John Locke & Bishop Berkeley animation

The empiricist philosopher John Locke worked out some of the details of an important distinction (originally formulated by Descartes) between primary and secondary qualities, and he was quite pleased with himself as this distinction allowed for the possibility of doing some serious science: you can't study secondary qualities objectively, since they are essentially subjective (and thus liable to change from person to person), but you can study primary...

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Julian Baggini - What Does It Mean to Be "You"?

The metaphysical question of personal identity is, to my mind, one of the most interesting and important there are in the philosophical literature. An obvious part of its importance has to do with the fact that many other philosophical, psychological, social and ethical issues depend on the answer to the question of whether the self exists and what it is.Consider a thought experiment formulated by Leibniz: suppose you have the option to choose to...

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Miss USA Contestants on Evolution

Let's be honest: beauty pageants are about how hot the contestants are. I won't pass judgment on whether this is morally acceptable or reprehensible, but since I once dated a beauty pageant contestant, I may be a bit biased anyway :)What I do have a problem with is the farce, perpetrated by the organizers, that everyone watching is going to be concerned with these girls' intellectual sophistication.If you want to choose someone based on how hot she...

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The Awesomest Sentence I Read Today

From a fascinating Slate article about why Robert Nozick came to reject the libertarianism his younger self once inspired:When the facts go against you, resort to "values." When values go against you, resort to the mother of all values. When the mother of all values swoons, reach deep into the public purse with one hand, and with the other beat the public senseless with your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged.Definitely worth the read...

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Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus

No, it's Stuxnet, not Skynet... and you may have more reason to fear the former than the latter, at least if your name is not John Connor... Stuxnet seems to be the first super weapon made entirely out of code. Unlike conventional weapons, it doesn't directly kill anyone, but this 21st century virus has the potential to wreak havoc in a scale and depth that's simply unprecedented, partly because it is open source and therefore because it can mutate...Governments...

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300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds

It all started during the industrial revolution (at least our own involvement did... plenty of plants and animals had died and gotten compressed into fossil fuels deep below the earth millions of years before we arrived on the scene), and there's no denying that a huge part of our technological success over the past two or three centuries is due to our ability to exploit this natural resource.Still, it's also caused its share of problems, so our...

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Colbert Takes the Marshmallow Test

As you already know from the marshmallow experiment (and all the variations done since), self-control in children turns out to be one of the best predictors of future life success. Whether the former is the cause of the latter, or whether both are effects of some other deeper set of causes is, to my knowledge, still an open question.Still, will power is a useful skill to have, so Sesame Street is trying to teach kids some valuable lessons about fiscal...

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Go the F**k to Sleep, read by Samuel L. Jackson

I have no kids of my own... that I know of :), but I have been around enough new parents to know that the happily-ever-after fairy tales adults tell themselves before having children are never quite what they anticipated... for better and worse.And it is with sympathy for the sake of parents in the real world that Adam Mansbach has just published a hilarious children's book for grown-ups, which you get to hear today as Samuel L. Jackson reads it...

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The Cyclotrope

Sorry about the recent lack of entries, but I've been buried grading finals and term papers. Now, while I continue the grueling ritual of reading students' work, I thought I'd share something to mess with your noodle...The cyclotrope is a cycle of sequential images spun at a particular speed such that the frame rate of the camera filming it produces the illusion of spirits and objects coming to life. The background music makes me think cartoonish...

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Lecture 4 - Cartesian Dualism & the Mind-Body Problem

There are all sorts of psychological reasons why people tend to believe that we have an immaterial soul that can somehow overcome the physical limitations of the body (think out-of-body experiences, misinterpretation of brain quirks and our tendency for promiscuous projection of agency, to say nothing of religious indoctrination).When it comes to actual reasoned philosophical arguments, Descartes is, for the most part, still the man to go to, but...

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Figures Palin would claim it was a "Lame-Stream Media Gotcha Moment"

I wish I could consider myself a prophet, since I called it, but sadly the truth is much more mundane: this woman is too petty and too predictable.I don't actually have much of a problem with ignorance. It's simply a lack of information which can be easily fixed. Arrogance, on the other hand, and the refusal to own up to one's mistakes (despite an ocean of evidence proving you wrong) makes me go bat shit insane because it's an insidious attitude...

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Everything and Nothing - Everything

You may find this hard to believe, but we've known about the true size of the universe for only about 100 years. When Copernicus proposed his revolutionary heliocentric model, for instance, he still believed in the existence of a perfect celestial sphere where all the stars revolved around the sun in a perfect circle. That belief would be slowly chipped away with the observation of a Super-Nova explosion in 1572.It wasn't until the 1920's when Edwin...

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Sarah Palin's History Lesson on Paul Revere

You'd think a tea-bagger who professes to love America and who decides to travel through every state with her family to "celebrate" our traditions, landscapes, institutions and history, would read up on the basics of our history...Of course, if the tour is really just a back-alley way to secure funding for her as-yet-undeclared presidential run (because once she does declare her candidacy, she'd have to reveal all financial contributions, especially...

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Earth Rotating Time Lapse

Apropos of Foucault's pendulum and the illusion it produces (namely, that it's the pendulum that rotates, when in fact it's the Earth rotating below it), I came across a video that has just emerged on the interwebs, and which helps with this shift in perspective.If you've seen any of the previous incredible star-gazing time lapse videos I've posted before, you may have had something of a necker-cube experience: most of the time you experience the...

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Lecture 4 - Skepticism of the External World

As you read this blog, you're probably working under the assumption that some guy, a so-called philosophy monkey, wrote this entry. You may not know who he is, but you're pretty sure he's not you. You probably think this because you're not aware of writing for this blog, so if you're not aware of something being done, then it's not you who did it. Of course, if we allow for the possibility that this is all just a dream you're having, or even a dream...

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