Tag Archives: Philosophy

“Women’s Works” by Peter Adamson

“Despite the ancient Oracle’s advice to ‘Know Thyself’, it’s only relatively recently that we philosophers have started wondering why so few of us are women. In fact, gender disparity among professional academic philosophers has now become something of a scandal. (…)  in the earlier ages studied by those historians, women were even more shut out of the discipline than they are today.

(…) The early modern period especially featured numerous prominent female thinkers, such as Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway. They were active in the mid-1600s, more than a century before Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1790 work Vindication of the Rights of Women (I’m guessing that this is the earliest philosophical treatise by a woman that most philosophers would be able to name).

If we look further back, we find that the history of women in philosophy is as old as the history of philosophy itself. In the time of the Pre-Socratics (6th C. BCE) there was Theano, an associate of and possibly the wife of Pythagoras. Plato famously argues in his Republic that women would be philosophers in his ideal city. (…)

(…)

By the way, non-European traditions have also featured women. We find several female disputants in theUpanisads (6th C. BCE onwards), for example.

Of course, it is not enough to acknowledge the existence of these women thinkers and then turn back to studying only their more famous male contemporaries. (…) After all, when we study Aristotle or Kant, we don’t usually start with the observation that they were men; so why should we see Hipparchia or Hildegard as women first and philosophers second? (…)

If female philosophers are to be rescued from their undeserved obscurity, it will be by using the same tools that can illuminate male historical figures.(…) And if this richer historical picture gives encouragement to women who are considering whether to devote their lives to philosophy, then an improvement in our understanding of philosophy’s past might just help improve philosophy’s future.”

read full article

the rise of consciousness as a problem

In “I feel therefore I am“, an essay published in aeon, Margaret Wertheim sketches the history of consciousness as a problem.

“In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke wondered if ‘the same object should produce in several men’s minds different ideas at the same time; for example, the idea, that a violet produces in one man’s mind by his eyes, were the same that a marigold produced in another man’s, and vice versa.’ Now known to philosophers of mind as the inverted spectrum argument, Locke’s query points us to the mystery of subjective experience and its attendant problem of ‘consciousness’.(…)

First coined in 1995 by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, this ‘hard problem’ of consciousness highlights the distinction between registering and actually feeling a phenomenon. (…)

As one of the founders of empiricism, Locke believed that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience, with real knowledge beingfelt by conscious beings. In the 17th century, René Descartes had also insisted on the irreducible centrality of subjective experience (…)

(…)

The idea that the laws of nature might be able to account for conscious experience – a position known as physicalism – steadily gained supporters in the 19th century and was given a particular boost with the advent of Maxwell’s equations and other powerful mathematical frameworks devised by physicists in their golden age. (…)

Yet, as some philosophers of the early 20th century began to point out, physicalism contains a logical flaw. If consciousness is a secondary byproduct of physical laws, and if those laws are causally closed – meaning that everything in the world is explained by them (as physicalists claim) – then consciousness becomes truly irrelevant. (…)

These are fighting words. And some scientists are fighting back. In the frontline are the neuroscientists who, with increasing frequency, are proposing theories for how subjective experience might emerge from a matrix of neurons and brain chemistry. A slew of books over the past two decades have proffered solutions to the ‘problem’ of consciousness. Among the best known are Christof Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004); Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000); Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999); and the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s bluntly titled Consciousness Explained (1991).

It has been said that, if the 20th century was the age of physics, the 21st will be the age of the brain. Among scientists today, consciousness is being hailed as one of the prime intellectual challenges. My interest in the subject is not in any particular solution to the origin of consciousness – I believe we’ll be arguing about that for millennia to come – but rather in the question: why is consciousness perceived as a ‘problem’? How exactly did it become a problem? And given that it was off the table of science for so long, why is it now becoming such a hot research subject? (…) ” read full essay

“What Desires Are Politically Important?” – Bertrand Russell

From Bertrand Russell’s Nobel prize acceptance lecture

“All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

(…)  man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite (…) : four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
Continue reading→

“The Case for Teaching Ignorance” By JAMIE HOLMES

From NY Times Op-Ed

“In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled “Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance.” (…)

(…) She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers. Eventually, the American Medical Association funded the class, which students would fondly remember as “Ignorance 101.”

Classes like hers remain rare, but in recent years scholars have made a convincing case that focusing on uncertainty can foster latent curiosity, while emphasizing clarity can convey a warped understanding of knowledge.

 (…)  By inviting scientists of various specialties to teach his students about what truly excited them — not cold hard facts but intriguing ambiguities — Dr. Firestein sought to rebalance the scales.

