thenatureofmind

Book Review: The End Of The Republic And The Delusion Of Empire

Very few public intellectuals pull no punches in their analyses of world affairs.  James Petras is one of them.  Possessed of a brilliant and capacious mind that grasps global events in a comprehensive and interconnected way, he also writes with a moral urgency befitting our dangerous historical moment.  He reminds me of C. Wright Mills, another brilliant sociologist whose warnings went unheeded more than fifty years ago.

Book Review: The End Of The Republic And The Delusion Of Empire

Book Review: A Beginners Guide to Reality

How do we know what is real? How do we know if anything we believe is real is actually real? How do our brains process the sensory data and produce our perception of the world we live in?

This is one of the best books I have found that covers western philosophy and it's evolving understanding of how we think, how our minds work and how the reality we perceive is created. It would seem that east and west are close to a juncture point of understanding the real nature of reality.

A Beginners Guide to Reality

What is Real?

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real -- that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans -- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.

-Philip K. Dick

Thanks to Boing, Boing and Cory Doctorow for this pointer to an article by Philip K. Dick titled How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later