Philosophy
drorzel | June 21, 2011Josh Rosenau has a post about the supernatural, spinning off recent posts about a recent Calamities of Nature webcomic. Josh makes a point that I think is valid but subtle:
The issue with the supernatural is not whether it's part of the universe, but whether it is bound by the same laws as all the other elements of the universe. The bizarre claim about ghosts is that they somehow obey some laws but not others, for no obvious reasons.
Something supernatural could, in principle, interact with the universe sometimes but not at others. If it is operating outside of natural laws, that doesn't…
jtoney | June 14, 2011What constitutes consciousness? How do you define a person? These are deep philosophical questions that I cannot answer, but MSNBC political commentator Rachel Maddow took them on - prompted, surprisingly, by one of my recent blogs "Growing a Brain in a Dish."
My earlier blog was more focused on my enthusiasm of the discovery that researchers could grow brain cells on a petri dish that were connected both physically and by electrical and chemical signals. I'll let The Maddow Blog explain, as it is more clear than my earlier post and then goes on to the deeper questions - and so I was "…
drorzel | May 25, 2011If I ever decided to abandon any pretense of integrity or credibility, and just shoot for making a bazillion dollars peddling quantum hokum, the particular brand of quantum philosophy I would peddle has already been laid out, in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity. In the story, the narrator is given a copy of a "crank book" by Carl G. Soziere, titled You will Never Die, which makes an argument that is essentially a variant of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics:
And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the…
jrosenhouse | March 16, 2011My last post has provoked a few replies. Especially the part about the problem of evil.
In my review of the new book by Giberson and Collins I was critical of their treatment of the problem. Michael Ruse, always classy, opens his response thusly:
Given that they are both committed Christians, as well as totally convinced that modern science is essentially right and good, the book is intended to defend Christianity against the critics who argue that science and religion are incompatible. Expectedly, it has got all of the junior New Atheists jumping with joyous ire, and all over the blogs…
drorzel | February 16, 2011Sean Carroll and Brad DeLong have each recently asserted that relativity is easier to understand than quantum mechanics. Both quote Feynman saying that nobody understands quantum mechanics, but Sean gives more detail:
"Hardness" is not a property that inheres in a theory itself; it's a statement about the relationship between the theory and the human beings trying to understand it. Quantum mechanics and relativity both seem hard because they feature phenomena that are outside the everyday understanding we grow up with. But for relativity, it's really just a matter of re-arranging the concepts…
stoat | February 3, 2011People don't talk about me much, so I'll point you at ocham.blogspot.com. It is even kind, in parts, but the problem he points out - the difficulty of maintaining an article like [[Existence]] - is quite genuine. I'm currently hacking through various "esoteric" bits of wikipedia removing cruft (I even started [[Gurdjieff Foundation]]), and Existence was but one minor victim of my ghastly surgery. I don't agree with "Ockham" - my attitude is that maths doesn't really belong in an article that is predominantly philosophy, but I don't care enough on that subject to argue hard.
Update: now with…
vlicata | January 22, 2011A physicist friend of mine recently lent me a copy of Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", which purports to be the only ever philosophical analysis of "bullshit". This former essay turned teeny tiny hardback book reaches such profound conclusions as: 1) bullshit is sort of like humbug, only more excremental; 2) bullshit is worse than lying, because liars know the truth, while bullshitters just yak away without regard for the truth or non-truth of what they are saying; and 3) that since a person cannot ever really know him/her self, any sincere expression of one's feelings is bullshit.
This…
pharyngula | January 5, 2011Among my usual flood of daily email, I frequently get tossed onto mailing lists for conservative think tanks. Why? I don't know. I suspect that it's for the same reason I also get a lot of gay porn in my email: not because I follow it or asked to be added, but because some tired d-bag with no imagination thinks its funny to dun me with more junk. The joke's on them, though: I might keep it around and skim the stuff now and then to get inspiration for a blog post, and then click-click — a few presses of a button and I add the source to my junk mail filter, and never see it again.
No, I didn't…
jrosenhouse | December 13, 2010The BECB (that's the big evolution/creation book) is slowly winding its way towards a complete first draft. I just finished writing a chapter about religious experiences. Creationists routinely tell me they have had them, you see.
So over the last few months I have read my share of the literature on the subject. I started with classics like William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, which actually made for more interesting reading than you might expect. James' approach to the subject is pretty measured and reasonable, especially given the state of science at the time (his…
jrosenhouse | November 30, 2010When people ask the question in the post's title, or the roughly equivalent question, “What is the meaning of life?” my reply is that I don't understand what is being asked. They both seem like category errors to me; universes don't have purposes and lives don't have meanings. If I were to attempt to give an answer, without any regard for whether the answer were true, I would have no idea what to say.
