Ross Andersen – Humanity's deep future Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, when he received a strange gift from a friend. The gift was a fossil, a chipped-off section of bone dug from a local quarry of limestone. Plot recognised it as a femur at once, but he was puzzled by its extraordinary size. The fossil was only a fragment, the knobby end of the original thigh bone, but it weighed more than 20 lbs (nine kilos). It was so massive that Plot thought it belonged to a giant human, a victim of the Biblical flood. Last December I came face to face with a Megalosaurus at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Bostrom attracts an unusual amount of press attention for a professional philosopher, in part because he writes a great deal about human extinction. There are good reasons for any species to think darkly of its own extinction
The Core of 'Mind and Cosmos' The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. This is a brief statement of positions defended more fully in my book “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” which was published by Oxford University Press last year. Since then the book has attracted a good deal of critical attention, which is not surprising, given the entrenchment of the world view that it attacks. It seemed useful to offer a short summary of the central argument. The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning.
A Philosophy of Tickling Photographs from Nadezhda Ladygina-Kohts, Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child. Originally published in 1935, the book offers a comparative study of the behavior of a human child (Ladygina-Kohts’s own son Roody) and an infant chimpanzee named Joni. The bottom two images in this plate show Joni reacting to being tickled. To him that dies, it is all one whether it be by a penny halter, or a silk garter; yet I confess the silk garter pleases more; and like trouts, we love to be tickled to death. —John Selden, Table-Talk: Being the Discourses of John Selden, Esq., 1689 THE TICKLISH ANIMAL Aristotle famously defined man as the rational animal (zoon echon logon), and as the political animal (zoon politikon). Why do people laugh when tickled? Does not tickling violate the basic mechanism of cause and effect, the principle that every action entails an equal and opposite reaction? Let us focus on one detail of Provine’s theory, a rather extravagant speculation. Pietro Longhi, The Tickle, ca. 1755.
Is JPMorgan a farmer? Imagine you’re a finance lobbyist and want to move deregulation and other industry-friendly policies through Congress. While you might think the House Financial Services Committee would be the logical place to do it — since it has jurisdiction over financial issues, naturally — what if there were a sneaky way to maneuver it through a far less scrutinized committee, so most people would have no idea what you were doing? This is the story of how the world’s largest banks came to love the House Agriculture Committee. In Washington, we often witness politicians forgetting the lessons of a year or five years or 10 years ago. It takes some special obliviousness to forget the lessons of Friday. The Whale trades, which totaled $157 billion at their peak, are known to the industry as derivatives, massive bets on bets that present outsize risk to financial institutions and the broader economy. To see how this all works, just look at the hearing on these derivatives bills, held last week.
One of Us Essays These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. That is technical language, but it speaks to a riddle age-old and instinctive. Descartes’ view drew immediate controversy.
The 17th-Century Breastoration: A Time Before Bras If you've ever been to a Renaissance Faire (I have), you know that the concept is less Queen Elizabeth and more Don Key-Ho-Tee's Medieval Potlucke WITH BREASTS. Or at least it was 10 years ago when a Ren-friend and I ate shepherd's pie, looked at chain-mail, and — once we'd soaked in enough of the Worlde and its high freckled bosoms — tried some boob-hoisting ourselves. Putting a corset on is tough, and the instructions I received at the Faire went as follows: Lean down, shove your boobs into it, straighten up, then pop them up so they'll show through the dress. If this story has a moral, it's that cleavage-wrangling is complex. I'm finally in a position to find out. Option 1: Consult a Reference Work! That there's your goal. Therefore to reduce those Breasts that hang flagging out of all comely shape and form, that they may be plump, round and smaller, bind them up close to you with caps or bags that will just fit them, and so let them continue for some nights. Got that? Then what? 1.
Forget Peak Oil, We're At Peak Everything Peak oil is the concept that new discoveries of commercially exploitable oil resources do not keep pace with growing demand. By extrapolating the data, you can estimate when we will run out of it for all practical purposes. There are a lot of disagreements about whether we have reached peak oil or when the downhill slope will hit a point that brings a significant percentage of our vehicles to a grinding halt, but the concept has made scientists and policy makers ask the question: What other critical resources may be peaking? Asia Pulp & Paper Company, one of the world’s largest, announced last month that it will no longer use wood from natural forests for any of its $4 billion per year worth of products. Why? Because APP’s customers realized we are running out of natural forests from which to harvest lumber and have demanded suppliers to develop sustainable sources. Another essential commodity that may soon hit its peak is food.
Philosophy of mind A phrenological mapping[1] of the brain – phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind–body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as one key issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body, such as how consciousness is possible and the nature of particular mental states.[2][3][4] Mind–body problem[edit] Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli that arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world, and these stimuli cause changes in our mental states, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation, which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Arguments for dualism[edit]
Sequencing The Genome Of Legal Documents To Make Them Readable A few years ago, researchers at Cornell worked out that it would take 76 working days (25 days in all) to read all the privacy policies we agree to every year. And, of course, nobody does read them--not even one. But perhaps, in the future, there may be easier ways of making sense of dense legalese, so we can work out what’s routine language, and what might land us in trouble one day. Docracy, a New York startup, has developed what it calls a "document genome" that it hopes will help ordinary folk, as well as businesses, and lawyers, to understand agreements more easily. "You can see how boilerplate the text is, and also the subtle differences," explains founder Matt Hall. Docracy already hosts a document library aimed at smaller businesses. The genome’s first application is Searcher.io, which allows inventors to search for patent applications. Hall says it’s much easier than searching the official record at the patent office, or using keywords on Google.
Kepler's Discovery The Rise of the Participatory Panopticon This week, I spoke at the first MeshForum conference, held in Chicago. The following is an adaptation of my talk, which adapts some earlier material with some new observations. Fair warning: it's a long piece. I look forward to your comments. The photo at right is by Howard Greenstein, taken during my presentation. Soon -- probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two -- we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. And we will be doing it to ourselves. This won't simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. I call this world the Participatory Panopticon. The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's 18th century model for a prison in which all inmates could be watched at all times. This day is coming not because of some distant breakthrough or revolution.
George Berkeley 1. Life and philosophical works Berkeley was born in 1685 near Kilkenny, Ireland. After several years of schooling at Kilkenny College, he entered Trinity College, in Dublin, at age 15. Berkeley’s first important published work, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), was an influential contribution to the psychology of vision and also developed doctrines relevant to his idealist project. In 1720, while completing a four-year tour of Europe as tutor to a young man, Berkeley composed De Motu, a tract on the philosophical foundations of mechanics which developed his views on philosophy of science and articulated an instrumentalist approach to Newtonian dynamics. Shortly after returning to London, Berkeley composed the Theory of Vision, Vindicated and Explained, a defense of his earlier work on vision, and the Analyst, an acute and influential critique of the foundations of Newton’s calculus. 2. 2.1 The attack on representationalist materialism 2.1.1 The core argument But why? 3.
Left 3.0 Obama and the emergence of a newer left The left side of the American political spectrum has undergone an extraordinary transformation over the past dozen years. Perhaps because it remains a work in progress, the extent of this transformation has gone largely unremarked and seems underappreciated even among those who have been carrying it out. Forty years after the forces of the “New Left” managed to deliver the Democratic presidential nomination to their preferred candidate, George McGovern, only to see him lose the general election to Richard Nixon in a 49-state landslide, the United States is home to a newer Left. Its political hopes repose not in a man able to muster less than 40 percent of the vote nationwide, but in the convincingly reelected president of the United States, Barack Obama. It’s beyond my purpose here to explore the history of the Left in American and its relation to American electoral politics. Continuities The Left and the Democratic Party