Recently in Philosophy Category

Would You Take the Morality Pill?

By webmaster on January 31, 2012 6:08 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Are We Ready for a 'Morality Pill?' ~ NYTimes.com

If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a "morality pill" -- a drug that makes us more likely to help? Given the many other studies linking biochemical conditions to mood and behavior, and the proliferation of drugs to modify them that have followed, the idea is not far-fetched. If so, would people choose to take it

Primed By Expectations

By webmaster on January 19, 2012 5:17 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Primed by Expectations: Discover Magazine


It's a fascinating result, but one that isn't a deathblow for priming as a method. Note that Doyen isn't suggesting that Bargh's team were simply making up their results to fit what they expected. Rather, their expectations affected their behaviour, which then affected the volunteers' behaviour. The volunteers were still being primed, albeit by the experimenters rather than the word tasks. "Either possibility is a confirmation for the power of priming," says Tom Stafford from the University of Sheffield....

"Our results don't completely rule out the possibility of unconscious priming," says Doyen, "but they point to the fact that the (generally weak) effects may also be influenced by many other factors that are almost never controlled in such studies."

The study also serves as a good reminder about how important it is for scientists to try and repeat each others' results.

Why Science is Failing Us

By webmaster on January 17, 2012 12:48 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Trails and Errors: Why Science is Failing Us ~ Wired.com by Jonah Lehrer

The reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns. At least two major factors contribute to this trend. First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations. Is that a new cause? Or just a statistical mistake? The line is getting finer; science is getting harder. Second--and this is the biggy--searching for correlations is a terrible way of dealing with the primary subject of much modern research: those complex networks at the center of life. While correlations help us track the relationship between independent measurements, such as the link between smoking and cancer, they are much less effective at making sense of systems in which the variables cannot be isolated. Such situations require that we understand every interaction before we can reliably understand any of them. Given the byzantine nature of biology, this can often be a daunting hurdle, requiring that researchers map not only the complete cholesterol pathway but also the ways in which it is plugged into other pathways. (The neglect of these secondary and even tertiary interactions begins to explain the failure of torcetrapib, which had unintended effects on blood pressure. It also helps explain the success of Lipitor, which seems to have a secondary effect of reducing inflammation.) Unfortunately, we often shrug off this dizzying intricacy, searching instead for the simplest of correlations. It's the cognitive equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight.


Unfriending Friendship

By webmaster on January 17, 2012 9:19 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Unfriending Friendship ~ The Hoover Institution

Turning to Aristotle's rich treatment of friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics, this essay takes a critical look at the fate of friendship in the new era of digital connection and shows how friendship and virtue are connected, pointing the way toward a recovery of friendship.

The Willpower Trick

By webmaster on January 10, 2012 6:33 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Willpower Trick ~ Wired.com by Jonah Lehrer

In other words, willpower is so weak, and the conscious mind is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before it becomes impossible for the brain to resist a piece of cake.

Why Ignorance Is a Democracy's Bliss

By webmaster on January 7, 2012 1:42 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Why Ignorance is a Democracy's Bliss ~ Wall Street Journal by Jonah Lehrer

Why are democracies so vibrant even when composed of uninformed citizens? According to a new study led by the ecologist Iain Couzin at Princeton, this collective ignorance is an essential feature of democratic governments, not a bug. His research suggests that voters with weak political preferences help to prevent clusters of extremists from dominating the political process. Their apathy keeps us safe.

The Folly of Fools

By webmaster on January 7, 2012 5:46 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Folly of Fools ~NYTIMES book review

Our big brains and communication skills make us master dissemblers. Even before we can speak, Trivers notes, we learn to cry insincerely to manipulate our caregivers. As adults, we engage in "confirmation bias," which makes us seize on facts that bolster our preconceptions and overlook contradictory data. We wittingly and unwittingly inflate the qualities of ourselves and others in our religious, political or ethnic group. We denigrate those outside our in-group as well as sexual and economic rivals. Fooling others yields obvious benefits, but why do we so often fool ourselves? Trivers provides a couple of answers. First, believing that we're smarter, sexier and more righteous than we really are -- or than others consider us to be -- can help us seduce and persuade others and even improve our health, via the placebo effect, for example. And the more we believe our own lies, the more sincerely, and hence effectively, we can lie to others. "We hide reality from our conscious minds the better to hide it from onlookers," Trivers explains. But our illusions can have devastating consequences, from the dissolution of a marriage to stock-market collapses and world wars.

Stupidity

By webmaster on December 31, 2011 5:39 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The World's Biggest Problem is Stupidity ~ The Telegraph

The struggle against stupidity is a continuous one within each of us - but we don't have to fight alone. Philosophy's emphasis on logical reasoning, avoiding fallacies, exposing preconceptions and engaging in imaginative thought experiments needs effort and commitment to master; but it is a communal activity based on debate and constructive mutual criticism.

Philosophy Bites: the First 168 Interviews

By webmaster on December 31, 2011 5:25 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Philosophy Bites: Links to the first 168 Interviews

1. Simon Blackburn on Plato's Cave
2. Mary Warnock on Philosophy in Public Life
3. Stephen Law on The Problem of Evil
4. John Cottingham on The Meaning of Life
5. Miranda Fricker on Epistemic Injustice

Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong?

By webmaster on December 24, 2011 5:16 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Steven Pinker: Can Science Tell us Right from Wrong?


Steven Pinker at The Great Debate: Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong? from ASU Origins Project on Vimeo.

The Islamic Scholar

By webmaster on December 1, 2011 11:14 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy ~ Humanities Magazine

In responding to Ghazālī's attack on philosophy, Averroës first insists that there can be no conflict between philosophy and faith: "Truth does not contradict truth." Although this is so in principle, Averroës goes on to make an interesting and subtle concession--he accepts that not everyone is suited to pursue religious questions in the way that philosophy demands. Following Ghazālī, he distinguishes between "the people of demonstration" and "the people of rhetoric"--that is, between the few who are able to pursue philosophical reasoning, and the vast majority, who can only follow simple and superficial teachings. The masses, the people of rhetoric, ought simply to accept at face value the words of the Qur'an and the Prophet--such material was, indeed, meant for them. But this does not mean that everyone should follow such crude methods

The King of Human Error

By webmaster on November 10, 2011 11:55 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The King of Human Error ~ Vanity Fair

Which alternative is more probable?

  1. Linda is a bank teller.
  2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The vast majority--roughly 85 percent--of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.) The human mind is so wedded to stereotypes and so distracted by vivid descriptions that it will seize upon them, even when they defy logic, rather than upon truly relevant facts. Kahneman and Tversky called this logical error the "conjunction fallacy."

