Philosophy everywhere everywhen

You are entitled to believe what you will, but your beliefs must to be subject to criticism and scrutiny just like mine

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Here is a true story. A young philosophy lecturer — let us call him Shane — is charged with the task of introducing young minds to the wonders of philosophy. His course, a standard Introduction to Philosophy, contains a section on the philosophy of religion: the usual arguments-for-and-against-the-existence-of-God stuff. One of Shane’s students complains to Shane’s Dean that his cherished religious beliefs are being attacked. ‘I have a right to my beliefs,’ the student claims. Shane’s repeated interrogations of those beliefs amounts to an attack on this right to believe. Shane’s institution is not a particularly enlightened one. The Dean concurs with the student, and instructs Shane to desist in teaching philosophy of religion.

But what exactly does it mean to claim ‘a right to my beliefs’? It often comes up in a religious context, but can arise in others too. Shane could just as easily be teaching Marxist theory to a laissez-faire capitalist student, or imparting evidence for global warming to a global warming sceptic. Whatever the context, the claim of a right to one’s beliefs is a curious one. We might distinguish two different interpretations of this claim. First, there is the evidential one. You have an evidential right to your belief if you can provide appropriate evidence in support of it. I have, in this sense, no right to believe that the moon is made of green cheese because my belief is lacking in any supporting evidence.

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There are real benefits to rituals, religious or otherwise

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Think about the last time you were about to interview for a job, speak in front of an audience, or go on a first date. To quell your nerves, chances are you spent time preparing – reading up on the company, reviewing your slides, practicing your charming patter. People facing situations that induce anxiety typically take comfort in engaging in preparatory activities, inducing a feeling of being back in control and reducing uncertainty.

While a little extra preparation seems perfectly reasonable, people also engage in seemingly less logical behaviors in such situations. Here’s one person’s description from our research:

I pound my feet strongly on the ground several times, I take several deep breaths, and I "shake" my body to remove any negative energies.  I do this often before going to work, going into meetings, and at the front door before entering my house after a long day.

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Recent research suggests that rituals may be more rational than they appear. Why? Because even simple rituals can be extremely effective. Rituals performed after experiencing losses – from loved ones to lotteries – do alleviate grief, and rituals performed before high-pressure tasks – like singing in public – do in fact reduce anxiety and increase people’s confidence. What’s more, rituals appear to benefit even people who claim not to believe that rituals work. While anthropologists have documented rituals across cultures, this earlier research has been primarily observational. Recently, a series of investigations by psychologists have revealed intriguing new results demonstrating that rituals can have a causal impact on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Stone Librande talks about parking lots, governing styles, and how Google Earth shaped the Sim's new world.

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In the nearly quarter-century since designer Will Wright launched the iconic urban planning computer game, SimCity, not only has the world's population become majoritatively urban for the first time in human history, but interest in cities and their design has gone mainstream.

Once a byword for boring, city planning is now a hot topic, claimed by technology companies, economists, so-called "Supermayors," and cultural institutions alike as the key to humanity's future. Indeed, if we are to believe the hype, the city has become our species' greatest triumph.

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Yesterday I wrote a post about a perspective by multifaceted chemist George Whitesides in which he urged chemists to broaden the boundaries of their discipline and ...

How can science, philosophy and a work of pure imagination meet to deepen our understanding of the physical world?

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In 1927 a young German physicist published a paper that would turn the scientific world on its head. Until that time, classical physics had assumed that when a particle’s position and velocity were known, its future trajectory could be calculated. Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that this condition was actually impossible: we cannot know with precision both a particle’s location and its velocity, and the more precisely we know the one, the less we can know the other. Five years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for having laid the foundations of quantum physics.

This discovery has all the hallmarks of a modern scientific breakthrough; so it may be surprising to learn that the uncertainty principle was intuited by Heisenberg’s contemporary, the Argentine poet and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges, and predicted by philosophers centuries and even millenniums before him.

While Borges did not comment on the revolution in physics that was occurring during his lifetime, he was obsessively concerned with paradoxes, and in particular those of the Greek philosopher Zeno. As he wrote in one of his essays: “Let us admit what all the idealists admit: the hallucinatory character of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: let us look for unrealities that confirm that character. We will find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno.”

Even some of the more faithful might have wondered over the last few days whether there truly is a God-

Even some of the more faithful might have wondered over the last few days whether there truly is a God.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking would like to help. Let's imagine there isn't, seems to be his preference.

