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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Three Minute Philosophy - Aristotle

When scholars refer to you as "the philosopher" for about two thousand years, and everyone understands what that means, you're kind of a big deal. That's exactly what happened to Aristotle because, let's face it, the man's depth and breath of intellectual sophistication simply blew everyone out of the water for two millennia.

If you want a nice introduction to his thought, you could go the comedic route with Mark Steel. For the more ambitious of you, there's always the eloquent Martha Nussbaum discussing Aristotle with Bryan Magee, or Barry Schwarts lecturing on Aristotle's virtue ethics and practical wisdom, or Michael Sandel's teaching his excellent Harvard course on Justice.

But if you have absolutely no idea who Aristotle was, give us 3 minutes:

Ok, so he's too important to distill in only 3 minutes, so give us 3 more:

And to get an even better idea, here is an explanation of Aristotle's four causes:

If you liked that, check out the excellent History of Philosophy podcast; your brain will thank you.

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Schrödinger’s Cat... in 60 Seconds

We've seen in previous episodes of this 60-second Adventures in Thought series, all sorts of philosophical, logical, mathematical and scientific paradoxes and all-around weirdness. To remind you, we've seen Zeno's paradox concerning motion, the grandfather paradox concerning backward travel through time, John Searle's chinese room thought experiment concerning thought and computation, Hilbert's infinite hotel concerning different size infinities, Einstein's twin paradox concerning special relativity.

And finally, today we have Schrödinger’s Cat, that poor kitty whose bivalent fate rests upon the superposition of subatomic particles...

For a more serious treatment of Schrödinger’s Cat, check out Jim Al-Khalili's documentary Atoms: The Illusion of Reality.

And for more on infinities, you'll do your brain a favor by watching the excellent documentary Dangerous Knowledge.

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Three Minute Philosophy - Descartes

Though I tend to disagree with a lot of Descartes' philosophy, even though I admire him a great deal, I've always been sympathetic to his methodological doubt, not only because it provides the prospect of a possible method for acquiring true knowledge, but because I'm frequently confronted, both in an epistemic and an existential sense, with skepticism and the question of what is real.

For the past two days, I've had a massive fever, and I had multiple experiences that seemed completely real at the time, but which, after checking for remaining evidence of their happening, now seem to have been nothing other than figments of an afflicted mind working overtime. Of course, I'm working on the assumption that I'm awake now and no longer hallucinating, but there's the rub, isn't it?

Anyway, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a quick and funny introduction to the father of modern philosophy and modern science:

Check out the Masters of Philosophy tag for more serious and funny treatments of some of the greatest thinkers of all time.

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The Twin Paradox

If you're riding a train and you shoot a gun in the same direction, the total speed of the bullet, relative to the ground, would be the speed of the bullet relative to the gun plus the speed of the train relative to the ground. There's nothing mysterious about that concept.

But what if you decided to shoot your photon torpedo gun (aka, your flashlight, or your torch if you're in England or Australia) under the same conditions? Intuitively, you'd think the speed of the light leaving the flashlight would equal its speed relative to the flashlight plus the speed of the train train relative to the ground, except you'd be wrong.

At the end of the 19th century, and especially thanks to the work of James Clerk Maxwell, there was plenty of evidence to conclude that the speed of light is constant, no matter how fast or in what direction you move relative to it, but no one could understand how this could possibly be so... until Albert Einstein developed his special theory of relativity with an intuition would that would forever revolutionize our understanding of physics: while the speed of light is constant, time and space are relative.

One of the weird consequences of that idea has come to be known as the twin paradox, about which you get to learn in the following funny animation:

Actually, GPS is one of the few applications that combines both special and general relativity in order to work because the Earth's gravitational pull also messes with the curvature of space-time.

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Hilbert's Infinite Hotel

If you study subjects like philosophy, cosmology or mathematics, it won't be long until you find yourself deep in the contemplation of the nasty little business of infinity.

Zeno's paradoxes of motion represent some of the earliest attempts to confront this beast, and although modern tools like calculus or the idea of an infinite sum seems to resolve the problem, I can't say that we've really solved it. It's more like we've brushed it aside and agreed to pretend it's been dealt with. Although I find myself on a small minority here, I still sympathize with Zeno.

