Philosophy Now

"Floods of raw sensory data trigger perceptions that fall into categories designated by “symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world,” Douglas Hofstadter asserts. Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the “power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.” Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. “You and I are mirages that perceive themselves.”" - Adriano

"Gödel’s proof emerged from deep insights into the self-referential nature of mathematical statements. He showed how a system referring to itself creates paradoxes that cannot be logically resolved — and so certain questions cannot in principle be answered. Consciousness, in a way, is in the same logical boat. At its core, consciousness is self-referential awareness, the self’s sense of its own existence. It is consciousness itself that is trying to explain consciousness." - Adriano

"Physics has definitely avoided what were traditionally considered to be foundational physical questions, but the reason for that goes back to the foundation of quantum mechanics. The problem is that quantum mechanics was developed as a mathematical tool. Physicists understood how to use it as a tool for making predictions, but without an agreement or understanding about what it was telling us about the physical world. And that’s very clear when you look at any of the foundational discussions. (...) Sean Carroll for example is very adamant about saying that time is real. You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn’t really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as... more... - Amira

"The most interesting thing about the human species is our plasticity, our flexibility. (…) Over the past 10 years we have started to see powerful evidence that children might learn language statistically, by unconsciously tabulating patterns in the sentences they hear and using these to generalise to new cases. Children might learn language effortlessly not because they possess innate grammatical rules, but because statistical learning is something we all do incessantly and automatically. The brain is designed to pick up on patterns of all kinds. (...) You only have to stroll down the street to see that human beings are learning machines. (...) if you compare us with other species, our degree of variation is just so extraordinary and so obvious that we know prior to doing any science that human beings are special in this regard, and that a tremendous amount of what we do is as a result of learning. So empiricism should be the default position. The rest is just working out the details of how all this learning takes place. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Philosophy tells us what is possible, and science tells us what is true. Cognitive science has transformed philosophy. At the beginning of the 20th century, philosophers changed their methodology quite dramatically by adopting logic. There has been an equally important revolution in 21st-century philosophy in that philosophers are turning to the empirical sciences and to some extent... more... - Amira

artificial intelligence :] - !lker yoldas. )°(

Podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics... so many good topics! Don't overlook Dan Sperber on the Enigma of Reason, MP3: http://traffic.libsyn.com/philoso... - Adriano

“In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.” — Alan Lightman, American physicist http://bit.ly/ttihs2 - Amira from Bookmarklet

Vagueness is the new profound :) - Eivind

What have you added to the philosophical canon? "[M]y idea of the 'intentional stance' draws together a lot of things in a useful way: it is the habit we have ... when we see something complicated or moving, our initial reaction is to treat it as an agent; to think 'what does it want? What does it know?' Treating unknown things, complicated things, as agents is the heart of the intentional stance. It is the strategy of supposing the thing that you're dealing with is rational, has beliefs, has desires. It has the beliefs that it can get from its sensory equipment; it has the beliefs that it needs to have to do the job it's doing; it has the desires it ought to have to accomplish its ends. And that makes it an agent that is highly predictable." - Adriano

"Anyone admiring David Hume as I do finds much to cheer, but much to lament in the state of academic philosophy, as this year, the 300th anniversary of his birth, comes to a close. Hume was an anatomist of the mind, charting the ways we think and feel — a psychologist or cognitive scientist before his time. The cheering feature of the contemporary scene is that plenty of people are following in those footsteps. The nature versus nurture battle has declared an uneasy draw, but the human nature industry is in fine fettle, fed by many disciplines and eagerly consumed by the public." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

EVERYthing with the word "neuro" attached is the wrong kind of knowledge to understand ANYthing, not just art! .. ok, it's somewhat useful for tissues, physical stuff, but the physical is the limit - Gregory Lent