Indeed, in a speech at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., on Tuesday night, he made jokes about God's supposed power and omnipresence.

"What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?" asked Hawking, clearly not afraid of meeting a reddish man with a fork and a tail.

Being a scientist, Hawking has faith only in scientific explanations.

As NBC News reports, he discounted a repeating Big Bang Theory (even though he's appeared on the show).

Instead, he thinks: "We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe."

I certainly feel like the product of quantum fluctuations on many days of the week, don't you?

"I think at some point you need to provoke people. Science is meant to make people uncomfortable.

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It is hard to know how our future descendants will regard the little sliver of history that we live in. It is hard to know what events will seem important to them, what the narrative of now will look like to the twenty-fifth century mind. We tend to think of our time as one uniquely shaped by the advance of technology, but more and more I suspect that this will be remembered as an age of cosmology---as the moment when the human mind first internalized the cosmos that gave rise to it. Over the past century, since the discovery that our universe is expanding, science has quietly begun to sketch the structure of the entire cosmos, extending its explanatory powers across a hundred billion galaxies, to the dawn of space and time itself. It is breathtaking to consider how quickly we have come to understand the basics of everything from star formation to galaxy formation to universe formation. And now, equipped with the predictive power of quantum physics, theoretical physicists are beginning to push even further, into new universes and new physics, into controversies once thought to be squarely within the domain of theology or philosophy. "

From "significant" to "natural," here are seven scientific terms that can prove troublesome for the public and across research disciplines

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Hypothesis. Theory. Law. These scientific words get bandied about regularly, yet the general public usually gets their meaning wrong.

Now, one scientist is arguing that people should do away with these misunderstood words altogether and replace them with the word "model." But those aren't the only science words that cause trouble, and simply replacing the words with others will just lead to new, widely misunderstood terms, several other scientists said.

"A word like 'theory' is a technical scientific term," said Michael Fayer, a chemist at Stanford University. "The fact that many people understand its scientific meaning incorrectly does not mean we should stop using it. It means we need better scientific education."

From "theory" to "significant," here are seven scientific words that are often misused.

Simplistic ideas of how genes 'cause' traits are no longer viable: life is an orderly collection of uncertainties

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DNA is a metaphor for our age. It conveys the powerful idea that our identity is scientifically reducible to an unambiguous, determinative code. We hear this idea expressed all the time. The car company Bentley advertises for employees saying: ‘Hard work is in our DNA.’ The footballer David Beckham says: ‘Football is in England’s DNA.’ And a toll-collector for the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco says: ‘Our DNA is embedded in this bridge.’

Everyone knows these statements aren’t literally true, but although we might understand their figurative meaning, they continue to reflect, and influence, how we think. Even biologists, being quite human, too often think metaphorically and assign properties to genes that genes don’t have. The metaphor works because our society has a deeply embedded belief in genes as clearly identifiable material things which explain our individual natures, making them inherent from the moment of our conception and thus predictable. If hydrogen and oxygen are the causal atoms of water, genes are the causal atoms of our existence.

In this week’s briefs: “Slobbering” over Zizek, Sloterdijk’s digressions, Derrida’s despair, and more.

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Philosophical celebrity, while not necessarily an oxymoron, is nevertheless an ambiguous beast. In a post at Page Views, The New York Daily News’s books blog, Rebecca Rothfeld tries to account for the mass appeal of Slavoj Zizek by comparing him to such figures as the young writer and TV star Lena Dunham, and the rapper Lil B, both of whom thrive, Rothfeld claims, “in spite of their confused relationship to earnestness.” It is difficult to know just how serious one should take a Hegelian philosopher who also “authored the text of a 2003 Abercrombie & Fitch catalog,” but Rothfeld thinks that working in this “liminal space between the serious and the farcical” may be the key to Zizek’s allure. In any event, his example, Rothfeld concludes, provides philosophy “a much-needed breath of self-deprecation.”

