A Beautiful Accident

- the Cartesian theater

A strangely interesting video excerpt - a tv program titled "a beautiful accident" with Oliver Sacks, Stephen Toulmin, Daniel C. Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, and Rupert Sheldrake sitting around a small table discussing the philosophy of mind (I think) and the Cartesian theater ... a derisive term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett to pointedly refer to a defining aspect of what he calls Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialistic theories of the mind.

Though I've heard of most of these guys, I only really know about Oliver Sacks, but I do know from science fiction about the Dyson sphere and know that Stephen Toulmin wrote Cosmopolis (A Conversation with Stephen Toulmin).



Here's another excerpt of the same show with mostly Sheldrake and Dyson ......



You can find more excerpts at Youtube. Here's a little about Wim Kayzer who made the tv show from which the excerpts came, from the (translated) Wikipedia page ....

Wim Kayzer (1946) is a Dutch journalist and filmmaker .... Since the eighties made for the VPRO Kayzer a number of special television programs .... In 1987 the series "better than God", in which doctors, geneticists and disabled people talked about the future of genetic research.

"Meticulous and despair" followed in 1989, a series of interviews with writers like Gabriel García Márquez, George Steiner, Gyorgy Konrad and Jorge Semprún ....

In 1993 "a beautiful accident<", Netherlands where he had ... scientists like Daniel C. Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Rupert Sheldrake and Stephen Toulmin ...


- Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams (who plays a fictionalized version of Oliver Sacks) in the movie Awakenings, adapted from Sack's book of the same name