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Bakker on the Radio!

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Madness:

--- Quote from: The2ndUtteralString on December 12, 2013, 10:53:38 pm ---
--- Quote from: Madness on December 12, 2013, 08:50:47 pm ---Have you listened yet?
--- End quote ---
Yes.
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Yeah, I lasted about an hour or two after you'd posted it. Listened to it on the bus home and I can't remember an instant of the bus ride. New Bakker content is rare.


--- Quote from: The2ndUtteralString on December 12, 2013, 10:53:38 pm ---
--- Quote from: Madness on November 27, 2013, 05:40:04 pm ---a round table discussion.
--- End quote ---
None of this. Paul Kennedy is absent after a brief introduction. Laura Penny narrates. Bakker, Dunning, Gardner & Toplak contribute.
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I was saddened that Fine didn't manifest. And I can't remember specifically when or if A Mind of It's Own comes up, even though its listed on the Reading List for the show.

It was very much like listening to someone's essay read aloud... disappointed. It would have been nice to hear more of the interview from each of the participants.


--- Quote from: The2ndUtteralString on December 12, 2013, 10:53:38 pm ---
--- Quote from: Madness on December 12, 2013, 08:50:47 pm ---Is it good?
--- End quote ---
It's ok. It's very much an intro into topics most on the forum have already delved deeply into. I don't think Bakker manages to quite explain the TPB theory to a general audience as clearly and succinctly as he could have (a tough task to be sure!). He seemed less eloquent than the other participants. One particular example he used to explain a brain engaging in introspection, by comparing it to an "anthropoligist being nailed in a coffin with an amazonian tribesman" was just weird to me.

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Lol - I'm not sure that the program was aimed at those of us so acquainted, 2US.

I think Bakker's deliberation in speaking and the essayistic nature of Penny's format (which obviously involves cutting larger interviews for her 'salient points') might account for eloquence (? - he just seems less likely to actually commit to a statement and more likely to question the validity of what he himself is saying) and coherence.

Probably, Penny chopped off the anthropologist metaphor from Bakker's comparison of the anthropologist in the box to the brainbound nature of self. In a great many ways, our brains became complex by having to account for the indeterminacy of others. It seems to partially explain why we seem to have huge sections of corticol matter devoted to vision and within that, schemas for the different orientations of facial neuromusculature in order to process emotion, etc, etc, down to all the minute possible representations of sensory experience. The brain, in this sense, processes other brains, as it were like the anthropologist who writes ethnographies with invisible access to a living culture from without. But when it tries to turn this cognitive lens on itself, it experiences an inability to see itself as it is because it is bound by its structure.

Lol - in trying an explanation, I felt shades of the No-God. Also, maybe a better analogy would be to ask one of the tribesman to produce the same ethnography as the anthropologist.

It'll be interesting to see if the CBC page gets any commentary. It's always fun reading reactions.

Callan S.:
Oh, it was a chorae studded coffin!

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