The Brain's Cacophony of Competing Voices

By webmaster on November 3, 2011 7:20 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Telling the Story of the Brain's Cacophony of Competing Voices - NYTimes.com

Knowing the breed well, he also understood its power. The interpreter creates the illusion of a meaningful script, as well as a coherent self. Working on the fly, it furiously reconstructs not only what happened but why, inserting motives here, intentions there -- based on limited, sometimes flawed information.

One implication of this is a familiar staple of psychotherapy and literature: We are not who we think we are. We narrate our lives, shading every last detail, and even changing the script retrospectively, depending on the event, most of the time subconsciously. The storyteller never stops, except perhaps during deep sleep.

But another implication has to do with responsibility. If our sense of control is built on an unreliable account from automatic brain processes, how much control do we really have? Are there thresholds of responsibility, for instance, that can be determined by studying neural circuits? Dr. Gazzaniga and his wife, Charlotte, raised six children, so like any parents they had to determine levels of responsibility on the fly, just to get someone to set the table.

What Makes Freewill Free?

By webmaster on October 20, 2011 7:45 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
What makes freewill free? ~ New York Times

..."What makes a choice free?" is not a question about facts but about meanings.  The fact that I raised my arm can be established by scientific observation--even by the impersonal mechanism of a camera.  But whether I meant to wave in greeting or to threaten an attack is a matter of interpretation that goes beyond what we can scientifically observe.  Similarly, scientific observations can show that a brain event caused a choice.  But whether the choice was free requires knowing the meaning of freedom.  If we know that a free choice must be unpredictable, or uncaused, or caused but not compelled, then an experiment can tell us whether a given choice is free.  But an experiment cannot of itself tell us that a choice is free, anymore than a photograph by itself can record a threat.
Continue reading What Makes Freewill Free?.

Varieties of Irreligious Experience

By webmaster on October 2, 2011 5:36 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Varieties of irreligious experience ~ New Humanist


The idea of atheism has never been as clear as you might expect. Etymologically, it ought to refer to the idea that there is no such thing as God, or an attitude of indifference or defiance even if there is. In practice, however, it has usually been used by religious sectarians to hit out at anyone suspected of doctrinal deviancy, or - in one version of a message received by Moses - those who "go a-whoring after strange gods". Socrates, for example, was denounced as atheos by his fellow Athenians, though they knew he was a believer in his way, and when he tried to defend himself he felt, according to Plato, as if he was "fighting with shadows." When St Paul talked about "atheists" ("strangers ... without God in the world") he did not mean unbelievers, but traditionalists who had not heeded the gospel of Christ; and Christians got a dose of their own semantic medicine when they found themselves arraigned as "atheists" under the provisions of Roman law.

Taking Aim at Freewill

By webmaster on October 2, 2011 5:29 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will ~ Nature News

You may have thought you decided whether to have tea or coffee this morning, for example, but the decision may have been made long before you were aware of it. For Haynes, this is unsettling. "I'll be very honest, I find it very difficult to deal with this," he says. "How can I call a will 'mine' if I don't even know when it occurred and what it has decided to do?"

God didn't make man; man made gods

By Jeff on September 18, 2011 5:11 PM
Science and religion: God didn't make man; man made gods
By J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer - LA Times

In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's "DNA." They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including "imaging" studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to "no heaven ... no hell ... and no religion too."

Willpower

By webmaster on September 9, 2011 11:27 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Willpower - Book Review ~ New York Times

Together with intelligence, self-control turns out to be the best predictor of a successful and satisfying life. But Baumeister and Tierney aren't endorsing a return to a preachy puritanism in which people are enjoined to resist temptation by sheer force of will and condemned as morally irresolute when they fail. The "will" in willpower is not some mysterious "free will," a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself. Willpower consists of circuitry in the brain that runs on glucose, has a limited capacity and operates by rules that scientists can reverse-engineer -- and, crucially, that can find work-arounds for its own shortcomings.

Selective Attention Test

By webmaster on August 30, 2011 11:16 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

TV Tricks of the Trade

By webmaster on August 29, 2011 12:45 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Why Study Philosophy?

By webmaster on August 25, 2011 6:22 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Multitasking at MIT

By webmaster on August 22, 2011 12:57 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Decision Fatigue

By webmaster on August 22, 2011 12:54 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - NYTimes.com

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

  1. Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.
  2. Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.
  3. Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Rapid Progress Toward Peace

By webmaster on August 18, 2011 5:44 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Think Again: War ~| Foreign Policy

[T]he last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace

Sure of Your Self?

By webmaster on August 17, 2011 8:44 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Sure of your self? ~The Philosophers' Magazine

Hume's account of the self is to be found mainly in one short and provocative section of his Treatise of Human Nature - a landmark work in the history of philosophy, published when Hume was still a young man. What Hume says here (in "Of Personal Identity") has provoked a philosophical debate which continues to this day. What, then, is so novel and striking about Hume's account that would explain its fascination for generations of philosophers?

One of the problems of personal identity has to do with what it is for you to remain the same person over time. In recalling your childhood experiences, or looking forward to your next holiday, it appears that in each case you are thinking about one and the same person - namely, you. But what makes this true?

Spoiler Alert

By webmaster on August 13, 2011 5:25 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Spoiler Alert: Stories Not Ruined If Surprise Ending Revealed ~ ABCNews.com

"I was surprised by the finding," Christenfeld said. "I've spent my life not looking at the end of a book." He and Leavitt had 300 volunteers read 12 short stories, including mysteries or tales with surprise endings by the likes of Agatha Christie, John Updike and Anton Chekov, and rated them on a scale of 1 to 10. Almost without fail, and by sizeable margins, the readers rated them more highly if the researchers inserted copy near the beginning, giving away how the tales would come out.

Does Philosophy Matter?

By webmaster on August 9, 2011 7:56 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Does Philosophy Matter? ~ NYTimes.com

Let's suppose that... a former moral absolutist is now a relativist of some kind, or a former relativist is now a confirmed believer in moral absolutes. What exactly will have changed when one set of philosophical views has been swapped for another? Almost nothing. To be sure you will now give different answers than you once would have when you are asked about moral facts, objective truths, irrefutable evidence and so on; but when you are engaged in trying to decide what is the right thing to do in a particular situation, none of the answers you might give to these deep questions will have any bearing on your decision. You won't say, "Because I believe in moral absolutes, I'll take this new job or divorce my husband or vote for the Democrat." Nor will you say, "Because I deny moral absolutes I have no basis for deciding since any decision I make is as good or bad as any other." What you will say, if only to yourself, is "Given what is at stake, and the likely outcomes of taking this or that action, I think I'll do this." Neither "I believe in moral absolutes" nor "I don't" will be a reason in the course of ordinary, non-philosophical, deliberation.

