On the horizon: PT's "Fear of a Blank Planet"

Via my old schoolfriend Paul Smith, here’s a piece on Dave Ling‘s blog about the forthcoming Porcupine Tree album. Since I can’t see any way to get a permalink to the specific entry, I’m going to quote the relevant paragraph in full:

Yesterday morning I trundled along to Abbey Road Studios for a preview of Porcupine Tree’s forthcoming album, ‘Fear Of A Blank Planet’ in glorious 5.1 surround sound. Before the playback began, band leader Steven Wilson informed the gathered throng that the album is one “continuous piece of music” that lasts for around 53 minutes, explaining that most CDs these days are way too long to hold the listener’s attention. “It’s a very intense album”, he warned, adding that it includes no potential singles – something that hardly seemed to bother representatives from the quartet’s new label Roadrunner Records. And why should it? The album is simply stunning from start to finish; elaborately conceived, brilliantly orchestrated and executed with consummate sophistication. The track that will surely generate most attention is ‘Anesthetize’, which at 17 mins and 42 seconds long features a guitar solo from Rush’s Alex Lifeson. Robert Fripp of King Crimson also offers guest soundscape guitar effects to the penultimate song ‘Way Out Of Here’. But, believe me, the whole album is a stroke of genius.

Amazon.co.uk isn’t showing it as available for pre-order just yet, but according to the PT website it should be out in April. And just to tantalize us still more, “It’s likely that both the stereo CD and 5.1 surround sound DVDA will be packaged together as standard.” Mmm!!

A worthy successor to Rummie

It looks as if the White House has found a worthy successor to Donald Rumsfeld. Spencer Ackermann reports here on the confirmation hearings for Admiral Bill Fallon, the new commander of US forces in the Middle East. After dodging most of the questions, Fallon produced this gem:

Perhaps most egregiously, when hawkish Republican Senator Lindsay Graham fished for an endorsement of his view that the US can win in Iraq, Fallon commented, “I don’t know what ‘winning’ is,” before pausing, realizing that he might have just made some unfortunate headlines, and backpedaling.

Pinker on consciousness

There’s a wonderful piece by Steven Pinker in the latest Time, entitled The Mystery of Consciousness. After reviewing the state of research on consciousness and the brain, he considers Chalmers’ notorious “Hard question”, nods at Dan Dennett’s rebuttal, (appropriately) dismisses Searle’s quantum nonsense, and (provisionally) accepts Colin McGinn‘s “cognitive closure” view. He concludes optimistically:

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people’s sentience becomes ludicrous. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew — or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog — a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer….
Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that “life is short.” It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Indeed it is. Enjoy.

Mushrooms and mysticism

Over at HuffPo, Mark Kleiman has a piece entitled Mushrooms and mysticism in which he reports on a remarkably thorough study into the effects of the “magic mushroom” hallucinogen psilocybin. The team at Johns Hopkins confirmed what most people would expect: psilocybin reliably (over 60% of the time) triggers a “full” mystical experience.
The author then starts in on the public policy issues: the fact that the National Institute on Drug Abuse wants to drop the whole thing, and the question of what happens when freedom of religious expression collides with drug policy:

If taking a dose of psilocybin under controlled conditions has a better-than-even chance of occasioning a full-blown mystical experience, it seems fairly hard to argue that forbidding such use doesn’t interfere with the free exercise of religion…. [The[ treaty banning psilocybin… seems to run squarely into the internationally recognized human right to religious practice, belief, and expression.

OK, I’m sure that those are important topics. But to me this study is just another nail in the coffin of religious experience as “evidence” for the supernatural. Four hundred years ago most people from Europe (including those taking over the Americas) were hard-core dualists: souls and other spirit-beings not only inhabited bodies, but could even invade them. Today, most intelligent people accept that a neuro-chemical brain malfunction (with genetic predisposition) is a better explanation than demonic possession for what we now call schizophrenia. Perhaps the overwhelming evidence for the natural, non-mystical origin of religious experience, coupled with facing up to non-issues like this will eventually banish “soulism” too. It’s about time.

"Venus", Kabul, and a nice coincidence

I caught the No. 16 bus up to Wallingford this afternoon, to go to see the movie “Venus”. Peter O’Toole was wonderful; highly recommended. Peter O'Toole and Jodie Whittaker in VenusI got there 20 minutes early, so I prowled around a bit, and found that the Kabul, Seattle’s (?only) Afghan restaurant, was just two blocks from the cinema. Chris took us there a few years ago, but we’d come by a different route, at night, so I didn’t recognize the neighbourhood. I couldn’t resist the opportunity, so when the film was over I hung out at the local Starbucks until the Kabul opened, and then had a great dinner.
While I was travelling in both directions, I was listening to an old favourite album on my iPod. When I got home, I checked NetNewsWire for new blog items and was surprised to find this over at Andrew Sullivan:

Sully was using it to illustrate this piece by Norm Geras. Good stuff, up to a point, but then he has to go and take a dig at Richard Dawkins. Perhaps he should read Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza (which I’m in the middle of), and pay attention to the subject of the Inquisition. Racism and torture in the name of divine love. Nauseating. Dawkins has it exactly right, in my opinion.

UC stands up for science

From Sara at Orcinus:

I’ve been saying for a long while now that the power to end the Intelligent Design fiasco, firmly and finally and with but a single word, rests in the manicured hands of the chancellors of America’s top universities. The message is short and simple: “Teach what you like, it’s all fine with us. But if you put ID in your science courses, we will not accept those courses as adequate for admission to our campus.”
Making this kind of public statement would be one small step for a university chancellor; and one giant leap for American science education. Somebody, somewhere, needs to set a firm standard. If our universities — which bear responsibility for training our professional scientists, and maintain the labs and faculties responsible for much of our best research — won’t stand up and draw that line, then we really are well and truly lost.
It turns out that we may be in better hands than I’d hoped.

It’s an interesting story – the University of California vs. Calvary Chapel Christian School. No prizes for guessing which side is trying to pass off the products of Bob Jones “University” Press as science textbooks. Perhaps an equally unambiguous statement by UK universities would squelch the incipient ID movement over there, too.

My WP setup

Art wanted to know which WP plugins I used, and why. Here’s the current list:

When I get around to it, there are a couple of other widgets I want to configure, including the one for del.icio.us links and Christian Maniewski’s I Read Straight which is supposed to simplify the presentation of “what I’m reading”. (Right now I simply plug generic code from the Amazon.com Associates Central link-builder page into a text widget, which means that I have to hand-edit the ASINs.)
That’s it. Hope it was useful, Art.