R. Scott Bakker

Last updated

R. Scott Bakker
R Scott Bakker 3 240409.jpg
Born (1967-02-02) February 2, 1967 (age 57)
Simcoe, Ontario, Canada
OccupationPhilosopher/Novelist
GenreScience Fiction/Fantasy
Website
rsbakker.wordpress.com

Richard Scott Bakker (born February 2, 1967) is a Canadian fantasy author. In 1986 he attended the University of Western Ontario to pursue a degree in literature and later an MA in theory and criticism. Since the late 1990s, he has been attempting to elucidate theories of media bubbles and the intellectual alienation of the working class. After all but dissertation in a PhD in philosophy at Vanderbilt University, Bakker returned to London, Ontario, where he now lives with his wife and daughter. He spends his time writing split between his fiction and his ongoing philosophic inquiry. [1] [2]

Early life

Bakker was born on February 2, 1967, in Simcoe, Ontario.

Works

Fiction

The Second Apocalypse

The Second Apocalypse is a fantasy series written by Bakker. The series includes three sub-series titled The Prince of Nothing, The Aspect-Emperor, and The No-God. The series was originally planned as a trilogy, but when Bakker began writing the series in the early 2000s he found it necessary to split each of the three novels into its own sub-series to incorporate all of the characters, themes and ideas he wished to explore.

ThePrince of Nothing trilogy was published between 2004 and 2006, while The Aspect-Emperor series was published between 2009 and 2017. The No-God has not been published at this time, and Bakker has not confirmed a release date.

Neuropath

While working on the Prince of Nothing series, Bakker was prompted by a crux of events to write a thriller dealing with the cognitive sciences. [3] He produced a near future science fiction novel involving a serial killer whose knowledge allows them to influence and control the human brain. This book is called Neuropath and was published in 2008.

The Disciple of the Dog

Shortly before The Aspect-Emperor's second book, The White-Luck Warrior, was published, Bakker released a second novel outside of his main fantasy series. Titled Disciple of the Dog, it features the private investigator, Disciple Manning, who suffers from a condition reminiscent of hyperthymesia. The story revolves around Disciple's recounting of a case involving a missing girl, a cult, and the small-town drama of Ruddick. It was published in November 2010. Bakker has planned a number of follow up novels to Disciple of the Dog, including The Enlightened Dead, [4] but due to the first novel's poor reception and very few reviews the sequels have not been pursued.

Other works

Bakker also has a number of unreleased works in progress, aside his fantasy opus, most notably Light, Time, and Gravity as well as an eventual anthology of short stories, Atrocity Tales, set within The Second Apocalypse fantasy narrative. [5] A draft of Light, Time, and Gravity was released serially on Bakker's blog, Three Pound Brain, but has since been removed. It is described by a defunct Amazon.ca link as a "novel told from the perspective of a suicidal English professor, recalling his experiences as a seventeen-year-old working on a Southwestern Ontario tobacco farm in the summer of 1984. Part essay, part narrative, part present, part history, Light, Time, and Gravity is a kind of Notes from the Canadian Underground, a portrait of our culture’s abject failure to create a genuine Canadian identity, as well as a stinging indictment of Canada’s literary and intellectual elites." [6]

Two other unreleased works of fiction in progress include the SF novellas Semantica and The Lollipop Factory. The former has been referenced by Bakker a number of times on his blog [7] [8] [9] and is described by fans as a "rumoured title set in a world where nootropic and neurocosmetic techniques have created a class division between those with enhancements and those without, where superhuman Tweakers rebel and are hunted like animals by an oppressive government." The latter, The Lollipop Factory, has only been mentioned once by Bakker in a Reddit r/Fantasy AMA in 2017. [10] Aside that it is a "short SF novel," nothing is yet known about this title.

Philosophy

As The Prince of Nothing trilogy was being published circa. 2003-06 and Bakker experienced his initial rise in popularity, he participated frequently with fans at the now read-only Three-Seas forum. During this time Bakker consistently began to formulate and popularize what would eventually become the foundation for his Blind Brain Theory and Heuristic Neglect Theory then focusing on how studies of human cognitive biases generally and eventually on their impact on academic Philosophy and the greater humanities.

