Steven Parmenius

                     I read in a very good book by a very learned author that at a certain frequency in the brain consciousness occurs and that very likely that is the end of the matter. Consciousness is a product of the brain so that no brain equals no consciousness. For various reasons I will not go into here I have never actually believed this, even intuitively as a child, and all I have read on the subject since has only reinforced my original skepticism. This is my hobbyhorse though and most philosophers and scientists are probably quite reasonable to hold that consciousness is a ‘brain thing’ and nothing else. Thus they continue the project of trying to base the philosophy of mind on neuro-science confident that the ‘hard problem’ or mystery of consciousness will be dispelled by science and that mind will be reduced, or at least be shown to completely depend on, the material substrate of na...

      Scientists quite legitimately feel their authority is under assault and that this loss of status and authority is a menace to the public. The evidence for this is incontestable as the climate crisis and the COVID crisis attest. How are we to get people to believe current science on these questions? There is one way to do this which will NOT work and that is reaction towards earlier forms of ‘scientistic’ ideology. For such an ideology the authority of science rests on an epistemology usually labelled ‘foundationalist’. Foundationalism holds that there is a bedrock principle or method which can give a rational account of itself and hence of other things. Science is an application of  this ‘method’, a method rationally justified in itself such that any claims resting on its correct application are also rationally justified. ‘Believe science’ would then mean ‘believe in the power of method for method guarantees the best approximation of truth or at least minimizes...

English poet and engraver William Blake diagnosed the human problem in the following way: from the wholeness and totality of objects we abstract the two qualities of ‘Good and Evil’ and doing so slay all the granular detail of the ‘minute particulars’ of existence. We use these abstractions to perform and justify the destruction of concrete individuals and the enslavement and oppression of human persons. What is worse, most of us have no idea that this is what we are doing for a fish, alas, can’t see water. Blake’s radical critique of human life and human society is that self-righteousness is that final nail in the coffin of ‘self-hood’, a state he persistently labels ‘Satanic’. Self-hood is the ego in its defensive and self-limiting mode which either views the other as an enemy and a threat to be nullified by either passive or active aggression or absorbed by erotic fusion (sex as a weapon to quote Pat Benatar!). Good and evil and the gap between them are the final articulation of t...

What is the aura of a monster? I’m not sure I know. Different monsters probably have different ones. I will take forest monsters since forests are something I know. Forests are chock full of noises most of which a child cannot readily identify. They are full of movement and rustling and even flashes of brown furry somethings that disappear behind trees almost the instant they are seen. A forest is phenomenally rich. We might take the view that as we grow up more and more of these ‘sightings’ or ‘hearings’ will be reduced to previously known entities, to ‘noumena’ as we have been calling them. We might also take a trip to a university to study flora and fauna and other boreal matters. This study will, we are confident, reduce pretty much all forest phenomena to forest noumena. Unfortunately we do not really know this. Some things we hear and see might well retain the flickering, uncertain status of phenomenal objects. These objects might in fact be noumena for other classification s...

Since Kant, at least, we have been very worried about the thing as it is in itself. Kant said we could not know this thing because our experience is structured by a-priori categories of the understanding. We experience phenomena but not noumena; things as our consciousness shapes them not things as they exist in themselves. The noumena are behind and the phenomena are in front obstructing our view. This is not, of course, the only way of looking at the matter. Some, like French philosopher and social scientist Bruno Latour, put the noumena in front and the phenomena behind. The real things are constructed out of a phenomenal backdrop. I like to think of it this way: there is an immense cloud of phenomena; visual and other impressions that clamor for our attention, for admittance into the world of real objects. Of these we must accept some and reject others. One of the ways we do this is science. Some might assume that the function of science is to reflect experience but actually the ...

Imagine the set of all things known, spoken and thought about. Now imagine the subset of all things known, spoken and thought about that actually exist . In almost any culture the first group is much larger than the second. A !Kung hunter might have his spear and a second spear he wished he had but does not because he has not yet fashioned it. This hunter may, for all I know of the matter, have some sophisticated concept of potential things and where and how they exist. Yet for all that, such a mode of reality will not, in all likelihood, be the same as that of the spear in his hand except, perhaps, in some special ritualized context. There is still another distinction we can make between the two groups and that is between things which exist and things which simply do not exist; things that are not actual OR potential entities. A square circle is one of these by way of intrinsic impossibility. A methane breathing dog is another because of the atmosphere of the earth and the known evol...

Justice and power are two things that do not sit well together and Marx was not the first or only person to see this. In the Middle Ages, egalitarian ideas embedded in the Gospels butted up against a feudal order founded on the raw expropriation of agricultural labor. This produced social revolts of various kinds and vigorous protests but no stable solution. Too few people have noticed that we have exactly the same problem today. We have a secular regime founded on a notion of universal human rights of which the values of ‘self-determination’ and ‘autonomy’ are considered core examples. At the same time our economic institutions only embody autonomy in the abstract form of consumer choice. Behind the façade of the free market lies the same process of exploitation and expropriation as we can see with the panicked effort of corporations to force workers back into plague infested packing plants and warehouses. In Canada this basic contradiction has taken a slightly different form than o...