Today I received my copy of COSMOS (not Cosmo, you perves!) in which my article appeared. I have to say (and not just because they showed the good taste to print me) that this is one of the better science magazines I have seen. It reminds me of OMNI at its height. OK, it's Australian, but you forners ought to check it out too if you can.
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John Wilkins is an eternal student, who thinks philosophy of biology is at least as interesting as politics or sport and twice as important. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne and worked at the University of Queensland, in Australia, before taking up a research fellowship at the University of Sydney. After a varied career, involving factories, gardening, civil service, publishing, graphics, public relations but not, unfortunately for the CV, driving a truck, John finally completed his thesis on species concepts in 2004, which he has worked into two books.
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COSMOS - a cool magazine
Category: Administrative
Posted on: January 1, 2008 10:42 PM, by John S. Wilkins
Did you like this post? If so, please click on the "Share this" link above and add it to your favourite social bookmarking service, or submit it to the Open Laboratory 2009 via the link on the left bottom of the page. Many thanks. John.
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Comments
Cool. I'll have to check it out. More reading material for the dunny. Where I have time to ponder......
Posted by: Brian English | January 1, 2008 11:19 PM
I'd be more impressed if your article had appeared in COSMO but then I AM a perve!
Posted by: Thony C. | January 2, 2008 2:51 AM
I could always pose for a nude centrespread...
Posted by: John S. Wilkins | January 2, 2008 3:34 AM
Hi John. While looking at the Cosmos site I found this article about the mind-brain problem. The article seems to say that science has shown that the mind is the functioning of the brain. Not some non-substance, or ghost. This is what I studied recently in a biological psychology unit. What's your take on the subject. As a philosopher of science. I'm guessing it's a little different from an Alvin Plantinga or Darth Ratzinger.
Posted by: Brian English | January 2, 2008 7:25 AM
As you guessed, I'm fully physicalist on this matter. My only idiosyncrasy here is that I'm not entirely reductionist about it. I think consciousness is not merely the activity of the brain, but also involves social interactions. That is to say, meaning, rules, and much cognition involves the transactions between other actors, and what seems like the "hard problem" is mostly (IMO) just the inability to express experience.
Phenomenal experience is in my view just a matter of having a point of view or perspective. It's not irreducible in terms of the activity of the brain so long as we realise that each individual experiences their life and not someone else's or an "objective" experience. It resolves down to a tautology, in my opinion. We are trying to explain experience in physical terms, which involves classes of neural behaviours, and so we can explain classes of neural activity, but each individual experiences tokens of neural activity - their own.
I'm sure that is quite opaque.
Posted by: John S. Wilkins | January 2, 2008 7:57 AM
I could always pose for a nude centrespread...
Or just use some images from one of your previous nude photoshoots. (This one's sexy, but safe for work.)
Posted by: HP | January 2, 2008 3:06 PM
Thanks John. I think I'm not too far away from you on that topic. I'm not entirely reductionist either. If I was, it'd probably be pointless studying psychology as it assumes that personality and emotion are something, and something that occurs uniquely, or at least in unique combinations to each person. Though the behaviors must have commonality, or we'd have to study each person and couldn't apply what we'd learnt from one individual to any other person.
Sort of puts the death knell into religions that sell their immortality policies to the average punter, if it's shown that there's no soul or mind that can go on. Though I'm sure there's a "sophisticated" theological answer to how not surviving death is surviving death......
Thanks, I love the internet. It allows non-intellectuals like myself to pick the brains of clever types. :)
Posted by: Brian English | January 2, 2008 4:03 PM