"t is estimated that around 16% of university students in the UK are taking ‘smart drugs’, medication available on prescription for conditions such as Alzheimer’s, that are now being used by healthy people to enhance memory, concentration and other cognitive abilities. Neither is it just students who are popping the pills, but their lecturers and a swathe of professionals eager to achieve that extra edge. Smart drugs inspired this year’s Hollywood film Limitless, with the tagline, ‘One pill. Anything is possible’. The scale of their use has also caused the UK’s leading expert on ‘cosmeceutical’ brain treatments, Barbara Sahakian, to speculate that students might soon have to take part in pre-exam drug tests to prevent wide-spread ‘cheating’. Although some are now taking pills to cram more memories in, others are looking forward to a time when they can wipe them out. Investigations into the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder have discovered certain ‘amnesia’ drugs can block,... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

latest entry in the Polytopia Project - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"[E]arth is represented by a virtual operating system with no knowledge of any other possible systems, I represent life with a simple process which runs in a loop for some specified time, after which it ceases to function. The programs are allocated a certain set of memory when they are initialized, which will never increase until they stop running. This represents the space we take up physically in the world. The program has internal states, which are never saved to disk, but are stored only in memory, and represent our changing mental states. When a process is killed or dies of its own accord, its memory is returned to the virtual environment for use by other programs, and nothing is ever saved about it’s existence. This process represents death in the real world." \\ Somehow those boots remind me of Godot :-) - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The Hypervisor can reincarnate the saved process into a new process in the same virtual machine by copying the saved contents or perhaps only certain segments of the state. It could take the saved process state and insert it into a new process in other virtual machines, which could be completely different operating environments. The Hypervisor could thus approximate travel from Earth to Heaven or Hell." - Adriano

"The archaeologist studies human material culture on the presumption that, within certain parameters, human beings may be found to do more or less the same sorts of thing wherever they reside and whatever phenotype they may have, and moreover that wherever they are found, human cultures have always been linked in complicated, constitutive ways to other cultures, so that in fact the process of ‘globalization’ is coeval with the earliest out-of-Africa migrations. (…) This is the same web that has always linked the material cultures of at least Eurasia to one another, whatever distinctive regional flavors might also be discerned. (...) When we accept this final point – surely the most heterodox, from the point of view of most philosophers– we are for the first time in a position to study and to teach Indian, Chinese, European, and Arabic philosophy alongside one another in a serious and adequate way." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"When we accept, for example, that all of the great Axial Age civilizations, to use Karl Jaspers’s helpful label, are the product of a single suite of broad historical changes that swept the Eurasian continent, and thus that Chinese, Indian, and Greek thought-worlds are not aboriginal in any meaningful sense (...), then all of a sudden it becomes possible to study, say, the Buddha and... more... - Amira

"Let’s unpack the concept of epistemology. (...) It’s a vital to understanding a foundational divide in Western thinking. I define it like this: An epistemology is a holistic framework for knowledge, giving us a set of consistent, simple rules for how we should describe that knowledge and apply it in practice. Looking back over the centuries, 8 famous epistemologies dating to Aristotle, Bacon and Descartes mark clear fault lines between science and philosophy. It is a separation between those who think in terms of empirical ’cause and effect’ vs. those who tend to think more intuitively, in ‘patterns’. (...) Thankfully, neuroscience is proving a potent field of discovery, and it’s helping us better unpack how the human brain works, yielding important insight on the psychology of thinkers." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The Royal Society continues to support scientific discovery by allowing free access to more than 250 years of leading research. From October 2011, our world-famous journal archive - comprising more than 69,000 articles - will be opened up and all articles more than 70 years old will be made permanently free to access." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lifetime. It was an ambitious project: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. It is recognized as one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century." -- Wiki http://bit.ly/vG2B6Q - Amira

“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.” -- L.W. http://bit.ly/jopy58 - Amira

"Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world. (...)Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style. (…) There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests. (...)We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about. And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

See also: 'The Secret of Innovation: The Best Ideas Are Small': "Malcolm Gladwell praised what he saw as the real genius of Apple’s late CEO [Steve Jobs]. He was a tweaker. He took things that existed, such as the computer mouse and the smartphone and the tablet, and he made them more perfect. (...) The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker... more... - Amira