Perhaps there is some guidance to be gained from the answers others give. One answer I have heard is that the meaning of life is to glorify God in word, thought and deed. But that sounds…
cagapakis | October 24, 2010Nick pointed me to a fabulous podcast series by CBC radio called "How To Think About Science." Each episode is a long and fascinating interview with a prominent scholar of science--scientists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians who explore how science is done, how scientists work, and how scientific ideas and facts are communicated. Check it out!
drorzel | August 6, 2010In comments to yesterday's post about my favorite Many-Worlds story, a couple of people mention "All the Myriad Ways," a Larry Niven short story. I don't think I've ever actually read the story, but it gets brought up all the time, so I'm familiar with the concept. It's an angle on Many-Worlds that I don't like, and has something in common with the central conceit of Inception, which is also not high on my list of literary tropes, though my reaction isn't anywhere near as negative as Scott's.
If you're not familiar with it, here's the summary from Wikipedia:
A police detective, pondering a…
cagapakis | July 20, 2010Everyone's favorite Slovenian philsopher, Slavoj Žižek, discussing his provocative perspective on nature, ecology, biotechnology, and climate change while dumpster diving:
via Immanent Discursivity (thanks Nick!)
jstemwedel | July 19, 2010In what is surely a contender for the photo next to the "business as usual in the blogosphere" entry in the Wiktionary, a (male) blogger has posted a list of the sexiest (all-but-one female) scientists (using photos of those scientists obtained from the web without any indication that he had also obtained proper permission to use those photos in his post), and now the blogger says he wants to know what could possibly be wrong about making such a post.
Because no one has ever taken the time to explain this issues in any detail. (You'd think someone who knew how to search for images could…
neurotopia | July 1, 2010
You may not think of our flesh-eating diseased brethren as being the thoughtful types. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.
As Sci mentioned, I'm gonna be holed up in the Costco for a while so I got time to think about it. They're the slow-moving-undead zombies, not those ultra-quick "infected" (I hate those creepy bastards). I rolled down those big steel doors, barricaded them with anything heavy I could find here, gathered up all the lighting supplies for when the power goes out, bandaged up that bite on my arm, and I've taken to making jerky out of all this meat I've got laying around…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2010The funding situation in the California State University system being what it is (scary-bad), departments at my fair university are also scrambling to adjust to a shift in the logic governing resource distribution. It used to be that resources followed enrollments -- that the more students you could pack into your classes, the more money your department would be given to educate students.
Now, in the era of enrollment caps (because the state can't put up its share of the cost for as many students as it used to), it's looking like resources will be driven by how many majors a department can…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2010tags: Education Innovation in the Slums, education, technology, poverty, slums, curriculum, philosophy, learning as a productive activity, Charles Leadbeater, TEDTalks, TED Talks, streaming video
Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education -- and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world's poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn. And this informal, disruptive new kind of school, he says, is what all schools need to become.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the…
grrlscientist | June 15, 2010tags: Foucault's Pendulum, physics, rotation, Pendulum, Jim LaBelle, Dartmouth University, wow, streaming video
This video features physics and astronomy professor Jim LaBelle, as he discusses the truly fascinating science behind a classic physics experiment, Foucault's pendulum, while seated next to Dartmouth University's pendulum in Fairchild Tower.
While scientists already knew that the Earth had a rotation, they had struggled to come up with a way of definitively proving this was so. In 1851, French scientist Leon Foucault gave a sensational demonstration in the Paris Pantheon proving…
drorzel | May 14, 2010Blame Bryan O'Sullivan for this-- after his comment about misreading "Bohmian Mechanics" as "Bohemian Mechanics," I couldn't get this silly idea out of my head. And this is the result.
I like to think that this was Brian May's first draft (he does have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, after all), before Freddie Mercury got hold of it:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Do objects have real states
Or just probabilities?
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
Studying quantum (poor boy), I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
A little psi, little rho
No interpretation ever…
drorzel | May 13, 2010I get asked my opinion of Bohmian mechanics a fair bit, despite the fact that I know very little about it. This came up again recently, so I got some suggested reading from Matt Leifer, on the grounds that I ought to learn something about it if I'm going to keep being asked about it. One of his links led to the Bohmian Mechanics collaboration, where they helpfully provide a page of pre-prints that you can download. Among these was a link to the Bohmian Mechanics entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which seemed like a good place to start as it would be a) free, and b) aimed at a…