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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9731264" data-attributes="member: 18">I disagree quite strongly.He's an apparent nihilist and a "neuroscience" bollocks artist. His most recent deal is he's obsessed with nearly conspiracy-theory level absolute nonsense stuff he's made up in "neuroscience" - all unprovable, unfalsifiable stuff with no apparent basis in existing science. He actually seems to have somewhat contemptuous opinions re: philosophy (despite being published in minor philosophy journals), in his case it's pretty clearly from a combination of him clearly not really understanding a lot of the philosophical concepts on a basic level, together with them not fitting with his conspiracy theory-style (rather than scientific) approach to "neuroscience" and how the brain works. This also ties into a lot of stuff in the Prince of Nothing books (esp. Kellhus).I use hate quotes around "neuroscience" note, because AFAICT, he is not applying the scientific method, nor creating theories the scientific method could be applied to, nor really interested in actual neuroscience.NB he stopped writing in 2017 and his brother says he's "done" for now at least and is "focused on his family", read that as you will, but I will point out there are similarities between his "neuroscience" stuff and what you might see with a smart person having a mental health crisis (indeed, we've seen this with authors before, they suddenly develop "important theories" in a field they're not really qualified in). Or maybe he was just like "Well this ain't paying the bills!" (because the second series of books sold very poorly), so who knows?Characters in PoN do yammer back and forth a lot in a way that could be described as "philosophizing", but to call it sophomoric would be to insult sophomores, and it's not actually engaging with actual philosophers or concepts, just engaging in teenage nihilism (it was very unsurprising to learn he came up with most of the PoN setting when he was a teenager).</blockquote>

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