Blind Brain Hypothesis

In 2008, Bakker published Neuropath, [11] a near future SF psychothriller which thematically continued Bakker's elucidation of human cognitive biases and their implications regarding human meaning, purpose, and morality, whatever form they may take. While the narrative events of the book make for a compelling thought experiment, Bakker included as an Author Afterword a short essay regarding the blending of factual and fictive premises therein and the eventual advent of the narrative's villain in our own world. The essay marks Bakker first formal mention of his Blind Brain Hypothesis, beyond its use in the narrative proper.

Narrative aside, in the Author Afterword Bakker sources two real world examples concerning illusory consciousness, the inner human experience of temporality and the imperceptible limits of field of vision. In the essay, as in the book via the character Thomas, Bakker argues that the human sense of the "Now," this very moment, might be symptomatic of perceptual thresholds akin to the human inability to perceive beyond the field of vision, certain colours outside within that field, or the perceptual blind spot caused by the lack of receptors in a portion of the back of the eye. Bakker cites the inability of consciousness to experience and perceive but a sliver of all the brain's processing as indicative of consciousness experience being totally illusory, rather than only sometimes in some contexts. As per the world of Neuropath's narrative, Bakker also argues that in time non-invasive brain scanning, via something like the narrative conceit of "low-field fMRI," may result in an entirely new scale of institutional manipulation, moving beyond efforts of associative conditioning given the wealth of data prevalent real-time brain imaging could provide. Finally, central to the essay is Bakker's assertion that the scientific method and its progress would eventually yield unfathomable insights into human behavior and cognition such that the existence of the narrative's villain and his futuristic brain–computer interface are inevitable in real life as well.

The Semantic Apocalypse

Shortly thereafter in 2008, Bakker presented The End of the World As We Know It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse [12] at Western University's Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, which was rebutted by then students Nick Srnicek and Ali McMillan. The title of Bakker's lecture, familiar to readers of Neuropath, references the Semantic Apocalypse, a theory attributed to one of the protagonist's professors.

Bakker begins the talk with a call to writers in the audience to reach beyond the confines of academia and their peers and instead write to challenge audiences who don't share the author's values and attitudes. He then summarizes again the narrative underpinnings of Neuropath's world where the technologies of neuroscience have reached technical and social maturity and prevalence.

The Semantic Apocalypse continues with a number of secondary arguments concerning pessimistic induction and what Bakker calls "Cognitive Closure FAPP." Regarding the former, Bakker explains that in all arenas historically science has replaced "intentional [or folk] explanations of natural phenomena with functional explanations." For Bakker it follows that this will inevitably extend to the brain and human cognition. On the latter, Bakker suggests that human culture and society have continually ignored the facts of our cognitive biases without due consideration of their impact. This gives rise to what Bakker refers to as the "Magical Belief Lottery:" the ignorance of a growing battery of confirmation biases concerning how humans rationalize behaviour and thought leading to conviction in long-held intentional or folk explanations of humans and their place in the world.

Building on his elucidations from Neuropath's Author Afterword, Bakker presents the metaphor of the Blind Brain Hypothesis as a magician's coin trick. By Bakker's argument the brain has evolved to process a prodigious amount of perceptual information regarding its local environment tracking natural objects with causal histories. Coin tricks through sleight of hand or misdirection exploit the brain's need for that causal history, confounding the brain's ability to process the coin's causal history. Given the central assumption of Blind Brain Hypothesis, that "information that finds its way to consciousness represents only a small fraction of the brain’s overall information load," humans are likely likewise unable to account for the causal history of thoughts and behaviours. It supposes that our conscious awareness of information processed by the brain is preceded by what Bakker calls here information horizons. Again Bakker draws upon the analogy of the eye's perceptual thresholds, this time highlighting that half of all the retinal nerves process information exclusively from the receptor rich fovea, and also extends that metaphor to speculate about the information horizons of our temporal field and the experience of the "Now."

