Updatage…

by rsbakker

One of my big goals with Three Pound Brain has always been to establish a ‘crossroads between incompatible empires,’ to occupy the uncomfortable in-between of pulp, science, and philosophy–a kind of ‘unholy consult,’ you might even say. This is where the gears grind. I’ve entertained some grave doubts over the years, and I still do, but posts like these are nothing if not heartening. The hope is that I can slowly gain the commercial and academic clout needed to awaken mainstream culture to this grinding, and to the trouble it portends.

I keep planning to write a review of Steven Shaviro’s wonderful Discognition, wherein he devotes an entire chapter to Neuropath and absolutely nails what I was trying to accomplish. It’s downright spooky, but really just goes to show, at least for those of us who periodically draw water from his Pinocchio Theory blog. For anyone wishing to place the relation of SF to consciousness research, I can’t think of a more clear-eyed, impeccably written place to begin. Not only does Shaviro know his stuff, he knows how to communicate it.

Robert Lamb considers “The Great Ordeal’s Outside Context Problem” over at Stuff to Blow Your Mind, where he asks some hard questions of the Tekne, and Kellhus’s understanding of it. SPOILER ALERT, though. Big time.

Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas-Mellamphy have just released Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-Centric Condition, a collection of various papers exploring the relevance of Nietzsche’s work to our technological age, including “Outing the It that Thinks: The Coming Collapse of an Intellectual Ecosystem,” by yours truly. The great thing about this collection is that it reads Nietzsche as a prophet of the now rather than as some post-structuralist shill. I wrote the paper some time ago, at a point when I was still climbing back into philosophy after a ten year hiatus, but I still stand by it and its autobiographical deconstruction of the Western intellectual tradition.