Justify Every 'A'

By webmaster on August 7, 2011 1:16 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Grading Power to Outsiders ~ The Chronicle of Higher Education

The best way to eliminate grade inflation is to take professors out of the grading process: Replace them with professional evaluators who never meet the students, and who don't worry that students will punish harsh grades with poor reviews. That's the argument made by leaders of Western Governors University, which has hired 300 adjunct professors who do nothing but grade student work.

"They think like assessors, not professors," says Diane Johnson, who is in charge of the university's cadre of graders. "The evaluators have no contact with the students at all. They don't know them. They don't know what color they are, what they look like, or where they live. Because of that, there is no temptation to skew results in any way other than to judge the students' work."

The Invisible Gorilla

By webmaster on August 4, 2011 4:25 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

Test yourself -- What do you believe about memory?

On each page of this survey, you will read a statement and decide whether you strongly agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or strongly disagree (or don't know). After you answer, you'll see how 1500 American adults answered. And, you'll see how their answers compare to those of 16 expert memory researchers.

You will not need to provide your name or any other information about yourself, and your responses will not be analyzed. This survey is just for your own interest. At the end of the survey, we provide links where you can learn more.

Is Using 'Study Drugs' Cheating?

By webmaster on August 3, 2011 7:35 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Is using 'study drugs' cheating? - Northern Star Online

If freshman Brian Miller hadn't popped a prescription Focalin pill before his calculus quiz, he would have failed it, he said. Focalin is a prescription medication for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder that Miller uses to help increase his alertness, concentration, information retention and to help him think "better and more fluidly." Like many college students, Miller sometimes takes medications like Adderall, Focalin and Ritalin, not prescribed to him, to boost his academic performance. Sleeplessness is a side effect of the stimulants and helps students avoid fatigue when staying up all night to finish projects or cram for tests.

Outsourcing Medical Decisions

By webmaster on July 31, 2011 5:37 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Why We Shouldn't Decide Ourselves When We Need Medical Attention ~ Psychology Today

The point, then, is simply this: we're cognitively predisposed, most of us, to believe we're okay. The moment even minor symptoms flare, most of us begin explaining them away, not because they're necessarily unimportant, but because we don't want them to be. This cognitive distortion is actually quite useful in that it protects us from suffering overwhelming anxiety in response to the daily inexplicable aches and pains many of us experience. But when it obscures our judgment and prevents us from acting quickly to preserve our health, it's quite clearly a liability. It very well may not be possible to entirely free ourselves from this bias, and certainly in most situations we probably don't want to. But whenever we find ourselves automatically dismissing an unusual symptom, we should stop and ask ourselves: are we sure it's really nothing?

‪Optical Illusion

By webmaster on July 28, 2011 12:03 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Hume's Impact on Causation

By webmaster on July 26, 2011 8:26 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
David Hume's impact on causation ~The Philosophers' Magazine

So why has Hume's view on causation proved to be so influential? Well, let's start with the state of play in philosophy at the time Hume was writing. The dominant view of causation at the time was a part of what Edward Craig (in The Mind of God and the Works of Man calls the "Image of God doctrine". The idea here is, as the name suggests, that we are made in God's image: our mental faculties are of course rather feeble compared to God's, but they are of the same kind as God's. If you were in the grip of the Image of God doctrine, you might think something like this. Our mental faculties are at their most perfect - their most God-like - when we're engaged in a priori reasoning, for example when we're constructing a mathematical proof. And in a mathematical proof, we can (if we're really good at maths) just "see" or "intuit" that each successive stage of the proof follows from, or is entailed by, the preceding stage. So, if our mental faculties generally are God-like, then the same kind of thing must be going on when we turn our attention to the causal structure of the world. At least in principle, if I look at some event - the cue ball hitting the black ball in snooker, say - I can tell, just by observing that event, what must happen next: I can infer, on the basis of just that experience, what the collision will cause, just as I can in principle tell just by looking at a mathematical theorem what follows from it.

Hume's fundamental insight when it comes to causation is that that story cannot possibly be right. No matter how hard I look, and no matter how much I know about the size and shape and weight of the balls and their position on the table, nothing whatsoever follows about what the collision is going to cause. Of course, what I expect to happen is that the black ball will move off in a certain direction and (let's suppose) land in the corner pocket. But that is not something I can deduce just from careful observation of the collision. As Hume puts it: "If we reason a priori, any thing may appear able to produce anything".

The Biology of Ethics

By webmaster on July 2, 2011 7:21 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Biology of Ethics - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Montane voles and prairie voles are so similar "that naifs like me can't tell them apart," she told a standing-room-only audience (younger and hipper than the museum's usual patrons--the word "neuroscience" these days is like catnip). But prairie voles mate for life, and montane voles do not. Among prairie voles, the males not only share parenting duties, they will even lick and nurture pups that aren't their own. By contrast, male montane voles do not actively parent even their own offspring. What accounts for the difference? Researchers have found that the prairie voles, the sociable ones, have greater numbers of oxytocin receptors in certain regions of the brain. (And prairie voles that have had their oxytocin receptors blocked will not pair-bond.)

"As a philosopher, I was stunned," Churchland said, archly. "I thought that monogamous pair-bonding was something one determined for oneself, with a high level of consideration and maybe some Kantian reasoning thrown in. It turns out it is mediated by biology in a very real way."

Why Seeing (The Unexpected) Is Often Not Believing

By webmaster on June 20, 2011 2:47 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Why Seeing (The Unexpected) Is Often Not Believing ~ NPR


For close to two years Chabris, who teaches at Union College, had been conducting this same experiment. He did the experiment at night, in the afternoon, with women, with men. All were told to run after the jogger and watch him. The goal of all this was to answer a question: Is it possible to see something really, really obvious and not perceive it?

People Argue Just to Win

By webmaster on June 14, 2011 10:33 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
People Argue Just to Win, Scholars Assert - NYTimes.com

"Reasoning doesn't have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions," said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. "It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us." Truth and accuracy were beside the point.

Your Child Will Become a Criminal

By webmaster on June 13, 2011 8:47 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Can This Man Predict Whether Your Child Will Become a Criminal? - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Society has always wondered about "bad seeds," people who seem to be possessed by devils. But what is emerging from this research is a cluster of biological markers that plant the bad seed in the brain. More striking, they appear to predict antisocial behavior even before it happens. Early warnings could avoid a world of hurt, because some of these people are terribly dangerous...

