Philosophy

Courtesy BoingBoing,

Courtesy our own Edy Valdes, Wired's Science blog "Frontal Cortex" is reporting on recent research which suggests that how we dress, or not, influences the kind of mind others attribute to us. From the post,

In order to understand why sweaters and tank-tops influence the kind of minds we perceive, it’s important to know about the different qualities we imagine in others. In general, people assess minds – and it doesn’t matter if it’s the “mind” of a pet, iPhone or deity – along two distinct dimensions. First, we grade these minds in terms of agency. (Human beings have lots of agency; goldfish less so.) But we also think of minds in terms of the ability to have experience, to feel and perceive. The psychologists suggest that these dual dimensions are actually a duality, and that there’s a direct tradeoff between the ability to have agency and experience. If we endow someone with lots of feeling, then they probably have less agency. And if someone has lots of agency, then they probably are less sensitive to experience. In other words, we automatically assume that the capacity to think and the capacity to feel are in opposition. It’s a zero sum game.

What does all this have to do with nakedness? The psychologists demonstrated it’s quite easy to shift our perceptions of other people from having a mind full of agency to having a mind interested in experience: all they have to do is take off their clothes.

Edinburgh's Andy Clark has a neat piece in the Times' Stone series suggesting that just how the brain encodes information about the environment may yield cognitive riches. From the article,

Finally, perception and understanding would also be revealed as close cousins. For to perceive the world in this way is to deploy knowledge not just about how the sensory signal should be right now, but about how it will probably change and evolve over time. For it is only by means of such longer-term and larger-scale knowledge that we can robustly match the incoming signal, moment to moment, with apt expectations (predictions). To know that (to know how the present sensory signal is likely to change and evolve over time) just is to understand a lot about how the world is, and the kinds of entity and event that populate it. Creatures deploying this strategy, when they see the grass twitch in just that certain way, are already expecting to see the tasty prey emerge, and already expecting to feel the sensations of their own muscles tensing to pounce. But an animal, or machine, that has that kind of grip on its world is already deep into the business of understanding that world.

I find the unity here intriguing. Perhaps we humans, and a great many other organisms, too, are deploying a fundamental, thrifty, prediction-based strategy that husbands neural resources and (as a direct result) delivers perceiving, understanding and imagining in a single package?

 We trust everyone is well-rested and ready for the new semester! Tiller will be busy with Professional Ethics, Sencerz is offering Eastern Philosophy and two very full sections of Intro, Piker is running that gem of a course, Intro to Logic, along with his Bioethics, and Berkich has got Minds and Machines, Philosophy of Science, and (with Haswell and Hill) Genocide.

Courtesy Boing Boing, enjoy this remarkable update to Dr. Seuss' "Oh the Places You'll Go!"... at Burning Man.

Having earned a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Science last year, philosophy student, ethics bowler, and stalwart of the philosophy club Jacob Spicer returned (with short hair!) this weekend to be the second person in the history of our program to walk the stage and receive his second degree, the Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy.

Congratulations, Jacob! We're so very proud of you!

The Philosophy Program is proud to announce that Kayla Angelosante is the first person in the history of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi to walk the stage and receive the BA in Philosophy. Courtesy her husband Kevin Pengelly, here is the text of the announcement read at commencement this morning:

Kayla and Kevin have been accepted to the highly competitive Peace Corps and in about six months will be sent to either South or Central America to contribute their talents and hard work.

Congratulations, Kayla! We're all very, very proud of you.

In an outstanding (for the Times' Stone series, anyway) essay, Simon Blackburn revisits David Hume and discusses his work in light of recent trends in philosophy. From the essay,

Anyone admiring David Hume as I do finds much to cheer, but much to lament in the state of academic philosophy, as this year, the 300th anniversary of his birth, comes to a close. Hume was an anatomist of the mind, charting the ways we think and feel — a psychologist or cognitive scientist before his time. The cheering feature of the contemporary scene is that plenty of people are following in those footsteps. The nature versus nurture battle has declared an uneasy draw, but the human nature industry is in fine fettle, fed by many disciplines and eagerly consumed by the public.

Yet among philosophers it is not uncommon to find Hume patronized as a slightly dim, inaccurate or naïve analytical philosopher who gamely tried to elucidate the meanings of terms but generally failed hopelessly to do so. In fact, Immanuel Kant, a German near-contemporary of Hume, who is often billed as his opponent, had cause to defend him against a similar complaint more than two centuries ago. “ One cannot without feeling a certain pain,” Kant wrote in 1783, “behold how utterly and completely his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie and finally Priestley missed the point of his problem and constantly misjudged his hints for improvement — constantly taking for granted just what he doubted, and conversely, proving with vehemence and, more often than not, with great insolence exactly what it had never entered his mind to doubt.” Plus ça change.