Antiphilosophical Dictionary - Peter Naur

[Black Dragon]

How did you find him, Asolsutsesvyl ?

There's two parts to that. The first is, his name is one that hobby programmers who read about programming languages will almost certainly encounter. He's one of the famous old giants in computer science. The second is, getting curious and looking for more information about him after reading the news, a few years ago, that he had died.


@Black Dragon: It's a bit more complicated, in that materialist thought is a type of philosophical thought, in a tradition going back to Aristotle. Naur is, basically, in a position between the materialistic philosophers and the non-materialistic philosophers, as an anti-philosopher. He rejects Cartesian dualism, he rejects the behavioristic dogma that forbids consciousness as a scientifically valid area of study, and he also rejects the idea that a convincing simulation of a human is a valid criteria for a system having a mind like a human. But he does relate consciousness to the body and brain, because observation centers around embodied life, with an absence of what he would accept as any knowing of what conscious life is beyond that.

Thanks, this clarifies things a bit for me. So some of these materialistic dogmas now in main stream science were contributed to in part by philosophers, specifically Aristotle...I suppose I can see that. Not a fan of behaviorism, especially the B.F. Skinner kind as espoused in the book "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", where he espouses basically drugging and behaviorally modifying everyone in society to some baseline norm.