Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate person I’ve ever met.
Most of the four million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil were sold in Salvador, the first residence of Portugal’s colonial rulers. It’s still Brazil’s blackest city. In Ribeiro’s neighborhood, children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose students to crack,” she tells me. And they study philosophy two hours each week because of a 2008 law that mandates philosophy instruction in all Brazilian high schools. Nine million teenagers now take philosophy classes for three years.
“But seeing things as they really are isn’t enough,” Ribeiro insists. As in Plato’s parable in The Republic, the students must go back to the cave and apply what they’ve learned. Their lives give them rich opportunities for such application. The contrast between the new luxury hotels along the beach and Itapuã’s overcrowded streets gives rise to questions about equality and justice. Children kicking around a can introduce a discussion about democracy: football is one of the few truly democratic practices here; success depends on merit, not class privilege. Moving between philosophy and practice, the students can revise their views in light of what Plato, Hobbes, or Locke had to say about equality, justice, and democracy and discuss their own roles as political agents.
Written by Carlos Fraenkel, Boston Review. Continue HERE
Once upon a time there was a primitive tribe that hunted and gathered in a verdant forest in a temperate clime.
I call them a “tribe” but that name may mislead if it suggests some rigorous form of social organization. In fact, the group was about as un-organized as it is possible for people to be. There were among them no elders, chiefs, shamans or any other kind of leader with authority over his fellows. With one exception– which we will soon discuss — there were no laws, rules or taboos that were obeyed or enforced among them and no judges or police to enforce them.
This lack of norms was reflected in their language which (luckily for our narrative purposes) was much like modern English but which lacked any moral or legal vocabulary. The natives never spoke of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘legal’ or ‘law’. They had no words for ‘promise’, or ‘contract’ and none for ‘property’ or ‘ownership’.
Even so, as I just averred, there was one rule that the natives generally acknowledged and mostly conformed to. They called it “The Rule”.
The Rule: No Bullying!
By ‘bullying’ the natives seem to have meant, roughly, hurting other people or using force or the threat of force to compel others to do what they would otherwise not do. But not every use of force or infliction of harm was regarded as bullying.
It was, for example, not considered bullying to use force or its threat to defend oneself or someone else against a bully. The Rule permitted self-defense and “other defense” and this had important consequences for all of tribal life.
Writing in the New York Times, Peter Singer and Agata Sagan ask “Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?” I dunno. Why?
The infamous Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments showed that given the right circumstances, most of us act monstrously. Indeed, given pretty mundane circumstances, most of us will act pretty callously, hustling past people in urgent need in simply to avoid the hassle. But not all of us do this. Some folks do the right thing anyway, even when it’s not easy. Singer and Sagan speculate that something special must be going on in those peoples’ brains. So maybe we can figure out what that is and put it in a pill!
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?
The answer is: no. And I think the question invites confusion. Morality is not exhausted by helping. Anyway, help do what?
Singer is perhaps the world’s most famous utilitarian, so maybe he’s got “help people feel more pleasure and less pain” in mind. Since utilitarianism is monomaniacally focused on how people feel, it can be tempting for utilitarians to see sympathy and the drive to ease suffering as the principal moral sentiments. But utilitarianism does not actually prescribe that we should be motivated to minimize suffering and maximize happiness. It tells us to do whatever minimizes suffering and maximizes happiness. It’s possible that wanting to help and trying to help doesn’t much help in this sense.
Written by Will Wilkinson, Big Think. ContinueHERE
Dan Fessler: As an undergraduate, most of the professors in the Anthropology Department at my university practiced psychological anthropology, a subfield of sociocultural anthropology that combines theories from various branches of psychology with the study of culture. I decided that I was going to be a psychological anthropologist, and I continued on at the same university, with the same professors, for my graduate degrees. Although I was confident that, to understand human behavior, it was necessary to investigate the interaction of mind and culture, I nevertheless became increasingly dissatisfied with psychological anthropology, which lacks an overarching theory from which to derive hypotheses, and which often eschews hypothesis testing in favor of description and interpretation. Anthropologists usually emphasize the differences between people in different societies, yet, during my doctoral field research, I was impressed by the underlying universalities in human emotions. I began thinking more about human evolution, and, with guidance from several primatologists, I gradually began to invent my own version of evolutionary psychology. I was unaware that such a discipline was already emerging – indeed, many of my ‘new’ ideas had already been formulated more clearly by others. It was a revelation when I attended my first meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and discovered a whole field devoted to my area of interest.