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

 (…) Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

(…) The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” (…)

The study of ignorance — or agnotology, a term popularized by Robert N. Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford — is in its infancy. (…)

 Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.”  Read full story

“Atheism on Trial” by Stephen Anderson

From article by Stephen Anderson:

“There was a time – some years ago – when to profess disbelief in a Supreme Being could be hazardous to one’s health. (…). Today, atheism has taken its comfortable seat by the fire and has its feet up. (…). Atheism has never been so respectable.

That is why perhaps we now ought to pause and ask if it has actually earned the easy place it enjoys. (…) Before we begin the trial, perhaps we ought to clarify the case. What is ‘atheism’?

(…) It claims there exists no kind of god.

That’s basic. But we might ask, ‘Is it really necessary to understand atheism as so categorical? Can’t we make room for softer versions of skepticism, so as to be more inclusive?’

(…) But secondly, and more importantly, including agnostics in their position is going to give away the game at the start (…),  it is a personal declaration of doubt, not a categorical one. In its strongest form, agnosticism says something like, “I really, really, really strongly don’t think there is any God, because I’ve seen no evidence anywhere near sufficient to make me think there is one.” But the savvy atheist is going to detect the problem: as a personal declaration, it fails to bind anyone else.Continue reading→

Learning about our minds while teaching machines how to learn

Writing an algorithm requires a reflection of what steps, and their internal relations, are necessary to determine a desired output correctly.  Such reflection exercise involving logical and abstraction considerations not only about the operations to be performed but also, in depth, studying how our mind process that same operations.  A couple of recent articles explore that cyclical effort.

“Algorithms of the Mind – What Machine Learning Teaches Us About Ourselves” by Christopher Nguyen and “Are You a Thinking Thing? Why Debating Machine Consciousness Matters” by Alison E. Berman aproach interesting points of this case.Continue reading→

Empathy, Authority, and Virtual Reality

Suggestion has been used for a long time by pseudo-psychics, hypnotism, and other form of magicians.  Regardless of some straight-out frauds, this is telling of the way our mind interprets perceptions does not conform to a deterministic way people sometimes try to see their ‘reasoning’.

An important factor on most of the explored means of tapping into suggestion was interaction with other person (the hypnotist).  Authority plays a major role in this.  As human communication is more and more mediated by technology, would our perception of authority be migrating as well?  One may see a big data miracle if amazon guess someone is pregnant by her shopping history, but take for granted if a local pharmacist do so?

Would empathy, hand-in-hand with suggestion and authority, be migrating to be mediated by virtual reality?

Not surprisingly, as businesses get the taste of the market potential of this shift, here is a new batch of articles on the matter.  Too many in this trendy topic to pick one, sorry.

“Inside the Empathy Machine: VR, Neuroscience, Race and Journalism” by Joel Beeson at Media Shift.

“NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell steps into virtual reality at Stanford lab” by Bjorn Carey

“The Limits of Virtual Reality: Debugging the Empathy Machine” by Ainsley Sutherland from MIT

“The Future of Empathy-Generating Virtual Reality Is Here” by Bill Desowitz

“How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine” – TED Talk with Chris Milk

“CAN VIRTUAL REALITY MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON?” by Stern Strategy Group

“Is It Really So Bad If We Prefer Virtual Reality to Reality?” by Sveta McShane

 

“Science Isn’t Broken” by CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN

Article from fivethirtyeight.com:

“If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately.

(..) International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology recently accepted for publication a paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List,” whose text was nothing more than those seven words, repeated over and over for 10 pages. Two other journals allowed an engineer posing as Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel to publish a paper, “Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.”

Revolutionary findings? Possibly fabricated. In May, a couple of University of California, Berkeley, grad students discovered irregularities in Michael LaCour’s influential paper suggesting that an in-person conversation with a gay person could change how people felt about same-sex marriage. The journal Science retracted the paper shortly after, when LaCour’s co-author could find no record of the data.

Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a universal problem: Science is hard — really fucking hard.Continue reading→

“How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions” by Will Knight

From MIT Tech Review:

“Fully self-driving vehicles are still at the research stage, but automated driving technology is rapidly creeping into vehicles. (…)

As the technology advances, however, and cars become capable of interpreting more complex scenes, automated driving systems may need to make split-second decisions that raise real ethical questions.

(…) a child suddenly dashing into the road, forcing the self-driving car to choose between hitting the child or swerving into an oncoming van.

