Watched today John Kerry's speech at the Democratic Convention. "A president who believes in science" -- sounds refreshing. I am afraid it sounds too good.  It is interesting though that four years ago I don't remember being so interested in American politics - is it me getting more Americanized or is American politics becoming more interesting?

It might just be that four years ago we did not have cable.

Richard Dawkins is the first on the list of the top 100 public intellectuals of Britain, as voted by readers of Prospect Magazine. Yess!

Found a good quotation from philosopher Simon Blackburn on "Butterflies and Wheels". Originally it appeared in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, in the "Postmodernism" entry:

While the dismantling of objectivity seems to some to be the way towards a liberating political radicalism, to others it allows such unliberating views as the denial that there was (objectively) such an event as the Second World War or the Holocaust...The postmodernist frame of mind...may seem to depend on a cavalier dismissal of the success of science in generating human improvement, an exaggeration of the admitted fallibility of any attempt to gain knowledge in the humane disciplines, and an ignoring of the quite ordinary truth that while human history and law admit of no one final description, they certainly admit of more or less accurate ones...

Going back to Freud (see the last entry): here is some supporting material for the claim that Freud

belongs more in a museum of errors, with studies of the four humours, the benefits of blood-letting, pre-Copernican astronomy, the forensics of witchcraft, alchemy, phrenology and phlogiston.

Finished reading two books by Steven Johnson: Emergence and Mind Wide Open. The latter is fresher. Quite liked it overall, although it does not feel as enlightening as Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker often do. But then, this might be too high of a measuring stick.

In the final chapter of Mind Wide Open, S. Johnson paints a bit too positive picture of Freud. Maybe it is a great insight indeed that the mind is divided, but it looks to me that there are a lot more misses than hits in the freudian view of the mind. It is a little bit like saying that the geosynclinal theory is very important because it got a few things right: sediments often do accumulate in big piles several miles thick and then become parts of folded mountain ranges. Well, that's true, but there is no explanatory power to it -- for that, you need modern plate tectonics and basin analysis. So, isn't it easier to just forget old and wrong concepts like id, superego, and miogeoclines?