Following an excellent post on cochlear implants by Teresa Blankmeyer Burke over at Feminist Philosophers is a comment pointing the reader to this interview, which may be of interest to NewAPPS readers. Of particular interest is William Mager's attempt to describe his experience of sound with the new implants. Here are a few key passages:
“It’s not sound. It’s beeping. But It doesn’t feel like sound. It feels like some kind of electronic trigger is going on in your brain.” (at around 4:27)
The latter half of the 20th century bequeathed the Anglophone world a very one-sided picture of “French Theory.” The soixante-huitards were like our noble savages. Many important voices were silenced, due perhaps to institutional and sociological pressures, as well as individal and collective decisions about what works to translate. In many ways this Romantic image of French philosophy continues today.
Many philosophers of science are understandably excited about Neil deGrasse Tyson's reinvorgoration of the TV show Cosmos. After all, most of us are pretty excited about science and anything that improves the public's scientific literacy. Thus, it is extremely disappointing to hear him articulate the comments that he does at about 1:02:46 of this video.* He says that a "philosopher is a would-be scientist without a laboratory" and that we have been "rendered essentially obsolete." He later suggests that there is much positive work that a philosophers can do (in ethics, for example), but doesn't seem to think that there can be any good philosophy of science. (Richard Dawkins, who is also shown in the video, seems to take a slightly more positive view of the field).
This morning, I saw two things that shook the cobwebs: 1) Eric Winsberg's intriguing post about dark matter, and, more to the point at hand, the fact that he was at an event that involved astronmers and philosophers, and 2) with the web announcement for a “Genomics and Philosophy of Race” Conference that I am a part of, involving both biologists and philosophers (not to mention historians and sociologists). These two events are only two of the many, many productive collaborations between scientists and philosophers of science. We need to do a better job telling people about them, and about telling the general public what philosophers of science do.
* H/T to Lucas Matthews, graduate stuent at the University of Utah, for the pointer to the video and NdGT's attitude toward philosophy of science
In philosophy of religion, realist theism is the dominant outlook: belief in God is similar to belief in other real things (or supposedly real things) like quarks or oxygen. There is a rather triumphalist narrative about the resurgence of realist theism since the demise of logical positivism (see for instance, Plantinga's advice to Christian philosophers) when logical positivism and its verifiability criterion held sway, philosophers were dissuaded from talking about God in realist terms: religious beliefs were not just false, but meaningless. With the demise of logical positivism, however, theists could again defend realist positions, using a variety of sophisticated arguments.
Nevertheless, the question is whether theists in philosophers of religion are not conceding too much to atheists by talking about theism mainly in terms of beliefs. To ignore practice is to ignore a large part of the religious experience, and what makes it meaningful to the theist. Such an exclusive focus can indeed be alienating, as it seems to suggest that theists believe a whole bunch of ideas that are wildly implausible, e.g., that a man resurrected from the dead, or was born of a virgin. This picture of religious life as believing in a set of strange propositions is, as Kvanvig memorably put it, a view that most theists will not recognize themselves in:
I hardly recognize this picture of religious faith and religious life, except in the sense that one can cease to be surprised or shocked by the neighbor who jumps naked on his trampoline after having seen it for years.
That is not to say that many theists do believe these things, even in a literal sense, but without looking at the larger picture of practices that help to maintain and instil these beliefs, our epistemology of religion remains woefully incomplete.
It is therefore refreshing to read philosopher Howard Wettstein's recent interview in The Stone, who, coming from a Jewish background, emphasizes the practice-based aspects of a religious lifestyle. He argues that "existence" is the wrong idea for God, following Maimonides, and instead argues that "the real question is one's relation to God, the role God plays in one’s life, the character of one’s spiritual life."
