Gary, I’ve been laid low by Christmas, art and cricket. It’s a time for veging out, at least for me.

What you recently wrote about Australia and Europe in the twentieth century is interesting. It’s a past era, of course. Now there is no cultural isolation. We happen to be in the same city but we could equally be anywhere in the world.

The old Australian academic philosophies will die out and some day will appear as they actually are: as bizarre relics of a bygone era. But the new one, cognitive science (cs) is as bizarre as anything that preceded it. The difference is, cs is driven by mainstream US universities.

The spirit of cs is positivist – epistemology is first philosophy and the explication of scientific knowledge is the main task. So, it is dogmatic. It doesn’t answer to the spirit of unrest that Bataille so values in philosophy but instead aims to subdue that spirit.

It suits the old style Australian academic sensibility because it is physicalist. It believes in something like the mind-brain identity thesis – minds are physical processes but instead of being like steam engines they’re like computers. I prefer the steam engine analogy myself. It seems more friendly – Thomas the Tank Engine and that sort of stuff – but I’m old-fashioned. All the same, computers seem a better analogue for the fascist mind. (I’m being light-hearted.)

We need to get back onto the topic of pornography. Did you notice how the number of hits went up immediately pornography became the topic of discussion? Also, I’ve been unreliably informed that pornography is the main use of the internet, or the Web, or whatever it’s called. What is this thing called ‘telecommunication’? Judging by my unreliable information, it’s a realm where people can release their imagination if not their self. It’s insatiability. Are we the greedy species that can’t keep away from it? Or is it to do with the loss of our sovereignty? I prefer the latter perspective.