"So if I could tell you, as a parent, that your child has a 75-percent chance of becoming a criminal, wouldn't you want to know and maybe have the chance to do something about it?" asks Raine.

In Search of the True Self

By webmaster on June 10, 2011 5:06 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
In Search of the True Self - NYTimes.com

Consider again the case of Mark Pierpont. One person might look at his predicament and say: "Deep down, he has always wanted to be with another man, but he somehow picked up from society the idea that this desire was immoral or forbidden. If he could only escape the shackles of his religious beliefs, he would be able to fully express the person he really is."

But then another person could look at exactly the same case and arrive at the very opposite conclusion: "Fundamentally, Pierpont is a Christian who is struggling to pursue a Christian life, but these desires he has make it difficult for him to live by his own values. If he ever gives in to them and chooses to sleep with another man, he will be betraying what was is most essential to the person he really is."

Each of these perspectives seems like a reasonable one, at least worthy of serious consideration. So it seems that we are faced with a difficult philosophical question. How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person's true self?

The Limits Of Human Knowledge

By webmaster on June 8, 2011 9:21 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Experimental Physics and The Limits Of Human Knowledge ~ | The European Magazine

The European: How do you make sense of that paradox? You want to expand the realm of knowledge but at some point, there is a definite boundary that you cannot cross. Do you simply have to accept the fact that nothing was prior to the Big Bang?

Heuer: I wasn't saying there was nothing, I am saying that we don't know anything about what was before - if there was a before. But here we are crossing the boundary between knowledge and belief. I think many famous scientists have struggled with this question and people today also struggle with it.

Commit Yourself

By webmaster on June 2, 2011 11:26 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Commit Yourself - Reason Magazine

If you want a sharper incentive, you can even pick an individual enemy or an organization that stickK.com calls "an anti-charity." Democrats, for instance, might find it especially motivating to know that if they fail to live up to a binding personal commitment on stickK.com, some of their hard-earned money will go to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Anti-charities apparently are highly motivating; stickK.com says they have an 80 percent reported success rate. "All stickK is doing," Karlan told me, "is raising the price of bad behavior--or lowering the cost of good behavior."

What's especially appealing about ventures like stickK.com is not just that they give us the tools to constrain ourselves but that they are voluntary. We are fortunate to live in a time when the biggest problem that many of us face is coping with our own appetites in the face of freedom and affluence. Inevitably our failures--bankruptcy, obesity--bring calls for government to protect us from ourselves. But there are ways we can protect ourselves from ourselves without trampling the rights of others.

Disbelieving Free Will Makes Brain Less Free

By webmaster on May 28, 2011 5:38 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Disbelieving Free Will Makes Brain Less Free ~ Wired.com


The test subjects were then asked to press a mouse button when a cursor flashed on a computer screen for several seconds. Those who read the passage dismissing free will displayed significantly lower readiness potentials. Their actions seemed to involved less voluntary control than the control group's.

Tested on when they decided to press the button, the non-free-will group reported doing so a fraction of a second before their counterparts. To lose confidence in free will seemingly introduced a lag between conscious choice and action.

Early Modern Philosophy Texts

By webmaster on May 6, 2011 11:24 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Early Modern Philosophy Texts ~ Jonathan Bennett

When students are introduced to the great philosophical works of the early modern period, it is usually in the hope that they will engage with the thoughts and arguments that the texts present. The teaching experience of many of us suggests that most students simply cannot understand these texts. The increasing rate of change in the English language ensures that fewer and fewer of today's readers can cope with the writings of the 16th-18th centuries. There are difficulties of syntax, length and complexity of sentences, words that are no longer current, still-familiar words used in meanings that they now do not have, arcane references to other philosophers which today's students will seldom understand or be required to follow up; these and other factors create forbidding obstacles to engaging with these early modern texts. I reduce the obstacles so that students can more easily come to grips with the philosophical thoughts the texts express. Once they do that, they still won't have an easy time, because the material itself is hard; but their efforts will go into getting philosophical understanding, not decoding old prose.

My versions are faithful to the content of the originals, but are plainer and more straightforward in manner. I could have made them even plainer, but that would have taken them further than I wanted to go from the stylistic feel of the originals. I love the original texts, and am glad to have spent years wrestling with them in their pristine form. I do wish, though, that through the years I could also have read them sometimes with all my energy going into the philosophy.


Considering Future Generations

By webmaster on May 5, 2011 7:55 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
What will happen to us? - The Boston Globe

"It turns out that the reduction of existential risk turns out to be one of the most important things we can do," he says. "It turns out, if you act and consider all good -- including that of future generations -- you could outweigh the good you can do today by eliminating world hunger, say, or curing malaria." Saving a billion from famine today is, by this calculation, a minor concern compared with making sure no extinction-level event snuffs out the opportunity for a trillion more to live in the centuries to come.

Why do Americans Still Dislike Atheists?

By webmaster on May 1, 2011 3:20 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Why do Americans still dislike atheists? - The Washington Post

Long after blacks and Jews have made great strides, and even as homosexuals gain respect, acceptance and new rights, there is still a group that lots of Americans just don't like much: atheists. Those who don't believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry. They can't join the Boy Scouts. Atheist soldiers are rated potentially deficient when they do not score as sufficiently "spiritual" in military psychological evaluations. Surveys find that most Americans refuse or are reluctant to marry or vote for nontheists; in other words, nonbelievers are one minority still commonly denied in practical terms the right to assume office despite the constitutional ban on religious tests.

In Defense of Flogging

By webmaster on April 27, 2011 7:13 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
In Defense of Flogging - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

No punishment is as easy or seemingly satisfying as a physical beating. I learned this not because I beat people, but because the good citizens I swore to serve and protect often urged me to do so. It wasn't hard for me to resist (I liked my job, and besides, I wasn't raised that way), but I agreed that many of the disrespectful hoodlums deserved a beating. Why? Because, as the old-school thinking goes, when people do wrong, they deserve to be punished...

For most of the past two centuries, at least in so-called civilized societies, the ideal of punishment has been replaced by the hope of rehabilitation. The American penitentiary system was invented to replace punishment with "cure." Prisons were built around the noble ideas of rehabilitation. In society, at least in liberal society, we're supposed to be above punishment, as if punishment were somehow beneath us. The fact that prisons proved both inhumane and miserably ineffective did little to deter the utopian enthusiasm of those reformers who wished to abolish punishment.

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

By webmaster on April 25, 2011 11:26 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science ~ Mother Jones

Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds--fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself...

