(December 16, 2023 at 9:45 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Oh, yeah, good choice. Gabriel is good.
There are still a lot of people who hold that the mind is nothing more than electro-chemical events in the brain, and Gabriel makes a strong case that their view is too simple. But he's also safe for atheists, in that he doesn't posit a deity at any point.
Science fans seem to have the ability to play both sides of the coin. If there's a gene or neuron that can explain a phenomenon, they can explain it away as the inexorable algorithmic operation of material processes; if there's not, they simply dismiss it as an illusion and that's supposed to suffice as an explanation.
Glad to find someone else who appreciates Gabriel's oddball approach to academic philosophy. I was in a bookstore in Barcelona in 2015 when I ran across Why The World Does Not Exist. I admit the title alone was Istvan-bait, but aside from my initial misgivings about his anti-constructivist stance I found his work very well-developed and lucidly presented.