/lit/ - Literature

His ideas concerning philosophy of mind seem interesting but I don't feel like wading through the mulk of mediocre fantasy drivel to get to it. I wish he wrote nonfiction.
Also his fans are fucking insufferable. Not a point against him but it turns people off to see the way they act.

>>19330033
He filtered me with his turgid prose.

>>19330033
I don't read children's fiction, sorry.

>>19330069
He has non-fiction papers. The Last Magic show is good.

I thought Neuropath was in some ways a lot better than Prince of Nothing. Like the prose is definitely not as good, it's a basic thriller, but putting epiphenomenalism and eliminative materialism into an easy to read book and making it a horror story was a very neat idea and it is executed quite well. It's a great book precisely because it is written as casual normie airplane book serial killer fluff, but then has this great premise underneath.

Prince of Nothing by contrast has way better prose and a pretty cool world, great battle scenes, and yet basically makes the same point using way more text. I still loved it. Battle scenes in particular are great, the way he covers side characters and tells small stories about events. Repeating "and death cam swirling down," and other motifs throughout. It gives them a sort of Iliad vibe, I'm pretty sure that's what he was trying to mimic and it comes off well.

The weaknesses I would say are:
1. Gratuitous sex and sexual violence. Adds little and turns some people off. You can imply these things without focusing on them.

2. Less would be more with the plot. Not all the threads come together meaningfully. The entire part with the exult general didn't ultimately make a huge difference. I guess I'm torn because I enjoyed reading it and liked having more, but I also think if Prince of Nothing was done in 600 pages total it could be better.

The editing problem was worse in the second series and I actually started to get a bit bored until it hit the third book. He also doesn't interest anything new interesting on the philosophy of mind front until then, and the parts he has on the nature of God and the Absolute aren't fully developed thoughts the way the parts on epiphenomenalism are.

Still, best new fantasy I've seen. I finished it a bit too recently to rank it fairly. I always rank recent reads too high. But I think it will stay up in the top 3 for genre fiction.

I don't think it will top Hyperion for me because Simmons' has tighter prose and narrative.

>>19330033

>>19330069
The philosophy in Prince of Nothing is pretty mediocre. The Thousandfold Though is dollar store Golden Path, and the titular Darkness that comes before is not very complex either. He thinks himself a lot smarter than he is.

Whats cool in his series are the logistics. I like the weapon triangle between:
mages annihilate armies
armies overwhelm archers with anti magic tears
archers with tears snipe mages

If you factor in terrain and the usual stuff like cavalry and siege engines there are some really fun high magic battles in PoN

>>19330186
>He thinks himself a lot smarter than he is.
Has he told you that himself?

>>19330140
I'll give the Last Magic Show a look, thanks anon.

>>19330033
What’s his fucking problem?

>>19330186
I have to disagree on it being Dollar Store Golden Path. I have to imagine Bakker read Dune. There is obviously a ton of influence there. What he adds is making the determinism a lot more based in how neuroscience actually works (to be fair, he had access to better research). Herbert had the problem of Paul having to be relatable as the key protagonist. Khellus reads better as sort of a Mentat type character than Paul because he doesn't need to keep slipping between the being a prescient computer and being the relatable kid you root for.

Herbert obviously wanted you to consider that Paul might be a sort of villain, but the narrative really makes him far more the hero. The extinction of humanity that necessitates the Golden Path is also a sort of amorphous, distant threat. The visceral reality of the Consult combined with the fact that Khellus is far easier to see as a monster than Paul, makes the tension of pragmatism more acute. The reality of Hell and damnation also gives it another dimension as the infinite and eternal totally demolish attempts at utilitarian calculus.

That said, I don't know if I like Bakker more than Dune. Dune carries out its narrative in under 500 pages and is better for it.

I do think Aspect Emperor, although weaker than Prince of Nothing, worked better than Children or God Emperor though.

>>19330520
The main problem in why genre faggotry is so shit is the overabundance of sequels.

>>19330033
Best living fantasy author.

Simple as.

>>19330033
Imagine being someone who knows who this is, or even worse, knows who this is and willfully reads "his" writings.