Finishing his lecture and corresponding transcript, Bakker speaks on the money invested into using the advances in neuroscience to improve marketing techniques. Bakker also uses a metaphor on alien cognition describing beings whose brains and nervous systems had evolved to track their brain's causal history.

Three Pound Brain

In May 2010, Bakker began a blog entitled Three Pound Brain, [13] in order to grow his presence online following a period of inactivity after years of engaging on the defunct Three-Seas forum. Over the years, Bakker has billed the blog as "a crossroads between incompatible empires," a crux for disparate ideologies to engage each other. While the content of Bakker's posts has varied greatly over the years, the enduring theme has been the slow and steady digestion of topics through versions of Bakker's Blind Brain Hypothesis, which comes to be called the Blind Brain Theory on his blog over years. Along with blog post content ranging from sociocultural commentary to writing fiction and philosophy, Bakker also uses Three Pound Brain to host paper drafts, copies of his past academic work, speculative pieces, and samples and drafts of his fiction writing. Over time, he has engaged a wide variety of disparate interlocutors and his blog content has become more technical, resembling some of his earlier academic projects, as Bakker increasingly tackled the philosophical work of noteworthy philosophers, historical and contemporary, using the blog as his philosophic workshop.

The Future of Literature In the Age of Information

Blog post from Three Pound Brain, October 2011. [14]

The Last Magic Show

In April 2012, Bakker added to Three Pound Brain a link to a draft of a paper he called The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory for the Appearance of Consciousness. [15] [16] The Last Magic Show was the first cumulative result of Bakker's efforts on Three Pound Brain and consolidated many terms invented or cited and appropriated across the previous two years of philosophic inquiry and analysis. The draft marked the first formal mention of Blind Brain Theory, as evolved from the Blind Brain Hypothesis. In his abstract Bakker describes the paper as addressing "[p]uzzles as profound and persistent as the now, personal identity, conscious unity, and most troubling of all, intentionality, could very well be kinds of illusions foisted on conscious awareness by different versions of the informatic limitation expressed, for instance, in the boundary of your visual field."

The title of Bakker's paper, A Blind Brain Theory for the Appearance of Consciousness, reflects his assertion therein that the Blind Brain Theory serves as a vehicle to describe and distinguish the features of how conscious experience appears to self-reflection rather than the actual specific systems and functioning underlying consciousness. To begin, Bakker imagines an explanatory vehicle he refers to as a Recursive System, the brain architecture which has evolved to track even more the basic architecture of itself, possibly akin to the relationship between the frontal cortex to the rest of the brain. Bakker suggests two parts to a Recursive System, the system "open," all the information processed by the brain, and the system "closed," referring to the information accessible to consciousness. The basic assumption regarding the existence of a Recursive System implies a limit on the information available to the RS-closed, conscious awareness, which Bakker dubs Informatic Asymmetry and its Asymptotic Limit. As specific examples Bakker refers to the cognitive psychology literature citing change blindness and inattentional bias (cognitive bias), wherein there are clear divergences between the information processed by the brain and information from the self-reports of perception.

As Bakker continues he expands on Informatic Asymmetry and the Asymptotic Limits of different Recursive Systems writing of information horizons, "the boundaries that delimit the recursive neural access that underwrites consciousness." Describing consciousness as encapsulated by the global limit of information horizons, Bakker highlights consciousness' inability to perceive any absence of information, that is processing outside of the RS-closed, as in some anosognosias. The information provided to consciousness is perceived as sufficient because the RS-closed is unable to track the discrepancy of the information processed by the whole brain. Bakker returns to the Coin Trick analogy from Neuropath's Author Afterword, using the magician as an extended explanatory metaphor to further elucidate Asymptotic Limits of specific Recursive Systems and the Asymptotic Complex of encapsulation regarding the experience of persistent global sufficiency, from where the paper almost certainly gets the former part of its title.

As before, Bakker builds on previous exposition reframing the experience of "the Now," with a portion of the draft directly referencing an older blog post. [17] Likewise, he again uses the example of the visual field to propose a similar temporal explanation for the conscious experience the Now. Blind Brain Theory, Bakker writes, argues seemingly natural occurring anosognosias but maintains that this becomes ultimately problematic for our experience of identity and intentions.

