Archive for Philosophy
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Digital Culture, Extended, Feminism, Philosophy, Technology
May 14, 2010 at 10:28 am
There’s been a lot of chatter about “post-genderism” and the like with the news of this recent work:
Virtual reality can get downright unreal. In this simulated realm, grown men given a new perspective on the world suddenly find themselves convinced that they inhabit the body of a young girl.
I understand the value of these experiments as a stepping stone in which we are learning how to project our experiences into a different sort of body and environment, and I understand the potential benefits that can come from this research (phantom limb mirror-boxes, for example, as well as some of the interesting work done by Henrik Ehrsson.)
But for people thinking that projecting into the body of a female somehow means you experience in the world as a female? You need to learn a lot more about phenomenal experience, cognitive science, and neuroscience. This may seem strange coming from someone who stresses the role of the body in cognition, but it really isn’t. This all calls for a much larger post than I’m planning to make here, but if you take seriously the brain-body-environment complex, you know that you can’t swap one aspect for a brief time and fundamentally change anything. A male doesn’t understand what it means to be female by changing what the body looks like any more than I understand what it feels like to be a female in a middle-eastern culture just by virtue of both of us having a uterus. These three things, brain, body, and environment, build up and create who we are over time. Having a female body is one small part of that process, but much more important is the way you are treated by your culture over time that builds the experience of being female (in that culture at that time, since there is no essential “feminine experience”). These experiments are mildly interesting as a step on the path, but they do not in any way, shape, or form, belong alongside the label “post-gender.”
Link to “Grown Men Swap Bodies with Virtual Girl” on Discovery.com
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Atheism, Blurb, Evolution, Philosophy, Science, ethics
May 6, 2010 at 1:32 pm
“A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life.” Paul Bloom in the NY Times.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Blurb, Evolution, Philosophy, Science, ethics
April 24, 2010 at 2:54 pm
BRAIN cells that may underlie our ability to empathise with others have been detected directly in people for the first time. Link to New Scientist article.
Posted in Blurb, Philosophy, Science
April 16, 2010 at 5:47 am
“Some of us need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to make us cognitively sharper. A newly published study suggests perhaps a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well.” Link to article about “mindfulness meditation” and cognition.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Atheism, Blurb, Evolution, Philosophy, Science, ethics
April 15, 2010 at 10:25 am
if a deterministic understanding of human behavior encourages antisocial behavior, how can we scientists justify communicating our deterministic research findings? In fact, there’s a rather shocking line in this Psychological Science article, one that I nearly overlooked on my first pass. Vohs and Schooler write that:
If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.
Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming that the public “can’t handle the truth,” and that we should somehow be protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social behaviors. Perhaps they’re right. Jesse Bering on the sticky science of free will in Scientific American.
Posted in Academic Life, Blurb, Philosophy
April 8, 2010 at 8:16 am
Fiction writers, artists, and directors create works generally outside of the academy, for audiences outside its walls. That work is studied inside the academy by humanists seeking to gain an understanding of the period, place, or identity it reflects. Like the fiction writer or the artist, and unlike her fellow humanists, the philosopher is focused on creating her own body of work, ideally a novel attempt at a solution to the on-going philosophical problems. But unlike the fiction writer or the artist, there is hardly an audience anymore for philosophy outside of the academy… Link to The Crisis of Philosophy by Jason Stanley at Inside Higher Ed.
Posted in Blurb, Evolution, Philosophy, Science
April 8, 2010 at 8:10 am
“They do not have new data, new theory, close acquaintance with the everyday practice of evolutionary investigations, or any interest in supplying alternative explanations of evolutionary phenomena. Instead, they wield philosophical tools to locate a “conceptual fault line” in contemporary Darwinism. Apparently unshaken by withering criticism of Fodor’s earlier writings about evolutionary theory, they write with complete assurance, confident that their limited understanding of biology suffices for their critical purpose. The resulting argument is doubly flawed: it is biologically irrelevant and philosophically confused.” Ned Block and Philip Kitcher on Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s new bizarre book “What Darwin Got Wrong.” Link to the Boston Review.
Posted in Academic Life, Artificial Intelligence, Critical Thinking?, Digital Culture, Evolution, Extended, Feminism, Philosophy, Science, Technology, ethics, literature
March 30, 2010 at 5:28 pm
I’ll be asking this repeatedly via all of my web-presences, but since this one sits idle these days I probably won’t have to ask more than once here; it’ll just stay on top since I never blog.
I’m teaching a First Year Initiatives course in the Fall. These are basically first-year seminar classes designed to teach college- and learning-based skills to incoming students. The content is meant to be highly interdisciplinary, but the content is also secondary in these courses. The primary goal is to give them training in critical reading and writing, public speaking, etc., as well as get them introduced to the college environment and the surrounding community and its needs.
I’m teaching a class with a cyborg theme, because the knitting theme I wanted to do just seemed too tough to sell (I wanted to attract the right sorts of students and I haven’t figured out how to do that with a knitting-themed course yet). I’ll be working on my syllabus once the semester is over (May) and I hope to have a sizable list of books, stories, and articles, both fiction and non-fiction, to examine and consider for the class by then. I have a few non-fiction items already to look at, but I don’t have many fiction pieces (aside from “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”). I welcome recommendations, and the ideal pieces will examine multiple facets of the cyborg concept (Hayles, Haraway, Stelarc, for example). The fiction pieces should do more than look only at the human-machine blending, although good fiction will always deal with more than one dimension. The social aspects, the economic aspects, and the philosophical aspects are all as important as the biological.
Please leave comments with recommendations, or also feel free to email me if you’d prefer that. And thanks in advance if anyone is still reading here and has something to contribute!
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Atheism, Blurb, Evolution, Philosophy, Science, ethics
March 29, 2010 at 9:07 pm
“Scientists have found a surprising link between magnets and morality. A person’s moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Link to NPR story.