{"id":8729,"date":"2013-06-05T14:14:34","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T14:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/06\/05\/colin-mcginn-good-news-and-bad-news\/"},"modified":"2013-06-05T14:14:34","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T14:14:34","slug":"colin-mcginn-good-news-and-bad-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/06\/05\/colin-mcginn-good-news-and-bad-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Colin McGinn: Good News and Bad News"},"content":{"rendered":"

First the good news: Homunculism<\/a>, McGinn's  NYRB review of Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.  <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

McGinn, like John Searle, is a formidable critic of bad philosophy of mind, and in this brilliant review he utterly demolishes Kurzweil's neurobabble, and indeed the whole type of which it is a token.  The devastation of the demolition job is commensurate with the chutzpah of Kurzweil's subtitle.  It is not that McGinn has said anything really new, at least not in this review.  The key points have been made before by Searle and Nagel and so many of us, but McGinn does the critical job with great clarity and great skill and gives it a (to me) slightly new slant: the ubiquity of the homuncular fallacy.  (I won't explain what I mean; you'll catch my  drift by carefully reading the review.)<\/span><\/p>\n

I don't understand how anyone who is intelligent and informed could read with comprehension McGinn's piece and still take seriously the sort of neuroscientistic nonsense of Kurzweil and Company.<\/span><\/p>\n

And please note that McGinn has no religious agenda: he is not out to resurrect the immortal soul or find a back door to the divine milieu.  The man is an atheist, a mortalist and a (damned) liberal too.  Just like Nagel.  Neither of these gentlemen are looking for a way back to substance dualism.  The former goes the mysterian route, the latter the panpsychist.  Both are naturalists.  More importantly, both are dispassionate truth-seekers.<\/span><\/p>\n

And now for the bad and sad news: Prominent Philosopher to Leave U. of Miami in Wake of Misconduct Allegations.<\/a>  <\/span> <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/em> 7 June 2013.  McGinn's side of the story is here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First the good news: Homunculism, McGinn's  NYRB review of Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.  McGinn, like John Searle, is a formidable critic of bad philosophy of mind, and in this brilliant review he utterly demolishes Kurzweil's neurobabble, and indeed the whole type of which it is a token.  The devastation … Continue reading “Colin McGinn: Good News and Bad News”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-mind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}