Philosophers are no longer allowed at summer camp

When it comes to the question of the metaphysics of diachronic personal identity (the question of whether you are the same person at different times), philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Derek Parfit, David Lewis and others, have come up with a plethora of absolutely fascinating and disturbing thought experiments. The idea is that these intuition pumps should help us get clearer on the concept and its logical implications so we can test the coherence of various views. What they haven't always considered is how non-philosophers might react to these stories :)

Unfortunately, summer camp is not the only place we're banned from :(

Via: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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Filibustering to Abort the Abortion Bill

When the Texas Senate wanted to pass a new abortion bill that would severely restrict abortion guidelines and ban abortions after 20 weeks, Senator Wendy Davis decided to literally stand up for women's right to make their own reproductive health choices by filibustering the bill for 13 hours in what has quickly become a national sensation that has galvanized liberal support from all corners of the nation.

Of course, conservatives are furious about her stance, and Governor Rick Perry (most likely afraid of losing his own office to her come next election), has decided to attack Davis on a personal level by going after her and her family. In addition, in one of his statements, Perry claimed that "in Texas, we value all life," apparently completely oblivious to the fact that on the very same day, his state had committed its 500th execution...

And just to give you a sense of the double-standards and dirty tricks some conservative opponents tend to use when approaching their core issues, here's what they tried to do with respect to the fact they saw that their bill wasn't going to pass:

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And although Davis ended up talking non-stop for about eleven hours, she can also be quite concise:

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The Punishable Perils of Plagiarism

As we've seen before (in a case in which a professor discovered a massive collective case of cheating), academic dishonesty is a serious and growing problem. What most cheaters don't always realize, however (especially those who engage in plagiarism), is the paradoxical nature of cheating: those who need to do it are usually not clever enough to know how to do it well enough to get away with it, and those who could get away with it are smart enough not to need to do it...

To paraphrase something I read in a fascinating article on anosognosia a couple of years ago: if you're too stupid to cheat, you're probably too stupid to know you're too stupid to cheat... The irony, of course, is that if you think you're clever enough to get away with it, you probably don't belong to the clever category...

Now, while the following video disavows the existence of our agency, those of us who, willingly or unwillingly, work for the Department of Plagiarism Investigation are familiar with lots of different versions and variations of cheating, and the disadvantage of any one cheater is that he/she is competing against the accumulated knowledge our agency has collected since its inception a long, long time ago...

Here is just a small sample of the many ways (both laughable and frustrating) in which students think they can get away with plagiarized work:

Of course, we can't divulge all the methods we have for catching instances of plagiarism, but even if you don't care about education itself or the value of honest work, it's still in your own self-interest not to cheat because if you get caught... well, let's not go there...

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The Examined Life

While defending himself against his accusers (at least in Plato's Apology), Socrates uttered a sentence that has captured the essence of philosophy and that has reverberated through the centuries: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

More than two thousand years later, now that we live in a society that's technologically advanced and that has benefited from the lessons learned through science and history, is there any need to question our most basic presuppositions, to wonder whether we are on the path to achieving wisdom, to ask whether we are worthy human beings, to remove the mask of superficiality and peer into the depths of our being? You'd better believe it!

And to prove it, today we are showcasing the documentary The Examined Life, which consists of a few sections in which a bunch of philosophers (people like Cornel West, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek and others) talk for a few minutes about various issues that we may normally take for granted as settled. And as you'll see, these short discussions will make it painfully obvious that things aren't nearly as neat and settled as we tend to assume. And once the philosophical gadfly bites you, even though you might feel uncomfortable, you'll be better off than you were before since now at least you have some kind of idea about what's really going on. And it is in that realization and doubt that the seed of wisdom can be planted. The question then becomes whether you'll help cultivate it and grow...

We are featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures, born between urine and feces, whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us.

Awesome :)

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Blowing the Whistle on Whistleblowers

Whistleblowing and information leaks have been spearheading news headlines recently. Among the highest profile cases in America we've had Bradley Manning and, most recently, Edward Snowden. Many have jumped on the character assassination wagon, calling them traitors, cowards, and a lot of other things, even calling for their heads!, all of which tends to distract from the more pressing issue: the information leaked, what it tells us about the sources that were trying to keep it secret, and the implications going forward.

Directly or indirectly, both men did work for the government, so a case could potentially be made that they betrayed our government. Though I disagree with that position, I'm willing to grant it for the sake of argument. What they did not betray, however, is their country. They saw that the government was violating human rights, the constitution and the principles upon we always claim our nation was founded, and they decided to stand up to power so that we could rescue our country back from the forces that want to corrupt it for their own purposes. These men are American and moral heroes. Few have the courage to stand up and risk so much when it would be so much easier to just stay silent and look the other way, and now, in their time of need, we ought to stand by them and support them.

Yes, the information they revealed is shocking and damaging to our reputation, no doubt, but our reputation ought to be based who we are, not on what we hide. And claims regarding national security, at least in these two cases, have been completely fabricated or at least blown way out of proportion. Unlike the previous administration, which actually outed individual secret agents and put their lives at real risk (all in the name of politics, I might add), Manning and Snowden have leaked information about highly questionable programs and practices that have been institutionalized without having gone through the proper checks and balances (you know, pesky little things like the Constitution and such)...