>>19330033
Imagine being someone who doesn't know who this is, or even worse, knows who this is and willfully doesn't read "his" writings.

>>19331167
Imagine failing to get dubs not being significant with this particular post.

>>19330033
Literally who?

>>19330832
If it takes you more than 1,000 pages to tell a story, and you aren't a long deceased literary giant, your story isn't worth reading.

>>19330149
The epitome of a midwit pseud. No wonder Reddit loves him.

So is he a
>brooo free will doesn't exist we're all just atoms and nothing truly matters
Rick and Morty type?

>>19331344
>free will doesn't exist
This is correct, though, but it's because God has predestined everything that occurs.

>>19331344
What an absolute faglord.

>>19331344
>>19331498
There's a reason why Reddit loves him.

>>19330209
>>19330149

>>19331498
>>19331507
Hard to believe someone would pay for a phd in philosophy only to come out of it with the same arguments that are made by atheist fans of Richard Dawkins

>>19331582
Bakker never got his PHD, he failed that.

>>19331599
No, not really.

>Imagine failing to get dubs not being significant with this particular post.

>>19331624
>Scott Bakker writings really turned my mind on like a light switch and I wouldn't be who I am today without "him"
>forever grateful to Scott
>I might be a woman someday you don't know

>>19330033
Your average fantasy reader is not used to philosophic themes. Hence the filtering.

>>19331690
Adding cuckoldry doesn't make a story more philosophical.

>>19331690
Some people simply can't handle his genius.

>>19331690
It might be worse than that.

>>19330033
Only living fantasy writer worth reading. I hope he finishes his series.

Who else based /ESL/ and very appreciative of Bakker's work? I feel like it's mainly English native speakers who dislike him for some reason based on some posts I've read around here.

>>19331818
People who only speak one language tend to have lower IQs on average.

>>19330033
He's genuinely retarded. Normies instinctively know this, and get filtered. Pic related.

>>19331696
It does to your personal life.

>>19331885
God, Bakker is such a midwit.

Like a lot of "big idea" fantasy writers he doesn't actually know what makes his works interesting.

I enjoyed thinking about the books after having read them, and discussing them with other people, than I did actually reading them.

>>19330119
>>19330124
You will never be a writer.
You have no brains, no vision, no skills, no courage to be bold and original.
When you look in the mirror you can see your smooth, pale hands, devoid of the calluses a writer would have.
You can see your cheeto encrusted neckbeard, with not a single hair above your jawline.
You can see the thick glasses that you flaunt in an attempt to look like an intellectual, but that are actually due to your masturbation addiction.
Your parents talk about you in their bed during sleepless nights fraught with anxiety and shame.
You acquaintances (you have no friends) mock your cringe intellectualoid persona and your literary aspirations.
All the encouragement you get is from embarassed near-strangers and people who want to keep selling you their writing workshops and courses.
Your keyboard, glazed in dried semen, watches you in mute sadness as you fap and pant. It has never been used for anything more complex than typing "trap genderbend doujin sword art online", and knows that it never will.
You will never be read in admiration to a flock of college girls that will fawn over you like groupies.
You will never put on paper any amazing saga of bravery and magic, never craft awe-inspiring new worlds out of thin air.
You will never be a writer.

>>19330119
I'm gonna filter your asscheeks with my turgid prose.

>>19332207
Very Bakkeresque

>>19331818
2 and a half languages, Bakker is a hack

>God, Bakker is such a midwit.

>>19330033
A lot of people in this board are leftist liberals.

What do you incels know about cuckoldry anyway? You know you need to have a gf and have actually had sex at least once to qualify as a cuckold which most of you never have. And cuckold aren't victims or plebs, it's a fetish that specifically attracts high IQ and very successful individuals, which basement dwellers on an anime boards aren't.

>Of course I like Cuckoldry in my novels, I'm a BVLL

It takes a special type of beta male to be unironically triggered by cuckoldry.

>>19332310
I would guess so considering how many profess knowing what reddit thinks about whatever. There's only one way to know what reddit thinks.

Lots of samefag seething just because people don’t want to read some leftist author.

>>19331612
He quite literally did not get his PhD, anon. Stop coping.

>>19332387
I wasn't asking.

>>19330033
"He" will never be a woman.

>>19332370
How womanish.

>>19332392
Seek help, anon and stop reading a story written by a self-proclaimed feminist. It ain’t healthy.

>>19332416
No, not really.

>>19332444
Quads of truth.

Imagine believing that Bakker is a feminist.

>>19332447
>Imagine believing that Bakker is a feminist.
Bakker said it himself that he's a feminist.

>>19332456
Didn't ask.

>>19332444
Based quads.

>>19332456
He’s also a liberal/leftist. Who caters to Reddit.

>>19332481
No, not really.

>Bakker said it himself that he's a feminist.

>>19332481
How would you know unless.... you go to reddit yourself?!

>>19332456
>No source.
I accept your defeat.

>>19332507
>How would you know unless.
Have you read his blog?

>>19332511
Yes. And you are wrong.

Checkmate.

>>19332511
Is that the one where he cries about the "Trump-Newscorp-Combine" or some other leftist bullshit?

>>19332528
Learn to write.

>>19332528
>Is that the one where he cries about the I checked his blog, and the first thing "Trump-Newscorp-Combine" or some other leftist bullshit?
Idiot.

>>19332532
>>19332536

>>19332550
Trump is left wing.

>>19332550
This shit is even cringe than I expected. Who takes this laughingstock seriously?

>>19332564
>Who takes this laughingstock seriously?
Absolutely no one.

>>19332564
>This shit is even cringe than I expected.
>is even cringe than

>>19332550
>>19332564
This is clearly false.

I don't know why you go through such extents to create false "blog" posts.

Seek help.

>>19332582
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2020/02/19/egnor-confounded/

>>19332592
Stop posting virus links.

>>19332592
>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2020/02/19/egnor-confounded/
People weren’t kidding when they say Bakker was Reddit.

We won Bakkerchads.

Anti Bakker Cucks can't even write properly.

>>19330033
A lot of people seem to like him.

>>19332653
Kek, stop samefagging OP, no one likes Bakker.

>>19332667
Didn't ask.

>>19332550
Hahahah holy cringe. Image an adult proudly proclaiming all these years later how
>My stupid high school gf's grandmother couldn't refute my atheism

Also eliminativism is completely retarded and even further solidifies this guy as smug pseud.

>>19332628
That is wordpress. Get you story straight.

>>19332653
Based.

Stop making Bakker threads, you're distracting him from writing the No God.

>>19332736
So you believe minds are made of magical substance?

>>19330033
People have a knee jerk reaction to eliminative materialism because the evidence for it makes it harder to believe in free will, an afterlife, or God. So they lash out and withdraw to superstition instead of going further and becoming Hegelians and sublating this knowledge.

Eliminativism appears to be correct in most of its claims, and yet this does not change the fact that being is the Absolute coming to recognize Itself in Absolute otherness (see also, The Signature in All Things).

>>19330149
The italics on epic fantasy are priceless. The first time I read that blog post I thought it had to be some kind of joke.

>>19334201
I like reading his blog. It’s a mix of cope from his failures and midwit philosophical takes that a user from Reddit can make. It just further solidifies this guy as smug pseud

>>19331344
>>19331472
>>19331498
>>19331507
Bakker's world ends up refuting this quote though.

>>19334166
Don't pretend to engage with a philosophical question if you don't understand it.

>>19332628
Why do academics always write in this dishonest polemic kind of way where they are mostly concerned with forcing the reader to accept their assertions instead of exploration and openendedness? It sets up a tradition of there always being this 'opposing' side that neither are able to concede anything to or even properly understand. It feels icky and I see it in everything. They need to stop identifying with intellectualism and their 'side'.

>>19334188
>So they lash out and withdraw to superstition instead of going further and becoming Hegelians and sublating this knowledge.
Or so you want to believe. This is an anti-intellectual practice because anyone can believe it for anything.

>>19330033
Bakker was a great read.

I can only recommend.

>>19334501
>Bakker
>Academic

>>19335684
Yes.

Hello, Based Department?

>>19332370
Not understanding criticism through demonstration is pretty womanish desu

>>19335801
Bakker isn’t an academic. The dumbfuck even failed to get his PhD.

>>19335882
Not everything is necessarily criticism, you know?

>>19334470
Ok, so absolutely no answer then except seethe. Thanks for clarification.

There are, or course, plenty of problems for physicalism in general, and consistent idealist systems that don't have to rely on appeals to skepticism that regress into solipsism, or angry appeals to emotion, it's just that I have just yet to see a single one of those alluded to on /lit/ in any thread on eliminative materialism (which used to be Dennett threads, lol), just seethe like this.

>>19334188
I wish Dennett would engage with these systems more but he mostly handwaves them. He basically ignores Kant's Copernican turn and focuses on the abstraction of physicalists models for the most part in what I've read. Grimm over at Stonybrook is good at comparing these with his views, Chalmers, etc. He has a solid book pulling in answers to big questions on the Hard Problem from them.

I only know Bakker from Neuropath, but even there he has his protagonist admit that there are philosophical systems that offer explanations on par with materialism in their coherence. He doesn't reference any directly. These are handwaves away as being less likely to be true because they are too complex for most people to understand, and because materialism helps us develop technologies and has pragmatic value, which is useful to keep the plot moving for his thriller, but a shit rebuttal.

>>19334526
I have no idea what this statement is supposed to mean. Is it some sort of appeal against epistemological relativism? I don't think that's what anon meant.

>>19335902
No, not really.

>>19335902
Bakker failed at philosophy, then he failed at neuroscience, and now he failed at fantasy. Wonder what he will fail at next, probably his tobacco farm.

>>19336003
You keep criticizing Bakker, but you have yet to provide a valid argument.

>>19336003
Bakker please stop posting. You need to stop this endless shitting on yourself and get back to writing the No-God

>>19336014
They can't even read him, what did you expect?

>>19336003
So this guy settled as a fantasy writer? Kinda pathetic.

>Still no arguments.

>>19330033
Too big brain for your average genre fiction enthusiast or 4chan user.

>>19332370
>it's not an insult to be like a woman!
Kek. Even women use "you throw like a girl" and other insults to demean men. They KNOW they're inferior. Denying it is just peak womanish behavior.

>>19332653
>no love for Orson Scott Card despite his hatred of faggots.
I'm ashamed of you, /lit/.

Bakkerchads,

We WON!

>>19336029
>>19336038
You will never be a writer.
You have no brains, no vision, no skills, no courage to be bold and original.
When you look in the mirror you can see your smooth, pale hands, devoid of the calluses a writer would have.
You can see your cheeto encrusted neckbeard, with not a single hair above your jawline.
You can see the thick glasses that you flaunt in an attempt to look like an intellectual, but that are actually due to your masturbation addiction.
Your parents talk about you in their bed during sleepless nights fraught with anxiety and shame.
You acquaintances (you have no friends) mock your cringe intellectualoid persona and your literary aspirations.
All the encouragement you get is from embarassed near-strangers and people who want to keep selling you their writing workshops and courses.
Your keyboard, glazed in dried semen, watches you in mute sadness as you fap and pant. It has never been used for anything more complex than typing "trap genderbend doujin sword art online", and knows that it never will.
You will never be read in admiration to a flock of college girls that will fawn over you like groupies.
You will never put on paper any amazing saga of bravery and magic, you will never conceive any mindblowing insights, you will never depict a generation's experience or craft awe-inspiring worlds out of thin air.
You will never be a writer.

>>19335945
Does eliminative materialism not propose that mental states or "consciousness" does not really exist? And that our qualitative subjective experiences are just illusions created by material processes?

But even the illusion of consciousness is still a subjective, conscious experience. Maybe I just don't understand the position, but it makes no sense to me.

Bump for BakkerChads

>>19338468
Bakker is shit, let this thread die already.