In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers. Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end--winning our "case"--and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

The Bible Is Dead; Long Live the Bible

By webmaster on April 21, 2011 10:19 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Bible Is Dead; Long Live the Bible - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial. They agree on the terms of the debate, and what's at stake, namely the Bible's credibility as God's infallible book. They agree that Christianity stands or falls, triumphs or fails, depending on whether the Bible is found to be inconsistent, to contradict itself. The question for both sides is whether it fails to answer questions, from the most trivial to the ultimate, consistently and reliably.

But you can't fail at something you're not trying to do. To ask whether the Bible fails to give consistent answers or be of one voice with itself presumes that it was built to do so. That's a false presumption, rooted no doubt in thinking of it as the book that God wrote. On the contrary, biblical literature is constantly interpreting, interrogating, and disagreeing with itself. Virtually nothing is asserted someplace that is not called into question or undermined elsewhere. Ultimately it resists conclusion and explodes any desire we might have for univocality...

To many, especially nonreligious people, faith is seen as absolute certainty despite or without regard to observed facts or evidence. Yet, as anyone trying to live faithfully in this world knows full well, there is no faith without doubt. Doubt is faith's other side, its dark night. Indeed, in an atheist­ing match, I'd put big odds on the faithful any day. People of faith know the reasons to doubt their faith more deeply and more personally than any outside critic ever can. Faith is inherently vulnerable. To live by faith is to live with that vulnerability, that soft belly, exposed.

Why Living Longer Destroys Faith

By webmaster on April 14, 2011 4:08 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Why living longer destroys your faith - The Week

Ever wonder why church attendance appears to be down just about everywhere? British researchers have found a surprising culprit: life expectancy. Economists at the University of East Anglia in England say -- in a study published in the International Journal of Social Economics -- that as people in developed countries live longer, they put off worrying about deep spiritual questions when they're young, and put off going to church.

Determinism and Legal Responsibility

By webmaster on April 8, 2011 11:55 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The human brain: turning our minds to the law - Telegraph

The first lesson we learn from studying our own circuitry is shocking: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you - the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning - is the smallest bit of what's transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.

Natural History of the Soul

By webmaster on April 4, 2011 12:16 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Natural history of the soul ~ New Humanist

Consciousness infuses us with the belief that we are more than mere flesh, that we matter, that we might have a life after death, that we have a "soul". All of these are illusions - the magic of his title - but they have real effects, by making us want to live. As for religion? In his book he argues, "Long before religion could begin to get a foothold in human culture human beings must already have been living in soul land." "Yes," he tells me, "I suggest that organised religion is parasitic on spirituality, and in fact acts as a restraint on it."

Can the Brain Explain Your Mind?

By webmaster on March 24, 2011 12:33 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Can the Brain Explain Your Mind? by Colin McGinn ~ The New York Review of Books

Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions--walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on--are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of the brain responsible for thinking?

Defending Moral Relativism

By webmaster on March 24, 2011 12:31 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Morality is a Culturally Conditioned Response ~ Philosophy Now

One might summarize these points by saying that relativism does not undermine the capacity to criticize others or to improve one's own values. Relativism does tell us, however, that we are mistaken when we think we are in possession of the one true morality. We can try to pursue moral values that lead to more fulfilling lives, but we must bear in mind that fulfillment is itself relative, so no single set of values can be designated universally fulfilling. The discovery that relativism is true can help each of us individually by revealing that our values are mutable and parochial. We should not assume that others share our views, and we should recognize that our views would differ had we lived in different circumstances. These discoveries may make us more tolerant and more flexible. Relativism does not entail tolerance or any other moral value, but, once we see that there is no single true morality, we lose one incentive for trying to impose our values on others.

The Social Animal

By webmaster on March 24, 2011 11:09 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Social Animal - By David Brooks - NYTimes.com

We may think that what we believe and do is largely under our conscious control, and we may believe that we should try to increase this control by the conscious exercise of reasoning and will power, but Brooks says that this is all wrong. Nondeliberate emotion, perception and intuition are much more important in shaping our lives than reason and will.

Colin McGinn on the Ontological Argument

By webmaster on March 22, 2011 1:02 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The Ontological Argument

By webmaster on March 22, 2011 1:01 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

How Predictable Are You?

By webmaster on March 6, 2011 5:22 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer - NYTimes.com

Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.

Metaphors Shape our Thoughts

By webmaster on February 26, 2011 4:34 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Is crime a virus or a beast? How metaphors shape our thoughts and decisions |~Discover Magazine

In a series of five experiments, Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky from Stanford University have shown how influential metaphors can be. They can change the way we try to solve big problems like crime. They can shift the sources that we turn to for information. They can polarise our opinions to a far greater extent than, say, our political leanings. And most of all, they do it under our noses. Writers know how powerful metaphors can be, but it seems that most of us fail to realise their influence in our everyday lives.

The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect

By webmaster on February 14, 2011 5:11 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The Myth of Joyful Parenthood

By webmaster on February 6, 2011 11:24 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Myth of Joyful Parenthood - Association for Psychological Science

All this makes sense from a historical perspective, the scientists point out: In an earlier time, kids actually had economic value; they worked on farms or brought home paychecks, and they didn't cost that much. Not coincidentally, emotional relationships between parents and children were less affectionate back then--and childhood was much less sentimentalized. Paradoxically, as the value of children has diminished, and the costs have escalated, the belief that parenthood is emotionally rewarding has gained currency. In that sense, the myth of parental joy is a modern psychological phenomenon.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

By webmaster on February 1, 2011 1:23 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

How Meditation May Change the Brain

By Jeff on January 30, 2011 11:53 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

How Meditation May Change the Brain
By Sindya N. Bhanoo   - NYTimes.com

Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.

He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, until the end of March. He's running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.

I'll admit I'm a skeptic.

Alien Hand Syndrome

By webmaster on January 22, 2011 3:03 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Alien Hand Syndrome~ BBC News

The discovery of hemispherical dominance has its roots in the 1940s, when surgeons first decided to treat epilepsy by cutting the corpus callosum. After they had recovered, the patients appeared normal. But in psychology circles they became legends.

That is because these patients would, in time, reveal something that to me is truly astonishing - the two halves of our brains each contain a kind of separate consciousness. Each hemisphere is capable of its own independent will...

In a particularly striking experiment, which he filmed, we can watch one of the split brain patients trying to solve a puzzle. The puzzle required rearranging blocks so they matched the pattern on a picture.

First the man tried solving it with his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere), and that hand was pretty good at it.

Then Sperry asked the patient to use his right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere). And this hand clearly did not have a clue what to do. So the left hand tried to help, but the right hand did not want help, so they ended up fighting like two young children.

