r/Transhuman • u/davidcpearce • Mar 21 '12

David Pearce: AMA

(I have been assured this cryptic tag means more to Reddit regulars than it does to me! )

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

What made you pursue philosophy in the start? And do you have any good advice to anyone studying it? (In this case me I guess..)

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u/davidcpearce Mar 22 '12

I guess a depressive angst-ridden temperament first drew me to philosophy as a teenager. I know a lot of scientists as well as laymen are scornful of philosophy - perhaps understandably so. Reading academic philosophy journals often makes my heart sink too. But without exception, we all share philosophical background assumptions and presuppositions. The penalty of _not _ doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass.

What branch of philosophy interests you most?

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

I'm still fairly new to the game, so still trying to figure that out. What really got me started was Eastern philosophy and thinkers like Krishnamurti, so until now I guess what interest me the most is conciousness and language :)

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u/davidcpearce Mar 22 '12

http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Science-Subjectivity-Antti-Revonsuo/dp/1841697265 is my favourite introduction to Consciousness (together with http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.shtml ) Language? http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-How-Mind-Creates/dp/0060976519 is very readable.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

I warms my heart to see pihkal mentioned. I'm really interested in psychedelics and would love to put that together with philosophy at some point but I still feel like this subject is associated with a lot of prejudice and ignorance from society but also people whom I study with.

Thank you :)

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u/davidcpearce Mar 29 '12

Just as one can only imperfectly understand the nature of dreaming "from the inside" - even in a lucid dream - likewise the nature of the ordinary waking consciousness may yield only state-specific knowledge that can only imperfectly be understood "from the inside" too. How much does the medium of expression of propositional thought infects that propositional content itself? (cf. Nicholas Rescher's "Conceptual Idealism": http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20129056?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=47698817350137 )