Standing just slightly out of Zizek’s spotlight is Peter Sloterdijk. In a post at 3quarksdaily, Jalees Rehman looks into why the German philosopher “is not quite so well-known in the English-speaking world.” Like Zizek, “his fans adore him; his critics are maddened by him;” like Zizek, Sloterdijk is utterly at home working in electronic mass media; and like Zizek, Sloterdijk makes one wonder whether there “isn’t much of a difference between a true comedian and a true philosopher.” But as a “professional digressor,” Sloterdijk is, for Rehman, “the prototypical anti-TEDtalker,” and probably unsuited to an age accustomed to receving “excessive positivity” in slickly-produced 15-minute packages. On the other hand, Rehman thinks “Philosophical Temperaments,” Sloterdijk’s collection of short essays on philosophers which “reveal more about the painter than the subject,” could teach the TED-talkers a thing or two.

A vast range of new technologies are transforming our lives. Could it be that the human mind is also undergoing unprecedented changes? Susan Greenfield presents her provocative work on what she considers to be the crisis of our changing world.

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Susan Greenfield CBE, is a British scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords. Specialising in the physiology of the brain, Greenfield researches the impact of 21st century technologies on the mind, how the brain generates consciousness and novel approaches to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

In the video above, Greenfield presents her provocative work on what she considers to be the crisis of our changing world.

Greenfield has written several non-specialist books on issues relating to the mind and brain for the general reader including, ID: The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century . She appears regularly on radio and television and frequently gives talks to the public andStemming from a love of philosophy, Greenfield’s research into consciousness looks to neuroscience for an answer to one of the greatest questions of all – how do we generate consciousness and an awareness of our own identity?

The philosopher's critique of evolution wasn't shocking. So why have his colleagues raked him over the coals?

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Thomas Nagel is a leading figure in philosophy, now enjoying the title of university professor at New York University, a testament to the scope and influence of his work. His 1974 essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" has been read by legions of undergraduates, with its argument that the inner experience of a brain is truly knowable only to that brain. Since then he has published 11 books, on philosophy of mind, ethics, and epistemology.

But Nagel's academic golden years are less peaceful than he might have wished. His latest book, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 2012), has been greeted by a storm of rebuttals, ripostes, and pure snark. "The shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker," Steven Pinker tweeted. The Weekly Standard quoted the philosopher Daniel Dennett calling Nagel a member of a "retrograde gang" whose work "isn't worth anything—it's cute and it's clever and it's not worth a damn."

The critics have focused much of their ire on what Nagel calls "natural teleology," the hypothesis that the universe has an internal logic that inevitably drives matter from nonliving to living, from simple to complex, from chemistry to consciousness, from instinctual to intellectual.

That is the claim made by the iron ladies to justify their political agendas. Can a scientific theory also be supported by such an argument? Michael Krämer discusses a new philosophical proof

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While most scientists do not care much about the philosophy of science, almost everyone knows of Karl Popper, and some might have heard of Thomas Kuhn. Both Popper and Kuhn have shaped two important phases of philosophy of science in the 20th century. Popper and his contemporaries were aiming at the grand picture, and have been arguing what is, and what is not, "good science". Kuhn, on the other hand, focused on sociological and historical aspects and initiated a new, descriptive style of philosophy that brought it closer to the actual scientific practice. In his talk at the recent meeting of the German Society for Philosophy of Science, Stephan Hartmann, Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, argued that we have now entered a third phase, the phase of "scientific philosophy". Scientific philosophy combines different scientific methods to address philosophical problems, including mathematics, empirical studies and even experiment. Hartmann demonstrated the power of such an approach by analyzing the "no alternatives" argument: can we base trust in a scientific theory on the fact that no alternative has been found? In a recent paper to appear in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Hartmann and his collaborators Dawid and Sprenger provide a mathematical proof of the "no alternatives" argument based on Bayesian statistics.

He is the dramatic, torrential thunderstorm at the heart of philosophy and his provocation is more valuable than ever-

..Kierkegaard was not so much an oasis in this desert as a dramatic, torrential thunderstorm at the heart of it. Discovering him as a 17-year-old suddenly made philosophy and religion human and exciting, not arid and abstract. In part that’s because he was a complex personality with a tumultuous biography. Even his name emanates romantic darkness. ‘Søren’ is the Danish version of the Latin severus, meaning ‘severe’, ‘serious’ or ‘strict’, while ‘Kierkegaard’ means churchyard, with its traditional associations of the graveyard.

He knew intense love, and was engaged to Regine Olsen, whom he describes in his journals as ‘sovereign queen of my heart’. Yet in 1841, after four years of courtship, he called the engagement off, apparently because he did not believe he could give the marriage the commitment it deserved. He took love, God and philosophy so seriously that he did not see how he could allow himself all three.

