Call for Papers: pdf version here Location: Delft University of Technology (TUDelft), The Netherlands Date: October 29-31, 2007 (Monday-Wednesday) Link: http://www-illigal.ge.uiuc.edu/wpe
Theme: Engineering Meets Philosophy, and Philosophy Meets Engineering On October 19, 2006 a working group on Philosophy and Engineering was convened at MIT to discuss the need for greater interaction between philosophers and engineers. The result was an agreement to move forward with a workshop to encourage reflection on engineering, engineers, and technology by philosophers and engineers.
The first Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering (WPE-2007) will be held in the Department of Philosophy, TUDelft, 29-31 October 2007 (Monday-Wednesday). Sessions will include talks by invited and selected speakers as well as a number of special sessions.
Extended abstracts (1-2 pages) are invited for submission in one of three tracks or demes:
* Philosophy (Deme chair: Carl Mitcham) * Philosophical Reflections of Practitioners (Deme chair: Billy V. Koen) * Ethics (Deme co-chairs: Michael Davis & P. Aarne Vesilind)
I can just picture the keynote address: "So . . . um . . . how about those Eagles on the weekend?" Read more!
Found this via a discussion about minds and brains at Pharyngula (note--the post is truncated. Click "Read More!" to, well, read more):
A dialogue by Terry Bisson. From a series of stories entitled "Alien/Nation" in the April [1991?] issue of Omni.
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the raido waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I 'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plamsa brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind."
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the reconds and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel theough C space. which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you sid it yourself, who want to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropiate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can marked this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone.
Kelly Tripplehorn, president of the i53 Network (which describes itself as an evangelical (though not Christian) network whose mission is "to produce quality media content, all to the glory of God’s Word"), has thrown down the gauntlet to us heathens. His organisation will pay $1000 to anyone who can offer a non-theistic justification for their belief that the Sun will rise tomorrow.
All you need to do in order to collect your $1,000 is get your non-theistic answer published (concerning your epistemological warrant for your inductive inference) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, under its heading The Problem of Induction.
The point I am interested in is to show that all the knowledge non-Christians have, whether as simple folk by common sense, or as scientists exploring the hidden depths of the created universe- they have because Christianity is true. It is because the world is not what the non-Christians assume that it is, a world of Chance, and is what the Christian says that it is, a world run by the council of God, that even non-Christians have knowledge… Now the question is not whether the non-Christian can weigh, measure, or do a thousand other things. No one denies that he can. But the question is whether on his principle the non-Christian can account for his own or any knowledge.
Tripplehorn elaborates in the video below:
Tripplehorn maintains that the problem of induction is not a problem for Christians like him, because "the first two passages of Genesis inform me that God created the world with order and uniformity, and I as a Christian can assume that the past laws of nature will be the same as the future laws of nature, because God has implicitly told me so, in his Word." This, my friends, is your standard Argument from Biblical Authority, with a twist of Argument from Design.
Bottom line: insofar as the problem of induction is a problem for non-theists, it is a problem for theists like Tripplehorn also. The only difference is that Tripplehorn has given his non-solution to the problem of induction a label: "God." As PZ Myers points out, in the process of tearing Tripplehorn a new one:
It's a cheat. He has absolutely no logical, philosophical justification for this divine precondition he has pulled out of his butt, but then he turns around and thinks that he's got atheists over a barrel and demands that they justify the use of induction without Jesus. What? Why can't I just invent an accidentally linear seam in the fabric of the 18th dimension that imposes regularity in our dimension by subspace resonance? It's total nonsense, but it's a justification that's on a par with waving your hands over an ancient Hebrew sky-god. How about if I pretend there is a subatomic particle (or maybe a sub-quantum force; does it matter?) called the Regulon that compels lawful behavior in other particles/forces. Again, it's pseudoscientific magical BS, but it's as good as Snottypunk's excuse.
Another YouTuber, responding to Snottypunk's--erm--I mean Tripplehorn's video, suggests that miracles pose a whole other set of problems for his supposedly neat Christian solution to the problem of induction.
Alan Kirby, in the latest issue of Philosophy Now magazine, muses on the death of postmodernism, and what comes after . . .
The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert. Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adapt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time.
Sciencinessn. the use of technical jargon, figures or statistics to lend a veneer of scientific credibility to cockamamie ideas, crackpot theories and ideological nostrums. The normal scientific method involves drawing (tentative) conclusions about the natural world from observation and experimentation; scienciness turns the scientific method on its head by presupposing conclusions about the world and then looking for data that appears to confirm them. (Creationism is the most notable case.)
Scienciness can therefore function as an effective propaganda technique, particularly when such propaganda is directed against minority or marginalised groups. An example is the anti-gay psychologist Paul Cameron's famous "Obituary Study," in which he attempted to demonstrate a significantly shorter lifespan among homosexuals by counting obituaries in various gay publications. In a critique of the study, Gregory Herek of the University of California at Davis observes that it "provides a textbook example of the perils of using data from a convenience sample to generalize to an entire population."
Scienciness, then, can be said to be a species of truthiness--but one which is parasitic upon the tension between emotion-based or faith-based reasoning on the one hand, and the appeal of science as a reliable source of knowledge about the world on the other, that is characteristic of contemporary political discourse.
Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused (Gilles Deleuze)
There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual. (Nietzsche again)
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment. (Immanuel Kant)
The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. (Michel Foucault)
In effect, I found that human relations in Perth are Mediated relationships. That is, for the most part, relationships are theoretical postulates. To give an example: one does not, for instance, notice somebody in need and then immediately render assistance without first pausing to consider the theoretical postulates which are thought to govern the situation. There is always the sense of a need to pause thus, and to consider one’s axioms before any human interaction with another.
This “arms length” theoretical mandate is given further enhancement by a sense of division between public and private realms of society. This is less a structural division these days as it is an epistemological division. One assumes that the role that one has been financially harnessed to do actually provides the attributive source of each person’s identity. So much for “public” identity. “Private” identity is the lower brother in this epistemological hierarchy. One “privately” varies from one’s fellow citizens, but this is not considered problematic unless it impinges on one’s capacity to fulfill the role that is designated “public”. One is defined by the manner one has found to earn money. One is not defined by one’s choices in life – which are personal – unless it is considered that one’s personal choices impinge on one’s public identity. In other words, personal choices are not considered interesting, except in the occasional negative sense. This theoretical division between public and private produces a social pattern, which constantly repeats.
Reading this reminded me of a passage, in the honours thesis I wrote on masculinity in Lord of the Rings, in which I considered Australian male friendships in very similar terms. I suggested that the dominant model of masculinity in Australian society is one which views close or intimate male friendship with at least a tinge of suspicion. Hence, the dominant mode of male friendship in Australian society is a mediated friendship; mediated, that is, through a shared activity or interest (be it fishing, drinking . . . perhaps even blogging) which both defines and limits the friendship. (Unlike Frodo's and Sam's.)
I haven't rebirthed an old blog post in several months. This one has been prompted by Daniel (late of Seeking Utopia, currently of Secretly Seeking Utopia) who has seen fit to publish an image of an infant, killed in recent Israeli attacks upon the Gaza Strip, whose brains are falling out of its open skull.
(There. I've said it. You know the content of the image (NSFW). You know the context. I'm not going to link to it--so track it down at your own risk.)
Before we proceed . . . I think there is an inherent risk in publishing gruesome or grisly images of the dead with the intent of "shocking" viewers into supporting your cause. Such images have a tendency to rob their subjects of their dignity, and you may find that the outrage generated by the image ends up being directed squarely at you. The litmus test can be summed up in a simple question: does viewing this image advance our knowledge of the situation? In the case of, say, the Abu Ghraib images, I would say: yes. In the case of the image on Seeking Utopia: we know already that innocents are being slaughtered in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so does publishing this image achieve anything beyond robbing the dead infant of her dignity? I think not.
I have just come across a wonderful interview with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum on the topic of the deleterious role played by disgust and shame in public policy and discourse surrounding important social issues. You might even say her argument establishes the appeal to disgust as a logical fallacy--though she is careful to emphasise that emotion can have a legitimate role to play in reasoning:
Some emotions are essential to law and to public principles of justice: anger at wrongdoing, fear for our safety, compassion for the pain of others, all these are good reasons to make laws that protect people in their rights. [. . .]
Disgust, I argue (drawing on recent psychological research), is different. Its cognitive content involves a shrinking from contamination that is associated with a human desire to be non-animal. That desire, of course, is irrational in the sense that we know we will never succeed in fulfilling it; it is also irrational in another and even more pernicious sense. As psychological research shows, people tend to project disgust properties onto groups of people in their own society, who come to figure as surrogates for people's anxieties about their own animality. By branding members of these groups as disgusting, foul, smelly, slimy, the dominant group is able to distance itself even further from its own animality. [. . .] Unlike anger, disgust does not provide the disgusted person with a set of reasons that can be used for the purposes of public argument and public persuasion.
Nussbaum cites recent debates around same-sex marriage and gay rights--including, for example, claims that "gay men eat feces and drink raw blood"--as examples of public discourse that regularly invoke disgust to persuade people to adopt a particular point of view. Videos of abortions produced for public consumption by anti-abortion groups also spring to mind. There is a case to be made, perhaps, that images of dead, wounded or disfigured women and children--which might be used to bolster both pro- and anti-war arguments--also constitutes an appeal to disgust.
What do you think? Is the appeal to disgust a logical fallacy, and should it be avoided?
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge . . .
-- Charles Darwin
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