One thought-experiment I've never been able to swallow, however, is Hilbert's Infinite Hotel. From the very beginning, it seems to want to assume premises that I would not want to grant... but this is not about me. It's about you, dear reader, and it's about exposing you to interesting ideas that will be worth your while to think about, so here's a short introduction:

And if you want more, check out the Grandfather paradox or the Chinese Room thought experiment.

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The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

The rise of computers in the 20th century, and especially their exponentially increasing computational capacity and speed, has gotten many curious minds to speculate as to whether it is possible at some point to create computers that can think. Those who believe in things like the computational singularity, such as David Chalmers, think it's just a matter of time before we have to bow down to our new mechanized overlords.

Here is a Philosophy Bites interview with Chalmers on just such a question:

Others, like philosopher John Searle, however, think that, given everything we know about computation, it is impossible, even in principle, for computers ever to think, no matter their computational capacity. To prove this point, Searle came up with what has come to be regarded, by supporters and detractors alike, as a classic thought experiment: the Chinese room, which you get to learn about in the following 60 seconds.

For more on questions of mind, consciousness, personal identity, etc., visit the Brainspotting tag.

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Time Travel and the Grandfather Paradox

Nothing beats boredom quite like philosophy. You start with almost any seemingly simple question, you do some heavy thinking, and before you know it, like when we were first introduced to Zeno of Elea (or even his mentor, Parmenides), it turns out motion may just be an optical illusion.

Now we get to explore the grandfather paradox. It's pretty obvious that if you wanted to kill your grandpa, a simple piece of technology like a pillow could get the job done. But what if you've suffered a lifetime of bad jokes, anachronistic war references, patronizing judgments for being 'metrosexual', and countless stories about how easy you have it now compared to a hundred years ago, when he had to walk five miles naked and barefoot through the snow so they could make it to school?

How could you get rid of the old geezer? Could you be so annoyed that you just get into your time machine and travel back to a time before he even met grandma and kill him right there and then? That would solve all the future annoying moments you've suffered for years... but wait, if you kill him before he meets your grandma, he can't knock her up with your dad, and if your dad is never born, then he obviously could not get your mom preggers with you, but then you would not be born, and if you're not born, how could you possibly travel back in time to kill gramps? Oy vay!

Ask the right questions, and a universe of fascinating opportunities opens up to you, or at least you get to kill boredom for a while. Either way it's a win-win.

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The Impossibility of Motion - Achilles and the Tortoise

There are many things most of us just take for granted as obvious or just plain common sense, and therefore as not worth wasting our time on. Philosophers, however, nit-picking bunch that we are, are insatiably curious, and in our search for some coherent grand theory of everything, usually mange to find trouble instead, of the conceptual kind, although there is also a respectable history of weird philosophers' deaths, which you may find interesting.

When you question what others take as self-evident, you may come to realize that what we take to be real may be anything but. If you can spare 60 seconds, the following animation demonstrates one of Zeno's famous paradoxes of motion proposed to support his mentor Parmenides' thesis that "all is one" and that change is impossible.

According to this paradox,if you think that it is possible for something to move from point A to point B, you've got to be kidding... and you haven't actually "thought" anything...

And for a more comprehensive introduction to, and analysis of, Zeno's paradoxes, check out the article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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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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Three Minute Philosophy - David Hume

There are many many reasons to like philosophy, but if I had to settle on just one, I would probably have to say that what I love about it is its inherent playful ability to turn the conventional wisdom of our time and what seems intuitively obvious into something downright bizarre and highly questionable. Needless to say, it does require a peculiar kind of personality to be comfortable with ambiguity and open questions, but isn't that exactly what it takes to gain any wisdom?

One of my favorite examples of a philosopher running wild with a simple idea (like that all our knowledge derives from experience) is David Hume's thoughts on the idea of the self.

Descartes once argued that if there is only one thing you can know with certainty it's your own existence. Taking Descartes' own idea of ideas, Hume demonstrated that you can't even be sure about that, as the following incredibly short and funny summary of Hume's view demonstrates:

Check out more of Hume's ridiculously awesome awesomeness.
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