Bona Saturnalia / Merry Xmas / Etc.

Festive holidayness from Colorado!

Our visit with JQ's folks draweth to a close, and we're off to MO in a couple of hours. There's no connectivity at the Ranch of the Damned, though we'll be staying in StL tonight and our last night there.

Obviously I haven't been posting much, but you're probably familiar with the erratic nature of posting around these parts already, so no surprises there, really.

Currently I'm reading Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, which is, thus far, not nearly as bad as you may have been led to believe. Much like The Last Word, M&C is engaging and puts its finger on something important...but also like TLW, it fails to carefully define its target. The arguments don't seem that strong at first blush, but he seems clearly to have struck a nerve with some folks. He'd have been better off to have throttled back on his claims somewhat. I think the point he *should* have made is that the reductive materialist view he has in his sites remains something like a kind of to-some-extent-unspoken orthodoxy in many places, though it really is more like a quasi-religious presupposition than a conclusion we are compelled to accept. Instead of pretending that it's the reigning orthodoxy and that he (Nagel) can slay it, it's more accurate to say that a lot of people are a lot more certain of the view than they have any right to be, and that a sensible view of the situation shows it to be a highly problematic option. The thing to do is to point out that the emperor is rather under-dressed for the occasion...

Anyway, more on that later.