Egnor: We need to pray during this pandemic

Once again the creationist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor can’t resist scrutinizing my website and trying to find flaws in what I say. I suppose this is because he and his Discovery Institute colleagues, despite their confident assurances of two decades ago, have failed to make progress in getting the scientific community to accept Intelligent Design. So, […]

More woo from the NYT? A $285 “non-invasive facelift” (i.e., a massage)

The New York Times continues to tout various species of woo (remember their astrology penchant we discussed here and here?) Now they’re (implicitly) promoting a form of facial massage which is supposed to be a non-invasive “face lift”. While there’s one reservation buried at the end of the article, in general the tenor of the […]

Physicist takes apart a goop lab episode

Here we have Professor Philip Moriarty, a physicist at the University of Nottingham, taking apart one of Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop lab segments that appears to be about reiki “healing”. Dr. Phil simply vets the statements in the goop Netflix episode and, as the segment proceeds, gets angrier and angrier as he watches the statements on […]

Panpsychism: a big bag of nothing

I was suckered by the Courtier’s Reply of panpsychists like Philip Goff, and so have finished his popular (i.e., trade) book, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. I am not going to summarize it or review it at length, as it says little beyond what I’ve summarized previously. It has not convinced […]

A philosophical red flag

Okay, I took the bait and am now reading Philip Goff’s trade book on panpsychism, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. (Why do I let myself repeatedly fall victim to the Courtier’s Reply? I am a sucker.) It hasn’t convinced me so far that matter is somehow conscious, and yet there seem to […]

The New York Times thinks itself “worth it”

by Greg Mayer A few weeks ago, I asked “Is Maggie Haberman worth it?” This was in response to the New York Times‘ growing “wookeness”, as I called it: the pervasion of woo and woke ideology throughout the paper. A major aspect of this in the paper is their 1619 Project, a major effort to […]

The New York Times touts Gwyneth Paltrow and “her other ways of knowing”

I’m not sure if the New York Times‘s penchant for woo has always been the case, or whether it’s new—and, additionally, whether it has something to do with the paper’s increasingly woke slant. (As we know, wokeness prizes ideology and narrative over truth.) Both Greg and I, for instance, have written about the paper’s recent […]

The American media continues to tout the powers of psychics

Here’s a story published in both the State Journal of Frankfort, Kentucky (click on screenshot below) and Fox News. Note the headline: “Psychics were right. . ” The story: Haylee Marie Martin, a 17-year-old, went missing on January 12 and her absence was reported to the police the next day. Baffled, the sheriff consulted psychics […]

Panpsychism: an interview and a critique

Yes, we’re gonna have more on panpsychism today, and, after I read Goff’s book (coming via interlibrary loan) I think I’m pretty much done. I’ve now finished Annaka Harris’s book book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, and, as I said yesterday, it’s a good read but suffers from her […]

A good critique of panpsychism but a lousy alternative

The article at hand was published by the Institute of Art and Ideas, a British organization that I hadn’t heard of but is described by Wikipedia thusly: The Institute of Art and Ideas is an arts organisation founded in 2008 in London. Its programming includes the world’s largest philosophy and music festival, HowTheLightGetsIn and the online channel IAI TV, where […]