Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the… (urspr publ 2010; utgåvan 2010)

Robinson's combative and formal tone was by far my favorite aspect of this collection. I found it a tad strange she didn't address phenomenology as it would've strengthened her argument but overall these are a compelling reason to consider the mystery of the human experience. A mystery to be explored but a mystery nonetheless.

What is parascience (rational materialism) and what can it tell us about nature and what does it NOT tell us about us. ( )

This is a hard book to rate for me... On the one hand, it calls for a humility that is lacking in 'parascience' (or scientism, or perhaps New Atheism, or maybe simply positivism.) Great. Yes.

On the other hand, Ms. Robinson clearly misunderstands or misrepresents some of the arguments and claims of e.g. evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, etc. More annoyingly for me personally, though a minor part of the book, is the author's use of quantum uncertainty and entanglement. If I could never see another philosophical/pop-science/religious/New Age piece misuse QM... I don't even know... I would give up my left arm. But that is a minor portion of the lecture/book. In any case, "Not great. No."

And then the argument for "I" as evidenced by long history and culture and civilization... but what of the long traditions in e.g. Buddhism and Hinduism that specifically speak to the illusion of the "I"?

This is a somewhat interesting contribution to a long argument and has some solid points about the need for greater humility and understanding amongst "parascientists." But in other respects, the book reveals Ms. Robinson's somewhat weak grasp of the arguments and counter-counter-arguments to her own counter-arguments. ( )

Time and again I found myself admiring Robinson's sharp logic and sharper words. This is an intelligent believer's response to the arguments against an inner self made by Dawkins, Wilson et alia. An excellent book all around, wherever one stands on the tension between religion and science, spirit and matter, soul and body. ( )

Eh. A rambling, less coherent extension of the essay 'Darwinism' in her "Death of Adam," this one deals with what Robinson calls 'parascience,' essentially, the kind of populist journalism written by Dennet, Dawkins, Pinker and their ilk, with the 'problem' of altruism for their dogma, and with Freud. The argument here is weaker than in 'Darwinism,' and simultaneously more polemical, which means people are going to give this one star on the basis that Robinson is a crazy religious nut-bag who doesn't understand science, or five stars on the basis that she is a crazy religious nut-bag who rejects science. That she isn't, and doesn't, won't deter those reviewers.

The basic approach here is: many modern theories use supposedly scientific claims to make social-scientific claims; the scientific claims are often mistaken and the social-scientific claims are almost always ludicrously reductionist (people are not, in fact, ants). Instead, we need a model of intellectual inquiry which grants to human beings a special kind of rich experience that we can call, say, 'mind' or 'culture' or 'art' or any of those big words. Parascientific attempts to 'explain' this experience are very bad, which should be obvious to anyone who has a facebook account and has friends who constantly link those 'scientific' experiments proving, for instance, that men in relationships lie to themselves about how attractive they find women, based on the assumption that all men find all women who are at a certain stage of their menstrual cycle attractive (and ignoring, for instance, the possibility that *not* all men find all women at that stage attractive). Maybe being in a relationship is something valuable that men want to hold onto more than they want to bang hot chix?

But nobody needs a hundred and fifty pages to make that argument, and the great one liners and beautiful sentences that you'll find in "Death of Adam" are sorely missing here, and her inability to understand German philosophy from Fichte through Nietzsche to Freud is on greater display. Too bad. ( )