No. No. Not THAT controversy. I just got back from a meeting at the insanely cool Carnegie Observatory in Pasadena, California (Hubble's old digs) with Wendy Parker, Paul Humphreys, James Ladyman, and many extremely interesting and engaging astronomers. (Barry Madore and Wendy Freedman were our hosts, and Stacy McGaugh, Bill Saslaw, Alar Toomre (who did an insanely cool computer simulation of galaxy collision back in 1972!), Frank van den Bosch, and James Bullock were in attendance.) Among the many interesting things I learned is that the whole issue of Dark Matter is much more complicated than I ever imagined. I used to think that Dark Matter was simply sprinkled liberally around the universe in exactly the right quantities to get the accelerations of galaxies and clusters right. I thought, in other words, that it was a simple and straightforward Duhem problem. Then, a few years ago, the images of the Bullet supercluster collision came out, and it was widely reputed to offer direct evidence of dark matter. This made it seem like a standard "independant confirmation" of a Duhumian auxilliary hypothesis. But of course, the situation is MUCH more complicated. There are in fact at least 16 different moving parts in the Dark Matter controversy, and superclusters are just one of them. And in fact, long before the Bullet cluster was observed, opponents of the standard model of "cold dark matter" (who advocate a modified theory of gravity) had admitted that superclusters probably had missing mass. But the rub is this: there is plenty of known missing BARYONIC mass (the kind that the Big Bang neucleosynthesis model predicts the expected quantity of) to account for the missing mass in superclusters. In fact, that would only take about 3% of the baryonic mass out there, and as much as 30% is known to be missing. So, the "dark matter" in the Bullet supercluster could easily be brown dwarfs, black holes, or other "normal" stuff. So, the debate is much more intricate, and it involves trying to figure out how the dark matter halos of the universe would have evolved from the tiny fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background and then predicting what velocity curves for galaxies those would produce. The contest is then to see who can predict velocity curves better: the people with modified theories of gravity, or the people who simulate the dark matter and then see what it does. From what I can tell, the modified gravity people seem to have the edge in that, and they do with fewer free parameters. All very fascinating stuff.
Over the weekend I came across this hoax piece of ‘news’, 'reporting' that a boy who had been raised by orangutans has been recaptured so as to live a ‘normal human life’ again in Malaysia. Despite (or perhaps because!) the phoniness of the ‘article’, it did get me thinking: in such a hypothetical scenario, would capturing such a child and bringing them back to a life with humans be the obvious, right thing to do? On the one hand: isn’t it a form of species chauvinism to think that a human being would undoubtedly be better off in the company of conspecifics? Wasn’t the boy doing just fine among orangutans? (In the hypothetical scenario, that is.) On the other hand: can a human being really thrive and live a fulfilling life exclusively among members of other species (and from a very early age)? This strikes me as an eminently philosophical question, though also partially empirical.
Relatedly, I am currently dealing with another surge of demands for a pet in our household. The current proposal is for rabbits, but I’m resisting this move by pointing out that rabbits belong in the wild, with other rabbits. They wouldn’t be happy living with us, no matter how often my kids will pat and caress them, as they promise. (It’s cute though to hear that this is their conception of what makes a living being happy: lots of hugs.) Coming to think of it, the only species that make any sense at all as pets are those that truly thrive in the company of humans, and as far as I can tell, this only holds of dogs and cats. (Maybe horses? Not sure.) Could it be that, just as I resist the idea of e.g. rabbits being ‘happy’ among humans, I should also resist the possibility of a human boy being happy among orangutans? My intuitions are clashing here.
What do readers think? I especially welcome comments by philosophers of biology, who may have more data on intraspecific vs. interspecific cohabitation among the different species of animals.
(PS There are of course lots of interesting implications for the nature/nurture debate in such scenarios, but I will leave them be for now.)
In the recent Mind & Language workshop on cognitive science of religion, Frank Keil presented an intriguing paper entitled "Order, Order Everywhere and Not an Agent to Think: The Cognitive Compulsion to Make the Argument from Design." Keil does not believe the argument from design is inevitable – I've argued elsewhere that while teleological reasoning and creationism is common, arguing for the existence of God on the basis of perceived design is rare; it typically only happens when there are plausible non-theistic worldviews available.
Rather, Keil argues that from a very early age on, humans can recognize order, and that they prefer agents as causes for order. Taken together, this forms the cognitive basis for making the argument from design (AFD). (For similar proposals, see here and here). He proposes two very intriguing puzzles, and I'm wondering what NewApps readers think:
We might soon be creating monsters, so we’d better figure out our duties to them.
Robert Nozick’s Utility Monster derives 100 units of pleasure from each cookie she eats. Normal people derive only 1 unit of pleasure. So if our aim is to maximize world happiness, we should give all our cookies to the monster. Lots of people would lose out on a little bit of pleasure, but the Utility Monster would be really happy!
Of course this argument generalizes beyond cookies. If there were a being in the world vastly more capable of pleasure and pain than are ordinary human beings, then on simple versions of happiness-maximizing utilitarian ethics, the rest of us ought to immiserate ourselves to push it up to superhuman pinnacles of joy.
Now, if artificial consciousness is possible, then maybe it will turn out that we can create Utility Monsters on our hard drives. (Maybe this is what happens in R. Scott Bakker’s and my story Reinstalling Eden.)
Two questions arise:
New APPS 