(…) “If that would avoid the child, if it would save the child’s life, could we injure the occupant of the vehicle? (…)

Others believe the situation is a little more complicated. For example, Bryant Walker-Smith (…) says plenty of ethical decisions are already made in automotive engineering. “Ethics, philosophy, law: all of these assumptions underpin so many decisions,” he says. “If you look at airbags, for example, inherent in that technology is the assumption that you’re going to save a lot of lives, and only kill a few.”

(…) “The biggest ethical question is how quickly we move. We have a technology that potentially could save a lot of people, but is going to be imperfect and is going to kill.”  read full article

 

Transhumanist Free Will

Even if you think debate over human free will has been conclusive (to say the least) or not agree in aphorisms as definitive judgements on the matter, Hank Pellissier’s “Free Will Does Not Exist – Should it be a Transhumanist Enhancement?” brings a refreshing debate on what would ‘enhanced’ human beings do about their possibility of free will.

“(…) We don’t have free will because human physiology isn’t wired that way. (…)

It is true that certain factions still believe in free will – Religionists and Libertarians – but I’m not in either camp. I’m an atheist social progressive.

Having established my opinion on free will, let’s proceed…(…)  Should 100% Free Will be a Transhumanist Goal? (…)  I believe free will isn’t available,but it could be attained, at least partially, perhaps through excruciating disciplines… or – definitely – via emerging transhuman technologies.

Returning to the present time, let’s examine the suffering caused by our enslavement to our outdated neurochemistry, which evolved to protect us from pre-civilization menaces. Let’s divide our investigation of the consequences into three categories:

Body –  Many people (…) enslaved to physical addictions that render them helpless. (…)

Emotion  – Humanity is cursed with negative feelings that injure us with internal pain and agony. (…)

Thought  – Our minds often flit spasmodically from one obsession to another, exhausting us with their randomness and superficiality. (…)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all these problems were eradicated?

Imagine an existence as Free-Will Transhumans, who decided 100% of the time what we wanted to think, feel, and do.. (…)

We’ll begin with options presently available, and continue from there into futuristic, far-out, fantastical possibilities.

Today’s Techniques and Technology  – Control of one’s thoughts and feelings can be improved via meditation. (…)

Pharmaceutical Control of our Biochemistry –  “Paradise engineering”, advocated by philosopher David Pearce of HedWeb.com, has “abolition of suffering” as its goal. (…)

Memory Erasure and Alteration + Injection of Joyful Invented Memories  – Our neurological response to situations is largely determined by memories of similar events. (…)

Rewiring Our Brains, with Wires – Our mental activity currently depends on largely-out-of-our-control neurochemical reactions….”  read full article

Consciousness, mind and brain – introducing Passive Frame Theory

Taking in consideration the carefulness required in any claim of a novel theory on consciousness and the necessary time to read and digest such a paper: “Homing in on Consciousness in the Nervous System: An Action-Based Synthesis” published at Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Associate Professor of Psychology Ezequiel Morsella from San Francisco state University.

A traditional disputed field among philosopher’s, psychologists, and many other research areas, theories of mind struggle to stand in solid ground.  In this aspect, this paper could be situated as a more naturalistic approach to the matter.

Focusing in overt action and reversing the attempt to understand mind-brain relationships from action to causes (instead of a stimulus-response study) is indeed not usual in recent or mainstream debate.  On this, it may bear some interesting dialogue with Piaget’s theory on intelligence, impulse and logic.

Such approach and the naturalistic arguments walk its way in what could be a descriptive, not normative, theory of mind-brain relationship.

A short introduction may be found by means of the press release issued along the article.

Can we reason physics without causality?

In this article published in aeon, Mathias Frisch discusses role of causality in shaping our knowledge.

“…In short, a working knowledge of the way in which causes and effects relate to one another seems indispensable to our ability to make our way in the world. Yet there is a long and venerable tradition in philosophy, dating back at least to David Hume in the 18th century, that finds the notions of causality to be dubious. And that might be putting it kindly.

Hume argued that when we seek causal relations, we can never discover the real power; the, as it were, metaphysical glue that binds events together. All we are able to see are regularities – the ‘constant conjunction’ of certain sorts of observation. …Which is not to say that he was ignorant of the central importance of causal reasoning…  Causal reasoning was somehow both indispensable and illegitimate. We appear to have a dilemma.

