From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Dec 12 1998 - 06:14:42 MST
At 12:50 AM 12/11/98 -0800, Paul Hughes wrote
>Lest we forget, it was [Eliezer] and Damien who decided to flame me first.
Sorry if you read my (rather bluntly expressed) comment on RAW/Leary as a
flame directed personally at you. I was trying to convey a general point -
I apologise if you felt wounded.
I don't think there's much point in citing the outdated views of great
scientists when the original daft document claimed that parts of the brain
were designed for that future era when we enter our eventual
extraterrestrial kingdom. This is not altogether impossible, I suppose,
but it's so unlikely - and clearly derives from stoned fantasies which
themselves are rather uninteresting transforms of ancient and
empirically/theoretically ignorant mythoi - that I don't think people here
should waste their time taking them seriously.
Using such mythoi for fictive or poetic purposes, of course, is quite a
different matter. (But I'm getting a tad suspicious about even that, as I
see how corrupting such pseudo-ideas are and how easily they squirm into
and conscript our hard-won scientific meme-systems.)
Damien Broderick
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