>>19338483
You will never be a writer.
You have no brains, no vision, no skills, no courage to be bold and original.
When you look in the mirror you can see your smooth, pale hands, devoid of the calluses a writer would have.
You can see your cheeto encrusted neckbeard, with not a single hair above your jawline.
You can see the thick glasses that you flaunt in an attempt to look like an intellectual, but that are actually due to your masturbation addiction.
Your parents talk about you in their bed during sleepless nights fraught with anxiety and shame.
You acquaintances (you have no friends) mock your cringe intellectualoid persona and your literary aspirations.
All the encouragement you get is from embarassed near-strangers and people who want to keep selling you their writing workshops and courses.
Your keyboard, glazed in dried semen, watches you in mute sadness as you fap and pant. It has never been used for anything more complex than typing "trap genderbend doujin sword art online", and knows that it never will.
You will never be read in admiration to a flock of college girls that will fawn over you like groupies.
You will never put on paper any amazing saga of bravery and magic, you will never conceive any mindblowing insights, you will never depict a generation's experience or craft awe-inspiring worlds out of thin air.
You will never be a writer.

>>19331507
Lolwut reddit hates him

>>19337751
Pure eliminativism proposes that consciousness and mental states don’t exist. This immunizes materialism against a wide range of arguments (e.g hard-problem arguments, category error arguments) at the price of making it highly unconvincing and opening it to phenomenal arguments.

>>19339034
That's not really a fair characterization, more of a strawman if anything. The claim is that it is impossible to gather data on qualia or any subjective experience, and thus they need to be eliminated from empirical study.

You can collect data on brain scans. You can ask people what they experience and code their verbal responses, or even code their nonverbal responses for analysis. What you cannot do is do empirical study on qualia because you only have access to your own.

Which seems like not much of a difference from other forms of psychology, right? I mean this is not that different from behaviorism circa 1950, except now we can had neuroimaging from the mix.

But the other side of it, probably of more interest to laymen, is that what we tend to find out about subjective experience makes it seem very different from what most people think it is. The brain doesn't have a central conciousness center where things we experience happens. Experience is an emergent phenomena of multiple specialized interacting systems.

You think you see way more of the world than you do. You visual field is actually tiny compared to what you think it is and your peripheral vision way worse than you experience it as. You also have a giant blind spot in the middle of your visual field that is excluded from concious awareness. Only careful experimentation shows a world of difference between the visual experience you think you have, and the sensory data you actually have access too. Conciousness has all sorts of slight of hand tricks to make things coherent.

Intentional movement is more spooky. When you test people for intentional movement, say "snap your fingers now!" the neurons that will guide the movement start firing BEFORE the experience of chosing to act. That is, from what we've seen, basically all movement from me typing this to you deciding to clap your hands as a demonstration of free will, demonstrably starts to happen first, then the experience of chosing to do what is already happening occurs. There isn't anything surprising to this from an evolutionary perspective since conciousness is a late arrival grafted on to existing systems, but it flies in the face of our theory of mind.

So, the big thing people tend to get uncomfortable around is things like the above. That the picture of conciousness in research is much reduced from the lives people think they live, and we can expose the way conciousness uses slight of hand to paper over inconsistencies.

You kind of get the feeling that we're all just muck, as my waifu would say.

>>19339500
BTW, Bakker himself has a quality summary of these findings that isn't behind a paywall.

https://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness

Eliminativism isn't a coherent stance though. Plenty, probably most neuroscientists want to eliminate the soul from consideration. No empirical evidence for it exists. Plenty of evidence suggests that our subjective experience is totally dependant on our nervous system. Dualism also had all sorts of logical contradictions to overcome. There just isn't a need for, or reason to include a soul in modern discourse on the mind. As Ockham said, don't multiply the number of entities required to explain something when not required.

Not everyone wants to eliminate qualia from study. And even those who do, don't mean to say "no one experiences pain, or desire." They mean to say that these classes and categories are too amorphously defined to have any merit on the study of the mind and using them causes more harm than good.

Do I believe this? No. If any one ontology has influenced me the most it's that of Jacob Boehme and Hegel, but I do find eliminativism compelling from a research agenda perspective. Plus it's nice and spooky, especially if you add epiphenomenalism to it. Good Halloween reading.

Eliminativism doesn't seem wrong to me in many of its conclusions, it just seems incomplete. It will be sublated into a higher system. It is inevitable, until the universe achieves the Absolute.

>>19332653
>Le Guin that low
jeez

>>19340108
That's what happens to racist writers.