Experiments like this led Sperry to conclude that "each hemisphere is a conscious system in

Link here to watch the fascinating video.

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

By webmaster on January 11, 2011 10:57 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior - WSJ.com

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America.

Is it Honest to be Polite?

By webmaster on December 31, 2010 8:57 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Manners Make the Mannequin ~ Big Questions

Is it honest to look for the positives in an otherwise distasteful situation? Is it honest to search for some element of shared interest, and focus on that, to get someone to warm up to you? Is it honest to yourself and others to admit mistakes, knowing that it might give you the upper hand in the rest of the negotiations?

Should you honestly tell your roommate she looks fat in her summer white pants, or that he should dump his clingy girlfriend? When you put on a big smile for your sixth interview of the day in a seemingly hopeless job search, are you being honest? And where is the line between direct communication and hurtful, unnecessary insults?

These are questions our great-grandparents would have dismissed out of hand. In their world, there was virtue in being polite, and if you didn't have something nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all. During the inner-directed 1960s, however -- the era of the Human Potential Movement and self-actualization -- sincerity and expressions of visceral emotions became our new definition of honesty. And these ideas stuck.

The New Science of Morality

By webmaster on December 31, 2010 8:54 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The New Science of Morality ~ Edge.org by Sam Harris

The truth is, science is not value-free. Good science is the product of our valuing evidence, logical consistency, parsimony, and other intellectual virtues. And if you don't value those things, you can't participate in the scientific conversation. I'm saying we need not worry about the people who don't value human flourishing, or who say they don't. We need not listen to people who come to the table saying, "You know, we want to the cut heads off adulterers at half-time at our soccer games because we have a book dictated by the Creator of the universe which says we should." In response, we are free to say, "Well, you appear to be confused about everything. Your "physics" isn't physics, and your "morality" isn't morality." These are equivalent moves, intellectually speaking. They are borne of the same entanglement with real facts about the way the universe is. In terms of morality, our conversation can proceed with reference to facts about the changing experiences of conscious creatures. It seems to me to be just as legitimate, scientifically, to define "morality" in this way as it is to define "physics" in terms of the behavior of matter and energy. But most people engaged in of the scientific study of morality don't seem to realize this.

Trolleyology

By webmaster on December 31, 2010 8:25 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Matters of life and death ~ Prospect Magazine

Trolleyology encapsulates the deepest tensions in our moral outlook. To tease out our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more ingenious scenarios. The trolley is usually racing towards five unfortunates and the reader is presented with various means to rescue them at the cost of another life, involving props such as obese gentlemen, footbridges, trapdoors and lazy Susans. Some of the examples are so complex that, in the words of one exasperated philosopher, this branch of ethics "makes the Talmud look like Cliffs Notes [a US brand of study guides]." But at its root the trolley problem is a philosophical detective story, attracting some of the smartest minds in moral philosophy.

Does Humanitarian Aid Fuel Conflict?

By webmaster on December 31, 2010 8:20 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Humanitarian aid and catering conflicts ~ The New Yorker

Polman puts it more provocatively. Sowing horror to reap aid, and reaping aid to sow horror, she argues, is "the logic of the humanitarian era." Consider how Christian aid groups that set up "redemption" programs to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan drove up the market incentives for slavers to take more captives. Consider how, in Ethiopia and Somalia during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, politically instigated, localized famines attracted the food aid that allowed governments to feed their own armies while they further destroyed and displaced targeted population groups. Consider how, in the early eighties, aid fortified fugitive Khmer Rouge killers in camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, enabling them to visit another ten years of war, terror, and misery upon Cambodians; and how, in the mid-nineties, fugitive Rwandan génocidaires were succored in the same way by international humanitarians in border camps in eastern Congo, so that they have been able to continue their campaigns of extermination and rape to this day.

An Amoral Manifesto

By webmaster on December 31, 2010 5:57 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
An Amoral Manifesto (Part I) ~ Philosophy Now

However, if I were only trying to persuade a Kantian vivisectionist of the error of her ways, its usage, it seems to me, would pass muster even morally. I would be using reasoning to show my interlocutor that what she was doing violated her own moral/theoretical commitments. My own view of morality itself would be irrelevant; my interlocutor can assume what she likes about my meta-ethics. It would be exactly as if I were talking with a religious believer about the proper treatment of other animals: whether or not the believer knew I was an atheist, it would be perfectly proper for me to try to convince her that there is Biblical support for a benign 'stewardship' of other animals - would it not? I need not believe in the concept of stewardship myself, nor in its divine sanction, in order to invoke it undeceivingly when arguing with someone who does. Just so, it seems to me, morality.

Benjamin Franklin on American Happiness

By webmaster on December 31, 2010 5:50 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Benjamin Franklin on American Happiness ~City Journal

According to the philosophers of the pursuit of happiness, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, this situation is no American accident; it's the human condition properly understood. Nature condemns us to shop until we drop. According to Hobbes, there is no "repose of a mind satisfied" and "felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter." Human beings are inclined to a perpetual, restless desire for power after power that ends only with death. Locke is no cheerier. He tells us that human desire always looks beyond present enjoyments to an absent good, and the minute we find ourselves contented by something, a new "uneasiness" disturbs us and "we are set afresh on work in the pursuit of happiness." By this argument, the pursuit of happiness means that happiness as such is the Holy Grail.

The Decline Effect

By webmaster on December 30, 2010 3:46 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method~ The New Yorker

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it's known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

Cleanliness and Morality

By webmaster on December 28, 2010 5:31 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
A Sense of Cleanliness ~ Edge.org

The question it all boils down to is whether feeling clean or dirty, or warm or cold at the moment, do these influences play an appropriate role or is it an influence that should be ruled out? Is it something that we should ignore is it something we actually should pay attention to? To what extent do we want to control for these feelings and get rid of them? Or rather, regulate them and say, "These must not play a role".

To be honest, the whole idea that feelings play such a powerful role for morality is still quite new, and we are really doing the basic studies. We are doing the basic science of just looking at the really specific effects in the laboratory and we then have to take these effects out of the laboratory and apply them.

At the end of the day, I suppose one goal could be to let people know that these are the effects that exist, and feelings play a role. So if you pay attention to where your decisions are coming from or what might be influencing them, you might be able to control some of these effects.