Further elaborating, Bakker cites the phenomenon in psychophysics known as flicker fusion (or flicker fusion threshold), the point at which consciousness perceives a light as steady. This phenomenon is widely exploited in the modern human environment from light bulbs to screened devices and brings about similar explanatory power akin to Bakker's use of the visual field metaphor.

Nearing the close of The Last Magic Show, Bakker delves into the highly speculative implications of Blind Brain Theory's argument for the appearance of consciousness regarding the use and reference of Intentionality in academic philosophy, as well as, the very underpinnings of humanity's scientific and philosophic endeavours, logic and math, the latter of which might reference an earlier essayistic work posted to Three Pound Brain. [18] He also writes of the "First-person Perspective Show," which almost definitely precedes his draft paper, The Introspective Peep Show. In the footnotes of The Last Magic Show, Bakker mentions that threads of his consideration have found themselves in every novel he's written, but that specifically "[o]nly Neuropath deals with the theory in any sustained manner." Bakker also takes care to distinguish Blind Brain Theory from eliminativism generally, in that, his theory "allows for a systematic diagnosis of the distortions and illusions belonging to the first person perspective."

The Introspective Peepshow

Draft paper posted to Three Pound Brain, January 2013. [19] Reposted as a reworked blog post, April 2013. [20]

Through the Brain Darkly

A proposed anthology of Three Pound Brain's essays and articles named for a fictional book that appears in Neuropath, mentioned on Three Pound Brain in April 2013. [21] Later in September, 2013, Bakker later posted a draft essay possibly serving as the last piece to be included in Through the Brain Darkly. [22]

Back to Square One

An essay published on Scientia Salon, November 2014. [23] [24]

Crash Space

A near future SF short announced on Three Pound Brain, November 2015, [25] and released in Midwest Studies in Philosophy. [26]

The Digital Dionysus

An anthology of essays published in September 2016 examining "the importance of Nietzsche's thought for decoding the vicissitudes of our digital age" (Keith Ansell-Pearson); Bakker contributed a chapter based on the talk that he presented to the annual Nietzsche Workshop @ Western -- a conference which he had regularly attended in London, the final year of which took place at The New School in New York City..

From Scripture to Fantasy

A paper published in Cosmos and History , January 2017. [27]

On Alien Philosophy

While an earlier draft of On Alien Philosophy was published on Three Pound Brain, August 2015, [28] Bakker ultimately published the paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Feb 2017. [29] [30]

Bibliography

The Second Apocalypse

The Prince of Nothing

The Aspect-Emperor

  • The Judging Eye (2009) ISBN   978-0-14-305160-2
  • The White-Luck Warrior (2011) ISBN   978-0-14-305162-6
  • The Great Ordeal (2016) ISBN   978-1-4683-0169-4 [31]
  • The Unholy Consult (2017) ISBN   978-1468314861 [32]

Atrocity Tales

  • The False Sun, Three Pound Brain, [33] published in 2017 in The Unholy Consult
  • The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin, Three Pound Brain, [34] published in 2017 in The Unholy Consult
  • The Knife of Many Hands, published in two parts in Grimdark Magazine #2 & #3, 2015 [35] [36]
  • The Carathayan, published in Evil is a Matter of Perspective [37] [38]

Short stories

Disciple Manning novels

Stand-alone novels

Essay-collections

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Consciousness</span> Awareness of existence

Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations, and debate by philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of it. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination, and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, metacognition, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Dennett</span> American philosopher (1942–2024)

Daniel Clement Dennett III was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of perception</span> Branch of philosophy

The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence of perceptual illusions and hallucinations and the relativity of perceptual experience as well as certain insights in science. Realist conceptions include phenomenalism and direct and indirect realism. Anti-realist conceptions include idealism and skepticism. Recent philosophical work have expanded on the philosophical features of perception by going beyond the single paradigm of vision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive neuroscience</span> Scientific field

Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.

