Philosophy
neurophilosophy | August 14, 2007
In today's New York Times, John Tierney discusses an argument by Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, that our existence could be nothing more than a computer simulation being run by posthumanists.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or "posthumans," could run "ancestor simulations" of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.…
voltagegate | August 13, 2007"Without knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife. Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own."
- Norman Myers
purepedantry | August 7, 2007In response to my earlier post on the limits of utilitarianism Ezra Klein, blogger and journalist at The American Prospect, had this to say:
Reading this perfectly serious attempt to lay out Ayn Rand's objections to utilitarianism, I'm reminded of how utterly astonishing I find it that anyone takes her seriously. Listen to this stuff: "The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good."
Do people really…
neurophilosophy | August 4, 2007
IN The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) Keanu Reeves plays a computer programmer who leads a double life as a hacker called "Neo". After receiving cryptic messages on his computer monitor, Neo begins to search for the elusive Morpheus (Laurence Fishburn), the leader of a clandestine resistance group, who he believes is responsible for the messages. Eventually, Neo finds Morpheus, and is then told that reality is actually very different from what he, and most other people, perceives it to be.
Morpheus tells Neo that human existence is merely a facade. In reality, humans are being '…
jstemwedel | August 2, 2007Or is there just something wrong with this instrument for self-evaluation?
The average score is pegged at 15 for a woman, 18 for a man. The "Asperger's" range is 32-50.
I scored 30.
Now, I have this reputation (at least in the geek circles with which I run) of being social and diplomatic and empathetic and good at communicating. But these results would tend to suggest ... not so much.
Although I'm wondering how accurate the self-assessments are. How good a judge am I of my facility at chit-chat or of how well I "read" other people? Also, the items that ask about what you prefer (rather…
omnibrain | July 29, 2007There's a great Flickr slide show with some brilliant LOL Philosophers right here.
Here's one of my favorites:
And a link to a few LOLScientists was brought to my attention recently. Check them out here.
voltagegate | July 27, 2007"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal."
-Thomas Jefferson
hrynyshyn | July 25, 2007Steven Pinker of The Blank Slate fame, weighs in on the nature and temptation of "dangerous ideas" in the latest must-read for visitors to the Island. Not too surprisingly, he likes them. Among the questions we should not be afraid to ask, says Pinker, are:
* Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?
* Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
* Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?
An excerpt , from his essay, which is the introduction to a series on dangerous ideas…
mixingmemory | July 18, 2007I've been out of town since Saturday, with no internet access. Thank goodness for tiny islands on the gulf coast of Florida. Unfortunately, I'm still sick, and I'm exhausted, so I'm going to have to hold off on posts that actually require work. Just to give you some previews, I'm working on some posts related to the negation stuff I talked about a while back, a post on conspiracy theories, some stuff on implicit and benevolent sexism, and, if I ever get around to actually putting the argument together, a fairly technical one in which I claim that metaphors don't exist (well, not quite, just…
jstemwedel | July 16, 2007In my last post, I allowed as how the questions which occupy philosophers of science might be of limited interest or practical use to the working scientist.* At least one commenter was of the opinion that this is a good reason to dismantle the whole discipline:
[T]he question becomes: what are the philosophers good for? And if they don't practice science, why should we care what they think?
And, I pretty much said in the post that scientists don't need to care about what the philosophers of science think.
Then why should anyone else?
Scientists don't need to care what historians,…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2007Prompted by my discussion of Medawar and recalling that once in the past I called him a gadfly (although obviously I meant it in the good way), Bill Hooker drops another Medawar quotation on me and asks if I'll bite:
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem to be able to get on very well without it. Most scientists receive no tuition in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no better as scientists than those who have not. Of what other branch of…
voltagegate | July 13, 2007A "green" art show just opened up in Lexington titled "HOT: Artists Respond to Global Warming", where area artists wanted to "participate in the conversation about climate change" through their works.
The objective of the show was to go beyond the informational and factual aspects and allow the artists to become true evaluators of the world around them, she said. The results include numerous media -- pottery, sculpture, oil paintings, watercolor paintings, fabric, and multimedia. The exhibit is laid out clearly, taking visitors from the immediately accessible depictions of global warming to…
sb admin | July 12, 2007A music video, a crowdsourced homecast cultural expression ... Brain Tamer by Peter Johnson.
Brain Tamer
voltagegate | July 12, 2007"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
-Carl Sagan
jstemwedel | July 12, 2007Following up on the earlier discussions of intentional unclarity and bad writing in scientific papers, I thought this might be a good opportunity to consider an oft-cited article on scientific papers, P.B. Medawar's "Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent?" [1] He answers that question in the affirmative only three paragraphs in:
The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.
Medawar's major complaint has to do with the "orthodox form" and the story it tells about how scientific knowledge is produced.…
voltagegate | June 28, 2007"You can't always sit in your corner of the forest and wait for people to come to you... you have to go to them sometimes."
-Winnie the Pooh
jstemwedel | June 25, 2007Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions:
Should tenure-track faculty members who are not yet tenured vote on new hires?
Paul S. Davies, one of the professors who pressed to exclude the junior professors from voting, stressed that such a shift in the rules would protect them. "If you have junior people voting, they have tenure in the back of their…
voltagegate | June 17, 2007"The crises of our time, it becomes increasingly clear, are the necessary impetus for the revolution now under way. And once we understand nature's transformative powers, we see that it is our powerful ally, not a force to feared our subdued."
-Thomas Kuhn
mixingmemory | June 16, 2007First, an obituary by his friend, Jürgen Habermas. It begins with a story of Rorty making light of the illness that ultimately killed him:
After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
In the next paragraph, he writes:
Three and a half decades ago, Richard Rorty loosened himself from the corset of a profession whose conventions had become too…