"There is a subtle optimism lurking in all of Kahneman’s work: it is the hope that self-awareness is a form of salvation, that if we know about our mental mistakes, we can avoid them. As Kahneman and Tversky noted in the final sentence of their classic 1974 paper, “A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgments and decisions in situations of uncertainty.” Unfortunately, such hopes appear to be unfounded. Self-knowledge isn’t a cure for irrationality; even when we know why we stumble, we still find a way to fall. Kahneman admits that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. His greatest legacy, perhaps, is also his bleakest: by categorizing our cognitive flaws, documenting not just our errors but also their embarrassing predictability, he has revealed the hollowness of a very ancient aspiration. Knowing thyself is not enough. Not even close." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

It would be enough for me if we could just understand how much we don't understand so we weren't quite so arrogant. - Todd Hoff

from Michael Lewis: "He was working on a paper about human intuition with Gary Klein who was the leader of a school of thought that stressed the power of human intuition, and disagreed with the work of Kahneman and Tversky. Kahneman said that he did this as often as he could: seek out people who had attacked or criticized him and persuade them to collaborate with him. He not only... more... - Adriano

"The Philosophers' Football Match is a Monty Python sketch depicting a football match between philosophers representing Greece and Germany. Starring in the sketch are Archimedes, Socrates, Hegel, Nietzsche , Marx and Kant. Confucius is the referee and keeps times with an hourglass.Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine (sporting haloes) serve as linesmen. The German manager is Martin Luther. As play begins, the philosophers ponder their theories while walking on the pitch in circles. Franz Beckenbauer, the sole genuine footballer on the pitch and a "surprise inclusion" in the German team, is left more than a little confused. (...) Nietzsche receives a yellow card after claiming that Confucius has no free will. Confucius he say "Name go in book". In the second half Karl Marx replaces Ludwig Wittgenstein, but does nothing to advance the game. With just over a minute of the match remaining Archimedes cries out "Eureka!", takes the first kick of the ball and rushes towards the German goal.... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

One of my favourite bits of Python. But it has to be said that Karl Marx was right, not with the philosophy, but that Socrates was offside! - Dave Lunt

Name go in book! - Mark J from Android

rather clever ;-) esp. Idealism which looks likes an Albers. - Adriano

"Einstein once described his life as a series of attempts to free himself from the chains of the "merely personal." That's an interesting phrase: "merely personal." Does the personal deserve to be prefaced by the word "merely"? There's a sense in which that question lies at the heart of the divide between SF and mainstream fiction; SF readers routinely criticize mainstream fiction for focusing too tightly on the personal, while mainstream readers criticize SF for giving short shrift to the personal. Which is the greater tragedy: the fall of an empire, or the end of your marriage? Is it more important to make a major scientific discovery, or to be a good parent to your child? It's a false dichotomy to say that fiction should only concern itself with one or the other; all of these issues are worthy subjects for fiction. Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell stories on a grand scale and an intimate scale simultaneously, and most fiction prioritizes one over the other. Science fiction has... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"Within Western analytic philosophy, culture has not been a major topic of discussion. It sometimes appears as a topic in the philosophy of social science, and in continental philosophy, there is a long tradition of “Philosophical Anthropology,” which deals with culture to some degree. Within core areas of analytic philosophy, culture has most frequently appeared in discussions of moral relativism, radical translation, and discussions of perceptual plasticity, though little effort has been made to seriously investigate the impact of culture on these domains. Cognitive science has also neglected culture, but in recent years, that has started to change. There has been a sizable intensification of efforts to empirically test the impact of culture on mental processes. This entry surveys ways in which the emerging cognitive science of culture has been informing philosophical debates." 1. What is Culture? 2. Cultural Transmission 2.1 Memes and Cultural Epidemiology 2.2 Imitation and Animal... more... - Amira

