Comments on: Reading 2010, vol 4:

By: billy

billy — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 08:23:43 +0000

Reading the original has pretty much always paid off for me. Of course, selecting which originals to read is the art

I have had the revised edition of A New Science of Life on my to read short pile for a good while now… more stuff keeps finding its way on, but I do get through it.

Yeah, I downloaded some audio from his site before, it was really good shit.

By: bruce

bruce — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 06:45:53 +0000

Lots of good podcasts for free DL on sheldrake’s site… http://www.sheldrake.org/B&R/audiostream/
and his seminal work on morphogenetic fields vis a vis biology has just been republished in an all new revised 3rd edition. I was definitely thinking of you and what you said about reading original sources, which I had mostly disagreed with, when I was reading Sheldrake. In his case you were certainly right that it was a good idea

By: billy

billy — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:39:14 +0000

Pearce: I stand corrected. Interesting that his themes are that consistent throughout; I think Brad muttered something along those lines once.

Chris: you can’t read a book you don’t have, no matter how good it is

Bruce: interesting. have been meaning to properly read Sheldrake for a long while now…

By: bruce

bruce — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:03:49 +0000

>b) their language has features which defy Chomskyian grammatical theory.

Rupert Sheldrake has an interesting take on Chomskyian grammatical theory. He argues it is an artifact of the mechanist approach, i.e. if everyone talks the same, the reason must be in the physical structure.

Sheldrake of course thinks this deep structure would be stored in fields, not in physical matter.

So for the tribe in the book, if the deep structure information is not physical, and instead stored in fields, then it also allows for more fundamental variations amongst different populations, as language structure is no longer required to be part of our genetic commonality with all humans, but instead there could be a variety of field based structural attractors governing language amongst humans.

By: C G

C G — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:25:02 +0000

Hmm.
HMMMM.
Thanks for the recommendation of John Crowley, I have just looked the series up on line and it looks brilliant. Not that I needed another book to buy and not read, however.
(thinking of the as-yet-unread copies of 2666, Cyclonopaedia and Maldoror I have sitting on my bookshelf at home)

By: Pearce

Pearce — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 21:51:18 +0000

Huh? Philip K. Dick wrote The Three Sitgmata of Palmer Eldritch fourteen years before Valis, and ten years before even the religious epiphany that inspired it. Given this, I don’t understand how it can be exploring “his usual post-Valis themes”.