Religious People Out-Reproduce Secular Ones

By webmaster on December 25, 2010 5:56 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Religious people out-reproduce secular ones by a landslide ~ Scientific American

In fact, Blume's research also shows quite vividly that secular, nonreligious people are being dramatically out-reproduced by religious people of any faith. Across a broad swath of demographic data relating to religiosity, the godly are gaining traction in offspring produced. For example, there's a global-level positive correlation between frequency of parental worship attendance and number of offspring. Those who "never" attend religious services bear, on a worldwide average, 1.67 children per lifetime; "once per month," and the average goes up to 2.01 children; "more than once a week," 2.5 children...

The whole situation doesn't bode well for the "New Atheism" movement, in any event. Evolutionary biology works by a law of numbers, not moralistic sentiments. Blume, who doesn't try to hide his own religious beliefs, sees the cruel irony in this as well:

Some naturalists are trying to get rid of our evolved abilities of religiosity by quoting biology. But from an evolutionary as well as philosophic perspective, it may seem rather odd to try to defeat nature with naturalistic arguments.

Should the Professor Give a Kidney?

By webmaster on December 25, 2010 5:41 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Philosophy class gets a real-world question ~ The Washington Post

In late August, students in Philosophy 380 at St. Mary's College of Maryland received an unusual assignment centered on this question: Should the professor donate a kidney to a stranger? Organ donation, a subject ancient philosophers hardly could have imagined, often comes up nowadays in college courses because of the ethical implications of the many stunning breakthroughs of modern medicine.

Freewill For Me

By webmaster on December 18, 2010 6:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
We really do believe we've got more free will than the other guy. | Neurotic Physiology

It doesn't matter whether we HAVE free will or not, our daily lives seem to make us FEEL that we have it. We make many decisions, consider many options every day, some big, some small, but in most of them, we feel like we have a choice, and that we are making that choice of our own free will.

But what's funny is that we don't seem to feel that way about OTHER PEOPLE. While we often feel we have free will in our choices, we don't really feel like our friends do. "Of course she got into Harvard, she's from a really smart family", "Of course he'll do X, it's the way he was brought up". It's been shown time and time again that while WE feel like we have free will, we feel like other people have less of it than we do. But how are you going to test this?

We Believe Experts Who Confirm Our Beliefs

By webmaster on December 15, 2010 5:44 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
We believe experts who confirm our beliefs ~ Physorg.com

"It's our values that determine the credibility that we give to experts," according to Éric Montpetit and Érick Lachapelle, professors at the Université de Montréal Department of Political Science. "We judge based on our political predispositions. This highlights the limit of rationality when shaping an opinion."

Montpetit and Lachapelle adapted a study conducted by American researchers Kahan, Jenkins-Smith and Braman and surveyed 156 of their own undergraduate students to know where they stand on the political spectrum. They were then asked to evaluate the credibility of fictitious researchers.

For instance, students were presented with the description of Oliver Roberts, a professor of nuclear engineering at Berkeley and a Princeton graduate. To some, he was described as concerned about the impact of buried nuclear waste on human health and the environment. To others he was described as a defender of this safe practice. For 85 percent of students wary about nuclear waste, he was considered credible when he was also described as wary. His credibility dropped to 61 percent when he defended the practice.

To Give or Not to Give?

By webmaster on December 10, 2010 8:03 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
To Give or Not to Give: It's All About the Brain ~ Marketplace interview with Jonah Lehrer

The first thing to note about giving away money is that it feels really good. For instance, several brain scanning experiments demonstrate that donating to a worthy cause leads to activation in the dopamine reward pathway. It's the same part of the brain that's turned on when we have sex, or eat a slice of chocolate cake. In fact, there is typically more "reward-related" activity when we donate money than we receive an equivalent amount. Giving is literally better than getting, at least from the perspective of the brain.

Link to read the transcript or listen to the audio.

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

By webmaster on December 8, 2010 7:11 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The Fingers Don't Lie

By webmaster on December 5, 2010 6:22 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The Fingers Don't Lie - US News and World Report

Logan says that this change in timing reflects a kind of automatic assessment of performance. "The body is doing one thing and the mind is doing another," he says. "What we found was that the fingers knew the truth."

Many psychologists thought that the mind was capable of detecting errors in several ways, but "nobody had pinned it down," says cognitive neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University. "Here, they developed a very clever set of experiments to tease the types of system apart."

The results may reveal a hierarchical method of error correction--with a "lower" system doing the actual work and a "higher" system assigning credit and blame, Logan suggests. These multiple layers of control may be evident in tasks such as playing music, speaking and walking to a destination, Logan says. As a man heads toward a new restaurant, his brain is noticing landmarks and keeping on the right course. Meanwhile, his feet steadily plod along, navigating the terrain automatically.

Speech and Harm

By Jeff on November 15, 2010 8:09 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Speech and Harm  -NYTimes.com
By Ernie Lepore

...why are slurs so offensive? And why are some more offensive than others? Even different slurs for the same group vary in intensity of contempt. How can words fluctuate both in their status as slurs and in their power to offend?

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

By Jeff on November 15, 2010 8:01 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
This Is Your Brain on Metaphors - NYTimes.com

By Robert Sapolsky

Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn't all that fancy. Let's compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ dramatically from one from a fly. Maybe the human's will have especially ornate ways of communicating with other neurons, making use of unique "neurotransmitter" messengers. Maybe compared to the lowly fly neuron, human neurons are bigger, more complex, in some way can run faster and jump higher.

Morality Put to the Test

By webmaster on October 23, 2010 5:41 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Morality put to the test - New Scientist

Long thought to be off limits to science, morality has been considered the exclusive preserve of philosophers and theologians. Not any more. In this special report a new generation of scientists share their wide-ranging insights.

Is Pure Altruism Possible?

By webmaster on October 20, 2010 5:24 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Is Pure Altruism Possible? - NYTimes.com

Still, doubting altruism is easy, even when it seems at first glance to be apparent. It's undeniable that people sometimes act in a way that benefits others, but it may seem that they always get something in return -- at the very least, the satisfaction of having their desire to help fulfilled. Students in introductory philosophy courses torture their professors with this reasoning. And its logic can seem inexorable.

Other Women's Voices

By Jeff on October 19, 2010 10:34 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

OTHER WOMEN'S VOICES
 Translations of women's writing
before 1700

Links that will take you to passages from over 125 women writers. The entries are on women who produced a substantial amount of work before 1700, some or all of which has been translated into modern English. Each entry will tell you about the print sources from which the translated passages are taken; it will also tell you of useful secondary sources and Internet sites, when those are available.

Morals Without God? - NYTimes.com

By webmaster on October 18, 2010 4:52 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Morals Without God? - NYTimes.com

Perhaps it is just me, but I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior. Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago. Not that religion is irrelevant -- I will get to this -- but it is an add-on rather than the wellspring of morality.

