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Sort of. I assume that part of this is delivery and the nature of a short interview format. But, I think it is important to highlight a point of mild disagreement between Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein in their Salon interview:
PINKER: Exactly. I would be opposed to a requirement on astrology…
Today has been an exciting day for me! First of all, although Steven Pinker had to decline my invitation to speak at UM (during the Neuroscience Spring Symposium), he did agree to do an interview here on Retrospectacle. So, similar to the Q's and A's I posted for review for Irene Pepperberg, I will…
Steven Pinker: The evolutionary man. Also check out the GNXP interview with Pinker from 2 years ago.
At 3 Quarks Daily, Abbas Reza reviews Steven Pinker's new book, Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which is published by Allen Lane later this month.
Pinker discusses the book in this recent interview.
Wow, that was well worth the read. Wasn't too keen on some of the questions, though...
I wasn't too keen on some of the answers.
Science has a long history of coming across unanticipated phenomena and growing to encompass them. If telepathy were discovered to be real, scientists wouldn't conclude that minds are something more than physics can explain - they'd conclude that their physics was incomplete. The idea that "the materialist position on the mind-brain question would collapse in a single stroke" is absurd.
When scientists couldn't account for all of the mass-energy in nuclear decay processes, did 'materialism' collapse? No - we predicted the existence of the neutrino, a material particle with truly extraordinary properties, but still part of the material world.
She wrote books on Gödel, and this was the result? Of course our science isn't complete. There IS no complete science.
The idea that "the materialist position on the mind-brain question would collapse in a single stroke" is absurd.
Absolutely. The logic of anti-materialism is inchoate. Radio waves aren't evidence against materialism so why would telepathy?
Anytime "normal science" is possible, it is materialist science (because you can't study something that is "supernatural"). Anytime "normal science" is not possible it is simply unknown. Nothing is or can be evidence for supernaturalism, because it is conceptually incoherent.