He was a romantic iconoclast, who lived fast and died young, but on a rollercoaster of words and ideas rather than sex and booze. During the 1840s, books poured from his pen. In 1843 alone, he published three masterpieces, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition.

Failure to replicate intelligence-priming effects ignites row in research community

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Thinking about a professor just before you take an intelligence test makes you perform better than if you think about football hooligans. Or does it? An influential theory that certain behavior can be modified by unconscious cues is under serious attack.

A paper published in PLoS ONE last week reports that nine different experiments failed to replicate this example of ‘intelligence priming’, first described in 1998 by Ap Dijksterhuis, a social psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and now included in textbooks.

David Shanks, a cognitive psychologist at University College London, UK, and first author of the paper in PLoS ONE, is among skeptical scientists calling for Dijksterhuis to design a detailed experimental protocol to be carried out indifferent laboratories to pin down the effect. Dijksterhuis has rejected the request, saying that he “stands by the general effect” and blames the failure to replicate on “poor experiments”.

The point is this: The otherness of an ‘other’ is none other than you. Allow me a moment to explain, for it is no simple matter, to realize that otherness is fundamentally a complex trait-building, pattern making characteristic of our minds.

Our first-person experience and reflection can catch crucial truths about happiness that escape the quantitative net.

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Happiness studies are booming in the social sciences, and governments are moving toward quantitative measures of a nation’s overall happiness, meant to supplement traditional measures of wealth and productivity. The resulting studies have a high noise-to-signal ratio, but we can expect that work with an aura of scientific rigor on something as important as happiness is going to be taken seriously. Still, our first-person experience and reflection can catch crucial truths about happiness that escape the quantitative net.

In offering here my views on the subject, I make no claim to special authority and present my thoughts as an example and an incentive for readers to develop their own perspectives. Such personal perspectives are a necessary check on the often questionable suggestions of happiness science.

As I see it, happiness involves four things, and the first one is mostly a matter of luck. You have be sufficiently free of suffering — physical and mental — for happiness to be even possible. Suffering can be noble and edifying, but it can also reduce us to a state where there’s nothing beyond our distress that can make it meaningful.Of course, we can fit an occasional bout of even extreme suffering into an otherwise happy life (see Peg O’Connor’s recent post on William James and the “misery threshold”), but there’s a level of sustained misery that wipes out happiness.

The classic form of the Doomsday Argument says it’s more likely that we’re closer to the end of our civilization than the beginning. In other words, apocalyptic destruction awaits us in the not-too-distant future.

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But a recent re-interpretation of this argument has slightly improved our prospects for survival.

The Doomsday Argument (DA) has been around for 30 years. It was first proposed by the astrophysicist and philosopher Brandon Carter in an unpublished paper. Though many subsequent papers have tried to defeat it, it has — quite infuriatingly — stood the test of time; if there was ever an argument we’d like to disprove, this would be the one.

Since Carter’s first formulation of the argument, several other philosophers have taken it further. Back in 1996, philosopher John Leslie published his book, The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, in which he presented it in more detail. It’s for this reason that the idea is often called the Carter-Leslie Doomsday Argument. Interestingly, the DA has been independently discovered by others, including J. Richard Gott and Holger Bech Nielsen.

But regardless of the thinker, each one came to the same disturbing conclusion: Doom is soon.

Philosophers are burning their armchairs and heading for the lab as part of a new movement called, appropriately enough, "experimental philosophy." Commentator Tania Lombrozo wonders why this small subfield of philosophy has captured the popular...

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To illustrate, consider one of the most celebrated findings from experimental philosophy: the "side-effect effect" or Knobe effect, named after experimental philosophy icon , who first documented the phenomenon. In his , Knobe (a philosopher) conducted a psychology experiment in which he presented participants with the following vignette:

The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, 'We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.'

The chairman of the board answered, 'I don't care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program.'

They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed.

The key question was this: did the chairman harm the environment intentionally? Eighty-two percent of participants responded 'yes.'

In a different version of the vignette, a different group of participants read the same text, but with "harm" replaced with "help." So the proposed program had the side effect of helping the environment, but the chairman said that he "didn't care at all" about helping the environment and went ahead with the plan for greater profit. Now participants were asked whether the chairman helped the environment intentionally, and only 23 percent responded "yes." (If that went by a little fast, check out this reenactment of the two cases.)