I'm Just a Machine

By webmaster on October 15, 2010 7:00 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Neuroscience, free will and determinism: 'I'm just a machine' - Telegraph

For a man who thinks he's a robot, Professor Patrick Haggard is remarkably cheerful about it. "We certainly don't have free will," says the leading British neuroscientist. "Not in the sense we think." It's quite a way to start an interview

Procrastination

By webmaster on October 10, 2010 12:23 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
What we can learn from procrastination : The New Yorker

Philosophers are interested in procrastination for another reason. It's a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia--doing something against one's own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you're simply saying "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," you're not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that's the most efficient use of your time doesn't count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn't make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn't do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

Atheists Know the Most About Religion

By webmaster on September 28, 2010 2:06 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey - Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.

religious-knowledge-01.png

What Is Consciousness?

By webmaster on September 4, 2010 9:29 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Not Telling Them Straight

By webmaster on August 26, 2010 1:02 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Chilean officials dropping wait-time news gently to 33 trapped miners - CNN.com

As Chile labors carefully to rescue 33 trapped miners, the nation is subtly working to buoy their hopes and psychological equilibrium by not telling them straight out just how long it could take to free them from the bottom of a dark and craggy shaft...

Authorities believe it would be too much of a psychological blow to tell the miners that experts estimate it could take three to four months to drill the men out.

Capitalism Has Made Society Kinder

By webmaster on August 21, 2010 3:11 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Capitalism has made society 'kinder'~ National Post

Social scientists -- and economists in particular -- have long been baffled with the way people in large societies are so trusting and fair in dealings with strangers. Many academics have argued it is a throwback to a time when humans were hunter-gatherers.

Mr. Henrich and his colleagues say their findings indicate playing fair with strangers is a behaviour that was favoured as the size of societies and populations grew.

The emergence and growth of markets allowed for the exchange of goods, skills and knowledge and enabled large complex societies to emerge and function, Mr. Henrich says, noting that humans in large societies are not nearly as selfish as some would suggest.

Ewwwwwwwww!

By webmaster on August 16, 2010 3:40 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Ewwwwwwwww! - The Boston Globe

Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn't return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

Today, psychologists and philosophers are piecing these findings together into a theory of disgust's moral role and the evolutionary forces that determined it: Just as our teeth and tongue first evolved to process food, then were enlisted for complex communication, disgust first arose as an emotional response to ensure that our ancestors steered clear of rancid meat and contagion. But over time, that response was co-opted by the social brain to help police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Today, some psychologists argue, we recoil at the wrong just as we do at the rancid, and when someone says that a politician's chronic dishonesty makes her sick, she is feeling the same revulsion she might get from a brimming plate of cockroaches.

Spend Less and Find Happiness

By webmaster on August 9, 2010 8:13 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness - NYTimes.com

Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

Her mother called her crazy.

Philosophy and Faith

By webmaster on August 2, 2010 7:45 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Philosophy and Faith - NYTimes.com

At this point, the class perks up again as I lay out versions of the famous arguments for the existence of God, and my students begin to think that they're about to get what their parents have paid for at a great Catholic university: some rigorous intellectual support for their faith. 

Soon enough, however, things again fall apart, since our best efforts to construct arguments along the traditional lines face successive difficulties.  The students realize that I'm not going to be able to give them a convincing proof, and I let them in on the dirty secret: philosophers have never been able to find arguments that settle the question of God's existence or any  of the other "big questions" we've been discussing for 2500 years.

Courage and Honesty

By webmaster on August 1, 2010 7:49 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

"None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear." 

Bertrand Russell

How Money Restricts Life's Pleasures

By webmaster on July 31, 2010 1:47 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

 

It's a mystery why money doesn't make us happy, because it feels like it damn well should. With money we can buy whatever we want, go wherever we want, even be whoever we want. Surely that should make us happy?

And yet study after study shows that in affluent societies money might bring satisfaction, but it doesn't bring much happiness.

Perhaps, as people become really rich, they don't choose more enjoyable activities (i.e. they stay in the office working)? Perhaps material goods just can't make us happy? Or perhaps there is always someone richer, spoiling the party with their more impressive wealth?

The New Science of Morality

By webmaster on July 31, 2010 1:41 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Scientists engaged in the scientific study of human nature are gaining sway over the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological foundation. 

 No where is this more apparent than in the field of moral psychology. Using babies, psychopaths, chimpanzees, fMRI scanners, web surveys, agent-based modeling, and ultimatum games, moral psychology has become a major convergence zone for research in the behavioral sciences. 

So what do we have to say? Are we moving toward consensus on some points? What are the most pressing questions for the next five years? And what do we have to offer a world in which so many global and national crises are caused or exacerbated by moral failures and moral conflicts? It seems like everyone is studying morality these days, reaching findings that complement each other more often than they clash.

The Busy vs. Lazy Paradox

By webmaster on July 25, 2010 7:31 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Forced to wait for fifteen minutes at the airport luggage carousel leaves many of us miserable and irritated. Yet if we'd spent the same waiting time walking to the carousel we'd be far happier. That's according to Christopher Hsee and colleagues, who say we're happier when busy but that unfortunately our instinct is for idleness. Unless we have a reason for being active we choose to do nothing - an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.

The World's Happiest Countries

By webmaster on July 23, 2010 7:00 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

uantifying happiness isn't an easy task. Researchers at the Gallup World Poll went about it by surveying thousands of respondents in 155 countries, between 2005 and 2009, in order to measure two types of well-being. 

First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a "life evaluation" score between 1 and 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their "daily experiences"--things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged. 

 Subjects that reported high scores were considered "thriving." The percentage of thriving individuals in each country determined our rankings

Why Money Makes You Unhappy

By webmaster on July 23, 2010 11:26 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Why Money Makes You Unhappy | Wired Science | Wired.com

Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. 

Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history - 21st century America - is slowly getting less pleased with life... Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure....

But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn't money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. The scientists explore the "experience-stretching hypothesis," an idea first proposed by Daniel Gilbert.

The Narcissist

By webmaster on July 17, 2010 7:05 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

There used to be theories that deep down narcissists feel unworthy, but recent research doesn't support this. Instead, it seems, the narcissist's self-directed passion is deep and sincere. 

His self-love is his most precious possession. It is the holy center of all that is sacred and right. He is hypersensitive about anybody who might splatter or disregard his greatness. If someone treats him slightingly, he perceives that as a deliberate and heinous attack. If someone threatens his reputation, he regards this as an act of blasphemy. He feels justified in punishing the attacker for this moral outrage.
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