h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yo Ed, I finally got round to listening to those Reith lectures you've been yammering on about. Actually they're pretty good I thought. I think his conclusions about giving up on the notion of identity as a singular thing are definitely right, and that this will slowly filter out to the wider world. It's interesting though, I think the conceptual reorganisation that this forces hasn't yet been fully thought through. It really involves a deeply radical change to a lot of things. It'll also be generally supportive of a sort of ultra-materialist philosophy which I tend to believe in and from your posts I guess you do too. Essentially, we have to see ourselves as just another sort of animal, and analyse ourselves in the same way we'd analyse any other animal. Once you do this, it changes the way we think about free will, knowledge, etc. You might find the second most recent post on my blog interesting on this subject if you haven't looked at it yet.

And doesn't he roll his R's in the most fantastic way!

Yes! What a lovely, patrician accent he has.

Philosophically, I'd say he's building on Dennett. And Hume, of course.

I'll read your blog from home.

Meanwhile:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/france-terrorism-tarnac-anarchists

Huh, don't know how I missed that story. I read Libération (French lefty newspaper) every day. Maybe I was a bit lax over the holidays.

Dunno if he was building on Dennett, or just that both he and Dennett are drawing conclusions from neuroscientific evidence. Hume of course worked it all out hundreds of years ago, but it takes us a while to catch up. (Wittgenstein too, I guess people will catch up with his ideas in about 200 years too.)