<i>Consciousness Explained</i> 1991 book by Daniel Dennett

Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. Dennett describes consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. He compares consciousness to an academic paper that is being developed or edited in the hands of multiple people at one time, the "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness. In this analogy, "the paper" exists even though there is no single, unified paper. When people report on their inner experiences, Dennett considers their reports to be more like theorizing than like describing. These reports may be informative, he says, but a psychologist is not to take them at face value. Dennett describes several phenomena that show that perception is more limited and less reliable than we perceive it to be.

Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Chalmers</span> Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist

David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and evolutionarily developed functions. However, different definitions of "module" have been proposed by different authors. According to Jerry Fodor, the author of Modularity of Mind, a system can be considered 'modular' if its functions are made of multiple dimensions or units to some degree. One example of modularity in the mind is binding. When one perceives an object, they take in not only the features of an object, but the integrated features that can operate in sync or independently that create a whole. Instead of just seeing red, round, plastic, and moving, the subject may experience a rolling red ball. Binding may suggest that the mind is modular because it takes multiple cognitive processes to perceive one thing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard problem of consciousness</span> Philosophical concept

In the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.

Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model of consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991. As the title states, the book proposes a high-level explanation of consciousness which is consistent with support for the possibility of strong AI.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Humphrey</span> British neuropsychologist

Nicholas Keynes Humphrey is an English neuropsychologist based in Cambridge, known for his work on evolution of primate intelligence and consciousness. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; he proposed the theory of the "social function of intellect". He is the only scientist to have edited the literary journal Granta.

The Prince of Nothing is a series of three fantasy novels by Canadian author R. Scott Bakker, first published in 2004, part of a wider series known as "The Second Apocalypse". This trilogy details the emergence of Anasûrimbor Kellhus, a brilliant monastic warrior, as he takes control of a holy war and the hearts and minds of its leaders. Kellhus exhibits incredible powers of prediction and persuasion, which are derived from deep knowledge of rationality, cognitive biases, and causality, as discovered by the Dûnyain, a secret monastic sect. As Kellhus goes from military leader to divine prophet, Drusas Achamian, the sorcerer who mentored Kellhus, comes to realize that his student may well be the harbinger of the Second Apocalypse.

Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis introduced by Julian Jaynes who argued human ancestors as late as the ancient Greeks did not consider emotions and desires as stemming from their own minds but as the consequences of actions of gods external to themselves. The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain that appears to be "speaking" and a second part that listens and obeys—a bicameral mind—and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he makes the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.

Paul Montgomery Churchland is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland rose to the rank of full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and joint appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive Science Faculty.

The Aspect-Emperor is a four volume series of fantasy novels written by Canadian author R. Scott Bakker. It is part of his Second Apocalypse series, and takes place twenty years after the events of his debut trilogy The Prince of Nothing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind–body problem</span> Open question in philosophy of how abstract minds interact with physical bodies

The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Animal consciousness</span> Quality or state of self-awareness within an animal

Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neural correlates of consciousness</span> Neuronal events sufficient for a specific conscious percept

The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena; that is, neural changes which necessarily and regularly correlate with a specific experience. The set should be minimal because, under the materialist assumption that the brain is sufficient to give rise to any given conscious experience, the question is which of its components are necessary to produce it.

The Dehaene–Changeux model (DCM), also known as the global neuronal workspace, or global cognitive workspace model, is a part of Bernard Baars's global workspace model for consciousness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Schneider</span> American philosopher and artificial intelligence expert

Susan Lynn Schneider is an American philosopher and artificial intelligence expert. She is the founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University where she also holds the William F. Dietrich Distinguished Professorship. Schneider has also held the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation at NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress.

References

  1. "Scott Bakker - Academia.edu". independent.academia.edu. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  2. "Three Pound Brain". Three Pound Brain. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  3. "New R. Scott Bakker interview". fantasyhotlist.blogspot.ca. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  4. "T-ZERO". Three Pound Brain. January 27, 2011. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  5. "School's… Out… For Autumn!". Three Pound Brain. August 23, 2011. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  6. Bakker, R. Scott (October 21, 2011). Light, Time, and Gravity. Insomniac Press. ISBN   9781554830343.
  7. "What is the Semantic Apocalypse?". Three Pound Brain. June 21, 2011. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  8. "Semantica". Three Pound Brain. October 31, 2011. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  9. "Tell Me Another One". Three Pound Brain. May 16, 2012. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  10. "R. Scott Bakker on Fantasy, Philosophy, and Dooooom • r/Fantasy". reddit. April 3, 2017. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  11. "Neuropath". Goodreads. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  12. N (November 27, 2008). "The Semantic Apocalypse". Speculative Heresy. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  13. "May | 2010 | Three Pound Brain". rsbakker.wordpress.com. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  14. "The Future of Literature in the Age of Information". Three Pound Brain. September 29, 2011. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
  15. "The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness". Three Pound Brain. April 12, 2012. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  16. Bakker, Scott. "The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  17. "T-Zero". Three Pound Brain. November 17, 2011. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  18. "Mathematics and the Russian Doll Structure of, Like, the Whole Universe". Three Pound Brain. August 17, 2011. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
  19. "The Introspective Peepshow: Consciousness and the 'Dreaded Unknown Unknowns'". Three Pound Brain. January 18, 2013. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  20. "The Introspective Peepshow: Consciousness and the 'Dreaded Unknown Unknowns'". Three Pound Brain. April 23, 2013. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  21. "The Crux". Three Pound Brain. April 29, 2013. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  22. "Cognition Obscura". Three Pound Brain. September 24, 2013. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  23. "Back to Square One: toward a post-intentional future". Scientia Salon. November 5, 2014. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  24. Bakker, Scott (January 2014). "Back to Square One: Toward a Post-Intentional Future". Scientia Salon.
  25. "On Ordeals, Great and Small, and Their Crashing". Three Pound Brain. November 22, 2015. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  26. Bakker, R. Scott (September 1, 2015). "Crash Space". Midwest Studies in Philosophy. 39 (1): 186–204. doi:10.1111/misp.12034. ISSN   1475-4975.
  27. Scott, Bakker Richard (2017). "From Scripture to Fantasy: Adrian Johnston and the Problem of Continental Fundamentalism". Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. 13 (1): 522–551.
  28. "Alien Philosophy". Three Pound Brain. August 9, 2015. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  29. Scott Bakker, R. (January 1, 2017). "On Alien Philosophy". Journal of Consciousness Studies. 24 (1–2): 31–52.
  30. "On Alien Philosophy". Three Pound Brain. February 1, 2017. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  31. Bakker, R. Scott (July 5, 2016). The Great Ordeal: Book Three. The Overlook Press. ISBN   9781468301694.
  32. "On Ordeals, Great and Small, and Their Crashing". Three Pound Brain. November 22, 2015. Retrieved November 22, 2015.
  33. "The False Sun". January 9, 2012.
  34. "The Four Revelations of Cinial'jin". November 7, 2011.
  35. Grimdark Magazine Issue #2
  36. Grimdark Magazine Issue #3
  37. "Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists". Kickstarter. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  38. Tchaikovsky, Adrian; Schafer, Courtney; Fletcher, Michael R.; Williams, Mazarkis; Marshall, Alex; Salyards, Jeff; Speakman, Shawn; Staveley, Brian; Frohock, Teresa (June 16, 2017). Collins, Adrian; Myers, Mike (eds.). Evil Is a Matter of Perspective. Grimdark Magazine. ISBN   9780648010579.
  39. "LIGHT, TIME, AND GRAVITY (Draft) | Three Pound Brain". Archived from the original on January 6, 2015. Retrieved July 29, 2015.
  40. "The Long Held Breath". August 17, 2011.
  41. Schwitzgebel, Eric; Bakker, R. Scott (November 27, 2013). "Reinstalling Eden". Nature. 503 (7477): 562. Bibcode:2013Natur.503..562S. doi: 10.1038/503562a . S2CID   4469594.
  42. "What Was… and What Will Never be". August 17, 2011.
  43. "On Ordeals, Great and Small, and Their Crashing". Three Pound Brain. November 22, 2015. Retrieved November 23, 2015.
  44. "The Dime Spared". March 22, 2016.

Interviews, articles, podcasts, and presentations