider this thread launched. I look forward to others’ questions, thoughts, and reactions. At some point I will likely reach out to John Horgan and let him know we are doing this.

Best,

Gregg