can't stop bloggin! one more thing on hawking: the world is not mind-dependent. the mind is world-dependent. (andy clark puts forward one version of this truth, for example.) now the notion that the world is mind-dependent is profoundly anti-naturalistic. if darwin is in the right world, then the human mind arises in a process of adaptation to an actual pre-existing environment, and is comprehensible in terms of the demands that environment poses, the objective facts with which it confronts a creature. but the hawking approach asserts the opposite: that the environment arises in response to us, in a profound and insane sense: we create its past. so if you still wanted a little evolution, you'd be forced to conclude that the mind arose from adaptation to an environment retrojected into the past by that very mind: we actually are making right now the past that gave rise to us. the human mind in this scenario is an uncaused cause, a prime mover; a god. now i note that the ability of these folks to swallow absurdities appears to know no limit. but these particular absurdities are completely incompatible with the sciences that ended up giving rise to them.