But of course, how you feel about and refer to these folks depends on where you're coming from, as the hilarious Samantha Bee beautifully and succinctly shows:

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And just to give you a taste of the backward twilight zone world we seem to be living in, here's an example of those in (financial) power trying to silence those who report on their corruption by trying to turn the law on them! (and apparently without noticing the irony and contradiction):

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Ok, this is going to sound horrible, so be warned, but was it deliberate that the public relations spokesperson sort of looks like a piggy, to make it look like they sympathize with the plight of animals, or was it just an unfortunate and ironic coincidence?

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What Is Evolution and Natural Selection?

I don't know if it's by design or circumstance, but (apart from the religious and ideological elements) part of the resistance to evolution has to do with the fact that a number of related but distinct concepts are normally conflated with each other, so that if you disagree with one, you automatically assume that you must disagree with all of them. For instance, many people confuse natural selection with evolution, and think of them as interchangeable concepts, but the former is simply the most famous, and possibly main mechanism driving the fact of the latter.

And talking about facts, people also tend to confuse the fact of evolution with the theory of evolution. Evolution, the change in (gene) allele frequency in populations over the span of multiple generations, is a fact that even the most hard-core creationists can't deny with a straight face (after all, you are not identical to either of your parents, nor to your own children). The theory of evolution is a scientific model (and by far the most successful account so far) to explain, understand and make sense of the fact of evolution (why it happens). And to bring it all full-circle, the theory makes use of various mechanisms, most notably, though not exclusively, natural selection. So yeah, I can understand why some people might get a little confused...

But if that seems needlessly abstract, here's a little animation to clarify what evolution is:

Having established that, the next point to touch on is the consequences of evolution and what it implies about us and our place in the grand scheme of things. Many people tend to disagree with evolution, not because it's not supported by more evidence than we know what to do with or because it doesn't make sense but because, as a kind of universal acid, it tends to undermine our inflated egos.

We like to think of ourselves as fallen angels, ignited by a kind of divine spark, but it may be more accurate to say that we are risen apes, and that we can trace our inglorious genealogical lineage all the way back to pond scum. Then again, how is that any worse than thinking we come from dust?

But before we consider the logical implications of this idea, here's a little lesson, again clearly articulated, explaining the basic logic behind the mechanism of natural selection:

And here's why the idea of 'intelligent design' is undermined by our observation of fossils and the massive number of extinct species: evolution is a 'blind watchmaker,' a tinkerer (not a designer) whose success is acquired by the death and destruction of all those experiments that ended up failing.

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Buy Starschmucks, Attack God?

Apparently evangelical Christian and right-wing conservative 'historian' David Barton and I have something in common: we kind of hate Starschmucks. Our reasons, however, differ. My antagonism is based on the condescending pretentiousness of the brand and many of its 'baristas,' and on the fact they have driven many humble mom-n-pop coffee shops into the ground. Barton's problem, however, is that StarBucks believes in marriage equality.

It's typical of right-wing conservative fundamentalist Christians like Barton to be obsessed with questions of sexuality (especially other people's) while ignoring questions of poverty, social justice and loving our neighbors. After all, given everything Jesus said about homosexuality... oh wait, he never said a word about it! He only wasted his time trying to make people kinder and more accepting and forgiving of others...

In any case, while the following analysis by The Young Turks commits a bunch of logical mistakes of its own, they do manage to drive home the point regarding the arbitrary double-standard on which most religion-based objections to homosexuality are based and what the consequences of taking their own reasoning seriously entails...

And I've never understood this, but how exactly do beards have corners???

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Hunters Are Pussies

There, I said it. You have probably seen what hunters like to do, right? Once they've killed some "game," they like to take pictures of themselves next to the dead carcass before mounting it as a trophy on their walls for the world to see and admire. Future generations are going to think of us the way we think today about slave owners: as a bunch of ignorant assholes...

But here's the thing: this wasn't a fair fight. In fact, it wasn't a fight at all. The poor animal got ambushed and killed before it could have any time to protect itself, and the wimpy but boastful "predator" was hundreds of yards away, taking comfortable advantage of a weapon that makes him feel like a "man" while simultaneously negating that manhood by placing him completely outside of any real danger and discomfort.

And as Stephen Colbert reports, to add insult to injury, they're also getting lazier...

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If you want to hunt and be a real man, leave your rifle behind, grab a couple of knives and go fight the beast head-on. Let the best fighter win...

But let's keep it real, here's what's probably going to happen:

Q.E.D.

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Daniel Dennett - Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

After a long and distinguished career in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, evolution and artificial intelligence, philosopher Daniel Dennett has picked up a number of mental tools along the way to help him reason his way through various interesting and thought-provoking conceptual puzzles and questions.

And nice guy that he is, he has taken the time to write a whole book about them to share with the rest of the world. These intuition pumps can be deployed to deal with a myriad of different scenarios, from the mundane to the highly abstract and philosophical, and no matter what kind of work you do or what kind of circles you run in, chances are these tools are going to make your life easier and more interesting.

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