Oh, she’s sincere all right. Like you, I intuit that she’s onto something, but I’m not getting my head wrapped around it very easily. I realize that I carry a lot of baggage in regard to information theorists (if that’s even the right word … as I’ve noted repeatedly elsewhere, “theory” drives me batty); that is, those IT/AI folks who reduce everything to “information” so as to deprive the notion of any real meaning. This is not what Currivan is doing at all. It is clear she wants to re-form our understanding of the notion, but I’ve not grapsed fully how she thinks she’s going to do it.
Sounding like does not make it so, but too many scientistic types are too blind to see that what they are practicing is in fact religion, and probably a more deadly variety than we’ve been cursed with for the past few thousand years. Consciousness is gaining ground, and we can thank a growing number of folks for that. (As an aside, I was pleasantly surprised that friends of mine from CA endorsed her book … small world somehow.) So, she does have the double duty of trying to show that (real) science is needed, but that it’s needed in a very different direction. Unlike many, I never saw physics as the “queen”. I’ve never subscribed to a primus inter pares approach to science at all. I’m wading through Kelley, et al.‘s Irreducible Mind and their (overdue sympathetic) review of Meyers’ tertium quid method reflects much more my own view of what “science” is supposed to be about. Unforutnately, we’ve not only almost completely succumbed to scientistic narrow-mindedness, only recently have researchers been coming out of the woodwork (like Welch, like Brown, like Kastrup) who still remember (or have rediscovered) what science is supposed to be.
I haven’t been able to come to a clear conclusion about Smolin yet … some days I’m more inclined than others … Karan Barad is an unknown. In 25 words or less … ?
My noggin has taken quite a beating for quite a while, but I don’t think I’m punch-drunk yet (but that’s only my view!). I had once hoped that I would use my “old age” to refine some of my thinking, not restructure it. Oh, the foolhardiness of the young.