"Adam Bear's last post encouraged me in presenting my own pet hypothesis about the Knobe Effect. It can be found in this paper, written with Emmanuel Dupoux and Pierre Jacob , and forthcoming in Mind & Language. Following Nichols and Ulatowski's proposal, we consider that the Knobe Effect and the Skill Effect can be accounted for only if we accept that "intentionally" has three different meanings that are differently elicited by contextual cues. To put it in a nutshell, here are (roughly) the three meanings: 1) According to Meaning 1, X is done intentionally only if the agent had a pro-attotude towards X. This meaning is preferentially triggered when X is something we expected the agent to desire (where "expectations" can be normative or statistical, and where normative expectations usually trump statistical expectations) 2) According to Meaning 2, X is done intentionally only if the agent was not reluctant or forced to do X. This meaning is preferentially triggered when X is... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"The title of this post is an homage to two recent essays, the first being Larry Sanger’s “Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?” and the second Evgeny Morozov’s “The Internet Intellectual”, a recent scathing review of Jeff Jarvis’ latest book. Larry Sanger’s critique of “geek” culture as anti-intellectual is a powerful read (even though I wrote a sort-of critique of Sanger’s post here; and he replied to me here). Sanger’s fundamental point is that modern geek culture is characterized by an anti-intellectual rejection of experts and I want to bring in Morozov’s review to highlight a slightly different point: the techno-experts embraced are anti-intellectual themselves. My goal in this short piece is to encourage the reader to take a look at these two essays in tandem to suggest a further conversation about the need for public intellectuals, the role of academics in framing theories of new technologies and what the consequences are when we leave this discussion to be dominated by business folks." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

❤ ❤ - Aline Ohannessian

"PhysOrg.com) -- "A perplexing philosophical issue in science is the question of anticipation, or prediction, versus causality," Shawn Pethel tells PhysOrg.com. "Can you tell the difference between something predicting an event and something actually causing an event?" Pethel is a scientist working at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. Along with Daniel Hahs, he set out to identify a method of distinguishing anticipation from causality using tools from information theory. “Any process that has to react in real time can improve its performance through anticipation, and in studying such processes it is important to find new ways to quantify causality” Pethel says. The question of anticipation versus causality is one that has real-world application in a number of areas. Pethel points out that this issue has implications in covert operations, as well as in financial areas, especially with regard to the development of bubbles. “Is there a way, from passive measurements, to tell what’s... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

53-page essay, PDF \\ "One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In particular, I argue that computational complexity theory---the field that studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve computational problems---leads to new perspectives on the nature of mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of logical omniscience, Hume's problem of induction and Goodman's grue riddle, the foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves, and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

Aaronson is teaching "6.893 Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science" during Fall 2011 at MIT: https://stellar.mit.edu/S... for reading material, notes, and audio of lectures. - Adriano

For a straight-forward introduction to Aaronson's paper, see Avi Widgerson's IAS 2008 lecture, "The "P vs. NP" Problem: Efficient Computation, Internet Security, and the Limits of Human Knowledge," video + ppt at http://video.ias.edu/P-vs-NP -- see also 2009 Wigderson paper: "Knowledge, Creativity and P versus NP" http://docs.google.com/viewer... which is very readable. - Adriano

"A gathering of philosophy-related links from the past week. Addressing an arguably understated question, Eric Schwitzgebel attempts to explain why metaphysics is always bizarre. No more Mr. Nice Guy: Bentham, Mill, and Utilitarianism reconsidered in the Economist. (And if this is your kind of controversy, proceed directly to the latest entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on Constructivism in Metaethics.) A new book claims to have definitively debunked Leo Strauss’ reading of Plato. Adam Frank ponders the novelty — and nefariousness — of our contemporary sense of time on NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog, which features a handful of provocative thinkers, including the philosopher Alva Noë. At Columbia University Press, history repeats itself, first as Communism, second as “Hermeneutic Communism,” in an interview with the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, an ICREA research professor at The University of Barcelona. A post on the arXiv Physics Blog... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet