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 qualities scientifically, since there is no difference in those cases between what you experience and what is.

As you can learn in the following hilarious little presentation, little did Locke imagine that soon after, a) Bishop Berkeley would take this distinction to its logical conclusion and show that there is no real difference between primary and secondary qualities, and that b) the physical world would disappear as a result...

Esse est percipi... Dang!

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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 have all the riches, talents, fame, good looks and lovers you desire, but on one condition: that you forget absolutely everything about yourself up to that point. Would you do it? If you answer is no, that implies that you think that whatever you are, your conscious experience and memories seem to be a necessary part of being you. So, no memories = no you. The new rich, talented, beautiful person would effectively be someone else. Imagine then a case of assault in which the victim loses all memory. Should this now count as murder?

In the following presentation, Julian Baggini explores the question of the self, whether it exists, whether it's an illusion, and whether we should understand an illusion as something that's not there, or as something that's simply not quite what we normally take it to be, but which is there nevertheless.

And if you want to listen to the whole thing, including an interesting Q&A, you can listen to it here:

For more on this issue, check out the Brainspotting series.

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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 is, just be honest and admit it, because when you don't, and you ask these girls a simple question, such as whether evolution should be taught in school (the only theory that can explain and connect all of biology into one coherent conceptual and testable framework supported by massive amounts of evidence, and what the hell kind of question is that anyway? why not ask whether the 'theory' of gravity should be taught too?), these are the dumbass sorts of answers you're going to get:

Did you get that? Even the girls who are pro-evolution can't always come up with decent support for their position.

I could teach a semester worth of logical fallacies based on these 15 minutes...

And yes, most of these girls may be misinformed, naive and/or dumb, and you may cringe at their stupid answers as I did, but I wonder who's at fault:

1. Impressionable girls who probably grew up being brainwashed with the fantasy of beauty pageants instead of the value of an educated and independent mind, or
   
   
2. The event organizers, who are aware of these girls' backgrounds and still threw them a fastball purely for the sake of creating controversy to increase their own ratings.

Finally, Miss California, give me a call sometime :)

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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 and corporations may be afraid of Anonymous, but it's probably Stuxnet they should probably fear more, as the following animation demonstrates:

And if you want to learn more, Ralph Langner describes in the following TEDTalk presentation how his team cracked the code that revealed the target, purpose and implications of this virus on steroids:

And you use Norton? How cute :)

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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 relationship is rather strained and complicated. Whose isn't? Anyway, here's a short animated history (RSA style) and what our future might look like depending on the choices we individually and collectively make now.

You know you want to learn more about Nikola Tesla and Michael Faraday...

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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 responsibility, discipline and long-term planning and investment. Since their approach is inspired by the marshmallow experiment, Stephen Colbert decides to put it to the test and see whether he's destined for success:

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Marshmallows and fluff... you can't beat that...

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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 the way only he can.

If I ever become a parent, someone'd better get me this book!!!

But if reading stories is not your thing, Tim Minchin has a great lullaby to capture the same basic experience:

And if you want to understand more about the science of parenting, and how it relates to happiness and fulfillment, check out Jennifer Senior's New York Magazine excellent article All Joy and No Fun.

Hat tip to Heidi and Tony!

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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 Native Americans...

You know what I'm talking about, right?

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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 as Professor Millican explains in this fascinating lecture (that explores the mind-body problem and the fallacies one can commit when trying to derive metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premises), that doesn't mean that substance dualism doesn't face some seriously problematic challenges...

Click here to see the class slides, and remember that the problems for substance dualism don't end there...

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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 contrary to the ideals of a lover of wisdom.

And that's exactly what Sarah Palin has done after her history lesson kerfuffle: she insists Paul Revere rode in the dark of midnight to warn the British that they were going to get ambushed the next morning. Yes, because when I think surprise attack, I always think 'let's warn the enemy ahead of time.' Luckily, Jon Stewart has something to say on the issue:

The Daily Show - Sarah Palin's Folksy Word Salad
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

But since her followers have tried to "fix" the Wikipedia page on Paul Revere to fit in with what this bimbo believes, I guess she must be right...

Here's Stephen Colbert trying to prove Revere could have ridden a horse while ringing a bell and firing multiple shots from a front-loading musket:

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I stand corrected... and possibly sterile...

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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 Hubble, thanks to a brilliant idea proposed by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, was able to measure the distance to a Cepheid variable in what was suspected to be either a weird part of the Milky Way, or an altogether different galaxy. The measurements made it clear that the universe was orders of magnitude larger than we had suspected.

Could it, in fact, be infinite? Does space go on forever? Or does it have to have an edge? If it has an edge, what's on the other side? More universe? And if it's infinite, and there are an infinite number of stars, why isn't the night sky as bright as it is during the day?

In the following documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili traces the history and the science behind these and other similarly fascinating questions that scientists, especially with the help of brilliant minds like Gauss, Reimann and Einstein, are just beginning to solve.

I would have thought that a finite amount of stars would solve the problem much more easily, but maybe Professor Al-Khalili hasn't heard of Ockham's Razor? :)

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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 those of corporations bent on reducing taxes for the rich while screwing the rest of us), then the fact she has no freaking clue what the hell she's talking about should be no surprise to anyone...

Here is Sarah Palin's revisionary history on the significance of Paul Revere and his Midnight Run, which she declared while visiting... wait for it... the focal point for Paul Revere's ride!!!

So, he warned the British to protect our Second Amendment before we even had a Second Amendment... or a First, or a Constitution, or even a Declaration of Independence?

Anyway, if you need a reminder of Paul Revere's story, listen to this:

I wonder if Sarah Palin will characterize this latest failure as yet another "lame-stream-media gotcha moment"...

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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 universe rotating around us, and every now and then you might experience us doing the rotating. This shift is usually involuntary and tends to be short-lived (at least for me).

To solve that problem, the people who created this video have taken some typical time-lapse footage, but fixed the video on the stars instead of Earth. The result is truly impressive.

Check out all sorts of awesome time lapse videos.
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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 within a dream (your 'waking up' this morning proves nothing), then all bets are off...

Welcome to the skeptical problem of solipsism (or at least one version of it): the idea that it may be impossible to tell the difference between a real mind-independent external world (what you're probably used to believing) vs. a completely realistic dream, or a hallucination, or a situation in which you are just a brain in a vat fed information by a scientist just messing with you through a super computer, or a world in which all that exists is you and your ideas and perceptions, or being stuck in something like The Matrix.

Can we have knowledge of a mind-independent external reality that's really "out there"? In the fourth lecture in this series, Professor Millican explores the history of this problem, starting with Descartes' skeptical arguments, as well as some of the possible solutions offered over the years, especially G.E. Moore's Defense of Common Sense.

Click here to see the course slides
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