Tuesday, March 11, 2008

More About Brain Zombies… and Kansas



Following on from a random thought yesterday, here’s the lecture from Prof. Dan Dennett that I vaguely had in the back of my mind when suggesting that people’s thoughts are sometimes effectively “hijacked” by parasitic memes that may run counter to their own personal imperatives (well that was the allusion in any case). To give the notion some verisimilitude and politically contextualize it a bit, it might be an interesting proposition to examine the puzzling conundrum, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” as posed by Thomas Frank several years ago, through this prism.