Let’s ditch the dangerous idea that life is a story ... ‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ So say the narrativists. I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. What exactly do they mean? Perhaps. Get Aeon straight to your inbox The tendency to attribute control to self is, as the American social psychologist Dan Wegner says, a personality trait, possessed by some and not others. In the past 20 years, the American philosopher Marya Schechtman has given increasingly sophisticated accounts of what it is to be Narrative and to ‘constitute one’s identity’ through self-narration. I still doubt that this is true. various selves… make up our composite Self. My self… is a dramatic ensemble. How can man know himself?
Science has next to nothing to say about moral intuitions | Aeon Ideas For centuries, philosophers have been using moral intuitions to reason about ethics. Today, some scientists think they’ve found a way to use psychology and neuroscience to undermine many of these intuitions and advance better moral arguments of their own. If these scientists are right, philosophers need to leave the armchair and head to the lab – or go into retirement. The thing is, they’re wrong. There are certainly problems with the way philosophers use intuitions in ethics, but the real challenge to moral intuitions comes from philosophy, not from science. How do ethicists use intuitions? The ‘trolley problem’ is the best, most ubiquitous example of this kind of philosophy. Ethicists will then cite people’s intuitions about the problem as evidence in the debate between the two most popular types of moral theories, consequentialist and deontological. In the past few years, scientists have argued that there is a fatal problem with this approach.
On Smell Smell is one of our primary and most immediate ways of understanding and interpreting the world and everything in it. We naturally categorise things into good and bad smells, and gravitate towards the former. Billion dollar industries exist around masking smells; making our environments and bodies smell better and less human. Yet throughout history, smell has oftentimes been considered a lower sense, through which we can only access a baser reality. Plato renounced smell. Philosopher G.W. When the Black Death swept through Europe in the 14th century, understanding of the modern germ theory of disease eluded doctors. Enlightenment thinkers dismissed smell as irrational and unverifiable. But not all throughout history have rejected smell as low and base. Smell is almost purely emotive and phenomenological to us. We can denigrate someone’s poor eyesight, their clumsiness, their deafness. Yet the way we think about the world and its history is inextricably bound to smell. “Not just smells.
What It Feels Like to Be an Octopus On a recent Sunday, at my local Italian market, I considered the octopus. To eat the tentacle would be, in a way, like eating a brain—the eight arms of an octopus contain two-thirds of its half billion neurons. Delicious for some, yes—but for others, a jumping off point for the philosophical question of other minds. “I do think it feels like something to be an octopus,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center, who has spent almost a decade considering the idea. Stories of octopuses’ remarkable ability to solve puzzles, open bottles, and interact with aquarium caretakers, suggest an affinity between their intelligence and our own. Since a 2008 dive off the coast of Sydney, Australia, where Godfrey-Smith encountered curious, 3-foot long cuttlefish, he’s been fascinated by the minds of cephalopods, which have the largest nervous systems of all the invertebrates. Does an octopus have a sense of self? Well they are a tricky case. How do they learn?
Philosophical Meditation Even though our minds ostensibly belong to us, we don’t always control or know what is in them. There are always some ideas, bang in the middle of consciousness, that are thoroughly and immediately clear to us: for example, that we love our children. Or that we have to be out of the house by 7.40am. Or, that we are keen to have something salty to eat right now. These thoughts feel obvious without burdening us with uncertainty or any requirement that we reflect harder on them. But a host of other ideas tend to hover in a far more unfocused state. Unfocused thoughts are constantly orbiting our minds, but from where we are, from the observatory of our conscious selves (as it were), we can’t grasp them distinctly. There is one response to dealing with our minds that has become immensely popular in the West in recent years. Eastern Meditation: the mind being emptied of its confused content Western Meditation: the mind’s confused objects being brought into focus 1. 2. 3. - You’ve been hurt.
Philosophy versus Neuroscience on the Question of Free Will Adam Bear opens his article, What Neuroscience Says about Free Will by mentioning a few cases such as pressing snooze on the alarm clock or picking a shirt out of the closet. He continues with an assertion about these cases, and with a question: In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science have to say about the true source of this experience? This is a bad start. Continuing with his alleged experience, Bear writes: …the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. More than a revolutionary proposal, this is an additional confusion. After these opening confused theoretical reflections, Bear turns to survey some empirical work he has done with Paul Bloom. I find this preposterous.
The Myth of Sysiphus by Albert Camus The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain!
Arguments for Incompatibilism 1. Definitions and Distinctions In the literature, “determinism” is sometimes used as an umbrella term for a variety of different claims which have traditionally been regarded as threats to free will. Given this usage, the thesis that I am calling “determinism” (nomological determinism) is just one of several different kinds of determinism, and the free will/determinism problem we will be discussing is one of a family of related problems. At a first approximation, nomological determinism (henceforth “determinism”), is a contingent and empirical claim about the laws of nature: that they are deterministic rather than probabilistic, and that they are all-encompassing rather than limited in scope. Let's call a world “deterministic” iff the thesis of determinism is true at that world; non-deterministic iff the thesis of determinism is false at that world. Determinism is a thesis about the laws, but it should not be confused with a philosophical analysis or account of lawhood. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The ‘Free Will Problem’ | A Philosopher's Take The purpose of this post is simple; to navigate through some of the different positions one could take regarding the ‘problem of free will‘. I’ve been asked by some to go over the basics, so, here it goes. I’ll define the major terms internal to the debate to give readers a bit more context and substance when thinking about future (and past) posts. Hopefully, this post will give those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology related to the topic a better understanding of what’s going on. I’ll start by briefly pointing out what the ‘free will problem‘ is before moving on to the different positions one could take. What is the Problem of Free Will and why should we care? First off, what is free will? 1. 2. 3. 4. So, given your best interpretation of what free will is, why should we care? We assume that Justin wasn’t forced or determined to implant the device in the first place and that’s why we have no problem blaming him for doing it. 1. Like this: Like Loading...
How VR Gaming will Wake Us Up to our Fake Worlds “It has no relationship whatsoever to anything anchored in some kind of metaphysical superspace. It’s just your cultural point of view […] Travel shows you the relativity of culture.” — Terence McKenna Human civilization has always been a virtual reality. Virtual Reality researchers, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, write in their book Infinite Reality; “[Cave art] is likely the first animation technology”, where it provided an early means of what they refer to as “virtual travel”. Today, philosophers and critics have pointed out that businesses such as McDonald’s and Starbucks are like virtual realities in and of themselves. A simple illustration of the origin of our more complex cultural virtual realities is found in the temple or the church, which acted as the centerpiece of many cultures as they began their voyage into modernity. Indeed, no one ever actually ‘enters a church’. “The human mind is actually, has a propensity, a natural gift to move into other realities. And then: