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...so you can see where the "mainstream" is trending. It's obviously very far from the final word....

Obviously. It never had any chance of being admitted in any serious public venue in the first place, for sheer lack of grounds of serious intellectual and/or public merit and/or standing.

Until our pal Antonio Gramsci came along and pissed all over Western Civilization, it would never have occurred to anyone I know (shades of Pauline Kael here....) to imagine that such a teensy minority could wreak so much public havoc; i.e., on the majoritarian scale.

I'm talking about the ideologies that set up the enormities of 20th-century warfare here. Tens of millions of our fellow human beings died.

Some say the final mortality toll numbers in the hundreds of millions, inclusive, reflecting the "contributions" of all those 20th-century potentates -- atheists every last darned one of them, to make an explicit point intended for public scrutiny -- who couldn't figure out a better use for power than to slay their enemies. Such bright boys.

Which ought to clue in experienced, rational adults that whatever motivated this carnage, "We don't want it here where we (I) live."

Time for bed. Good night, PH. Thank you and sweet dreams....

p.s.: PH, personally, I have always found you fair-minded and gracious in every way. FWIW

Walker is right: We can't abandon the scientific approach to the solution of these problems, for in this case, philosophy's tools really aren't sharp enough for the kind of precision we need ...

I've read Walker now twice and I'm sure there will be a third time. There are several aspects of it that suggest it will withstand the "test of time".

The Physics of Consciousness is, or at least attempts to be, rigorous mathematically. Consciousness is found to be (or assumed to be, if you wish) fundamental, a non-material force or aspect of reality that expresses at the very foundation of physical reality, in state vector collapse. It is involved in the very "production" of physicality.

Walker goes on to explore the emergence or advent of human consciousness and gives us a quantum mechanical explanation that ties to aspects of consciousness that can be measured. Quite a feat. This latter focus may obscure the fact that Walker's math assumes or establishes that consciousness is universal, a fundamental agent in the production of physical reality. I don't think Walker is blind to this but there was only so much he could explore in one book.

A third comment would be that Walker at least implicitly acknowledges the link between beauty and truth. I liked this, personally, a lot, having been convinced for some while that this link is quite real.

Plato and Jesus and Buddha have, I believe, found a friend in Walker. Perhaps now this long retreat from the 19th Century tsunami of Materialism can begin to be reversed.