Sunday, September 2, 2007
Lucid Dreaming
This section of a discussion about consciousness has science writer John Horgan rejecting post-modernism. Post-modernist nihilism, doubting all knowledge, laying claim that all is context, all narrative, provides no insight but helps rationalize self-absorbed detachment. Science is a model of reality — not its rejection. Art has other entry points for discussion — it is no surprise that the best interpreters of paintings are poets.
Earlier in the discussion the talk is about lucid dreaming and its implications. The mind is always constructing stories to explain ambiguous reality. In an article I read recently, Kurt Gödel was said to have carried it even further, doubting the existence of time, the ultimate pattern we impose on blooming, buzzing reality.
Quoted in the podcast — from Mr. Electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell:
The only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.