… causes seemed too vague for a mathematically precise science. If you can’t observe them, how can you measure them? If you can’t measure them, how can you put them in your equations? Second, causality has a definite direction in time: causes have to happen before their effects. Yet the basic laws of physics (as distinct from such higher-level statistical generalisations as the laws of thermodynamics) appear to be time-symmetric…

…

Neo-Russellians in the 21st century express their rejection of causes …

This is all very puzzling. Is it OK to think in terms of causes or not? If so, why, given the apparent hostility to causes in the underlying laws? And if not, why does it seem to work so well?” read more

“Can We Design Trust Between Humans and Artificial Intelligence?” by Patrick Mankins

Desinger Patrick Mankins article on building trust between people and Artificial Intelligence.

Excerpts below, but read full article – it’s not long anyway:

“Machine learning and cognitive systems are now a major part many products people interact with every da…. The role of designers is to figure out how to build collaborative relationships between people and machines that help smart systems enhance human creativity and agency rather than simply replacing them.

… before self-driving cars can really take off, people will probably have to trust their cars to make complex, sometimes moral, decisions on their behalf, much like when another person is driving.
Creating a feedback loop
This also takes advantage of one of the key distinguishing capabilities of many AI systems: they know when they don’t understand something.  Once a system gains this sort of self-awareness, a fundamentally different kind interaction is possible.

Building trust and collaboration
What is it that makes getting on a plane or a bus driven by a complete stranger something people don’t even think twice about, while the idea of getting into a driverless vehicle causes anxiety? … We understand why people behave the way they do on an intuitive level, and feel like we can predict how they will behave. We don’t have this empathy for current smart systems.”

“A New Theory of Distraction” BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN (New Yorker)

“…Like typing, Googling, and driving, distraction is now a universal competency. We’re all experts.

Still, for all our expertise, distraction retains an aura of mystery. It’s hard to define: it can be internal or external, habitual or surprising, annoying or pleasurable. It’s shaped by power: where a boss sees a distracted employee, an employee sees a controlling boss. Often, it can be useful: my dentist, who used to be a ski instructor, reports that novice skiers learn better if their teachers, by talking, distract them from the fact that they are sliding down a mountain. (…)
Another source of confusion is distraction’s apparent growth. There are two big theories about why it’s on the rise.  The first is material: it holds that our urbanized, high-tech society is designed to distract us. (…)  The second big theory is spiritual—it’s that we’re distracted because our souls are troubled. (…). It’s not a competition, though; in fact, these two problems could be reinforcing each other. Stimulation could lead to ennui, and vice versa.

A version of that mutual-reinforcement theory is more or less what Matthew Crawford proposes in his new book, “The World Beyond Your Head: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). (…) Ever since the Enlightenment, he writes, Western societies have been obsessed with autonomy, and in the past few hundred years we have put autonomy at the center of our lives, economically, politically, and technologically; often, when we think about what it means to be happy, we think of freedom from our circumstances. Unfortunately, we’ve taken things too far: we’re now addicted to liberation, and we regard any situation—a movie, a conversation, a one-block walk down a city street—as a kind of prison. Distraction is a way of asserting control; it’s autonomy run amok. Technologies of escape, like the smartphone, tap into our habits of secession.

The way we talk about distraction has always been a little self-serving—we say, in the passive voice, that we’re “distracted by” the Internet or our cats, and this makes us seem like the victims of our own decisions. But Crawford shows that this way of talking mischaracterizes the whole phenomenon…”  read full story

“What Happens When We Upload Our Minds?” by MADDIE STONE

Article from Motherboard:

“Since the dawn of computer science, humans have dreamt of building machines that can carry our memories and preserve our minds after our fleshy bodies decay. Whole brain emulation, or mind uploading, still has the ring of science fiction. And yet, some of the world’s leading neuroscientists believe the technology to transfer our brains to computers is not far off.

But if we could upload our minds, should we? Some see uploading as the next chapter in human evolution. Others fear the promise of immortality has been oversold, and that sending our brains off to the cloud without carefully weighing the consequences could be disastrous.

(…)

“The mind is based on the brain, and the brain, like all biology, is a kind of machinery,” (,,,) “Which means we’re talking about information processing in a machine.”

read full story

Ceteris Paribus Logic as general framework for Modal and Game Logics

In the article “The Ceteris Paribus Structure of Logics of Game Forms” authors Davide Grossi,
Emiliano Lorini, and Francois Schwarzentruber propose a generalization to the multitude of logic models applied in game and agent formal analysis.

Authors sudied common aspects of formal models used to represent choice and power currently used in modal logics such as ‘Seeing to it that’, ‘Coalition Logic’, ‘Propositional Control’, and ‘Aternating-time tempral logic’ among others.