philosophy

“Does John Searle, in his book Minds, Brains, and Science, succeed in explaining how mental phenomena can be nothing over and above neural phenomena and yet be caused by neural activity?” - My Answer.

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I forgot that the reason you get “paid” to do “jobs” is because it’s not something you’d leap up out of bed in the morning raring to do, without the carrot of filthy lucre leading you on … “Real work” for me is something you just do as a consequence of being who you are and doing what you do, towards something you believe in — with money as mere byproduct … Someone told me this anecdote recently: You ask two workers laying bricks what they’re doing — they’re both doing the same thing — and one guy says “I’m laying bricks” while the other guy says “I’m building a cathedral.”

from Caterina

But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the image of something entails that everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God?

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Logical behaviorism tries to solve the problem of other minds by showing that behavior is the effect of mind states. By examining behavior closely enough, says the logical behaviorist, it is possible to know mental states of others … In his article “Brains and Behavior” Hilary Putnam attacks the school of thought known as logical behaviorism … Putnam believes that the basic premises of even a weakened form of logical behaviorism can be proven to be false …

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A few nights ago I finally finished reading Just Six Numbers : The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe by Martin J. Rees. I liked it. It was a good read. The author explains pretty much everything you need to know to understand the science of cosmology as it exists today. It was full of fascinating stuff if you’re interested in black holes, dark matter, superstring theory, and the “Big Bang” concept. In the end, though, it seems like most scientists today are going to a helluva lotta trouble to determine the size /age of the universe. Wouldn’t it be easier to just accept infinity? That’s what I kept asking myself while I was reading this book. If space and time are infinite - and I just don’t understand how they couldn’t be! - wouldn’t almost all of the problems these guys have with particle physics disappear? Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for finding answers and truth and meaning in the universe, but it seems like even if you get to a point where you can say, “Ah-ha! Here is the Big Bang and how it worked!” you are still going to have someone ask, “Well, what was there before that?” (I know I will. Does that make me dense?)

We humans are spending billions of dollars - not millions, billions - on research to determine the size and age of the universe.

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10 things Google has found to be true

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
3. Fast is better than slow.
4. Democracy on the web works.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
7. There’s always more information out there.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
10. Great just isn’t good enough.

“The important thing is to never stop questioning.” That quote is often attributed to Einstein. I cannot confirm that he ever actually said this. But I doubt I would hear many arguments if I suggested he was one of the greatest thinkers in history.

Is “questioning” really all that important? I guess it depends on how you interpret “important”. At some point in my life I decided to take that path. “Questioning” … “knowing” … is very important to me.

It’s even more important to me than “happiness”. At caterina.net right now there are some questions about … well … questioning. Caterina says:

I also read a study once of a conjectural connection between intelligence, depression and a “sense of reality”: they tested people who identified themselves as “happy, content” and people who identified themselves as “unhappy, depressed” and gave them a test to assess their knowledge of history and current events. The “happy” people had no idea what went on or what was going on, whereas the “unhappy” people did. Whether they knew these things because they were depressed type people or were depressed because they knew these things is hard to guess.

I know from experience that there is a very definite correlation between how aware I am of current events and how happy I am. I don’t even need to use the example of my extreme “awareness” during the weeks immediately following September 11 to illustrate my point. A much simpler analysis can be made by using the weeks surrounding the whole “Cuban-raft-boy-Elian” episode.

I remember that the events of this boy’s life so overwhelmed the media that I simply stopped listening. I went from being able to tell you which specific bills were before Congress and the names of all of the Cabinet members to barely knowing what the day of the week was. I went from listening to NPR for two or three hours each day and reading the newspaper to listening to nothing but my CD player and reading only mind-numbingly boring tomes on database access.

If you’re waiting for some flash of brilliance here, you’re not going to get it. I apologize, but I’m just thinking out loud now. It’s amazing, sometimes, how reading someone else’s blog will spark a whirlwind of confusion and contemplation in my mind.

In the end I am - and always will be - someone who believes that it is truly better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And in the end I think … well … the love you take … is equal to the love …

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You really should read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by the late, great Douglas Adams. There’s a bit in there about Schrödinger’s cat that started me tumbling down a long road (many, many years ago) of trying to learn everything I could about physics, metaphysics, philosophy, blah blah blah. (Try to find a copy of William Poundstone’s Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge, too. It will blow your mind.) The folks at Mad Science Laboratories have created a Schrödenger’s Cat Web Cam that is hysterical. I love the disclaimer:

DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS EXPERIMENT YOURSELF AT HOME. WE ARE TRAINED SCIENTISTS! YOUR CAT MAY THEORETICALLY DIE!

You simply must visit AOLiza. I was in tears. You can read all about it at the site, but basically here’s the story: A guy took one of the original artificial intelligence programs (ELIZA) and connected it to an AOL instant messenger account. The account sits on line and people attempt to chat with it because they think it’s a real person. Some of the recorded conversations are laugh-out-loud funny.
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How could anybody not love Ned Flanders?

This is a take-home exam from a Philosophy class I took in my 2nd year of college…
October 26, 1992
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The bonus question @ sylloge.com is: “Does anyone know if there are an infinite number of chess games? If not, what the limit is?” The answers are “no” and “I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, but I suspect it’s a great big number”. This is a topic tackled in Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone, an excellent treatise on game theory and the research of John Von Neumann.

… and I think I think too much …

The previous post got me thinking about all the continuing hullabaloo about content. Continuing? Yeah. Continuing as in, the same thing people were debating 300 years ago. I took entire classes in college about content and what it is and where it originates and why it’s good or bad. What I learned was that nobody can really say. I decided a long time ago that everything is content. Some of this content we consider art and some of it (like mine!) we consider pointless crap. But the thing is, even the pointless crap is content to someone.

I don’t even know if I want to get into this conversation here, because it isn’t going to get anywhere. The thing … the thing … I’m always talking about the thing it seems … the thing is … Okay. Look. I don’t know if I can say this in a way that anyone is going to get besides me, but I’ll give it a shot.

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