hyper-textual ontology

Humans masturbate. A lot. And it says something about our cognition.

firepile — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:22:28 +0000

“Now back to masturbation fantasies and cognition—and this is where it gets really interesting. “ Jesse Bering in Scientific American.

Kieron Gillon takes on sexism in videogames

firepile — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:01:12 +0000

That your passing desire means you get to derail a woman’s life whenever you feel like it is the absolute definition of male privilege. Kieron Gillen (writer of one of my favorite comics, Phonogram) on sexism.

The listening brain

firepile — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:05:07 +0000

“Is a sound only a sound if someone hears it? Apparently not. Silent videos that merely imply sound – such as of someone playing a musical instrument – still get processed by auditory regions of the brain.” Link to article at New Scientist.

Post-Nothingism

firepile — Fri, 14 May 2010 18:28:47 +0000

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

The Moral Life of Babies

firepile — Thu, 06 May 2010 21:32:25 +0000

“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.

Empathetic Mirror Neurons Found in Humans at Last

firepile — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 22:54:07 +0000

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.

Experimental evidence for cognitive enhancement with even brief meditation

firepile — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:47:54 +0000

“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.

Free will probably doesn’t exist, but don’t stop believing!

firepile — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:25:16 +0000

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.

The Extended Mind

firepile — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:57:47 +0000

“Programs are encoded information that is contiguous and continuous with the information in our heads, and in the world. ” … Joe Berkovitz on Apple’s restrictive development rules, making an Andy Clark-esque Extended Mind argument in the process. (H/T Joshua).

The Crisis of Philosophy

firepile — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:16:48 +0000

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.