Via The International Cognition & Culture Institute’s Blog. Continue HERE
A robot walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a screwdriver.” A bad joke, indeed. But even less funny if the robot says “Give me what’s in your cash register.”
The fictional theme of robots turning against humans is older than the word itself, which first appeared in the title of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play about artificial factory workers rising against their human overlords. Just 22 years later, Isaac Asimov invented the “Three Laws of Robotics” to serve as a hierarchical ethical code for the robots in his stories: first, never harm a human being through action or inaction; second, obey human orders; last, protect oneself. From the first story in which the laws appeared, Asimov explored their inherent contradictions. Great fiction, but unworkable theory.
The prospect of machines capable of following moral principles, let alone understanding them, seems as remote today as the word “robot” is old. Some technologists enthusiastically extrapolate from the observation that computing power doubles every 18 months to predict an imminent “technological singularity” in which a threshold for machines of superhuman intelligence will be suddenly surpassed. Many Singularitarians assume a lot, not the least of which is that intelligence is fundamentally a computational process. The techno-optimists among them also believe that such machines will be essentially friendly to human beings. I am skeptical about the Singularity, and even if “artificial intelligence” is not an oxymoron, “friendly A.I.” will require considerable scientific progress on a number of fronts.
You are special. Don’t worry, this is not the start of yet another Joel Osteen sermon. I mean only that your existence, itself a wildly improbable fact, increasingly seems to be the only peg on which cosmologists can hang the existence of our Universe.
Oh, and not just you, by the way. I’m special, too. All of us observers capable of wondering why we are here are special, because we contribute to what is known as the Anthropic Principle. Here’s the nub of it, given by Stephen Hawking and a colleague in 1973: “The answer to the question ‘why is the universe [the way it is]?’ is ‘because we are here.’”
There’s something odd about that. As the cosmologist George F.R. Ellis notes, the Anthropic Principle sends the arrow of causation winging, feathers first, back to the bow. It declares, to paraphrase DesCartes, “I think, therefore the Multiverse.”
Written by Clay Farris Naff at the Huffington Post. Continue HERE
What existed before the big bang? What is the nature of time? Is our universe one of many? On the big questions science cannot (yet?) answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers.
Last May, Stephen Hawking gave a talk at Google’s Zeitgeist Conference in which he declared philosophy to be dead. In his book The Grand Design, Hawking went even further. “How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Traditionally these were questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead,” Hawking wrote. “Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.”
In December, a group of professors from America’s top philosophy departments, including Columbia, Yale, and NYU, set out to establish the philosophy of cosmology as a new field of study within the philosophy of physics. The group aims to bring a philosophical approach to the basic questions at the heart of physics, including those concerning the nature, age and fate of the universe. This past week, a second group of scholars from Oxford and Cambridge announced their intention to launch a similar project in the United Kingdom.
One of the founding members of the American group, Tim Maudlin, was recently hired by New York University, the top ranked philosophy department in the English-speaking world. Maudlin is a philosopher of physics whose interests range from the foundations of physics, to topics more firmly within the domain of philosophy, like metaphysics and logic.
Yesterday I spoke with Maudlin by phone about cosmology, multiple universes, the nature of time, the odds of extraterrestrial life, and why Stephen Hawking is wrong about philosophy.
Written by Ross Andersen. Interview with Tim Maudlin HERE
The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2010, given by Professor Bruno Latour: “May Nature Be Recomposed? A Few Questions of Cosmopolitics”.
Location: Nobel Museum, Svenska Akademiens Börssal, May 11 2010. The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture is given every spring at the Nobel Museum by an international scholar of excellence.
In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as a titanic figure who could alter the course of history: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.” His origins were humble for the role. The son of a small-town Lutheran minister, he steeped himself in classical literature while growing up in eastern Germany. When he was 24, he secured a professorship in Basel, Switzerland, and a few years later published his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy.” Against the common view of the ancient Greeks as the epitome of serene equipoise, Nietzsche emphasized the “Dionysian” excess and frenzy that complemented the “Apollonian” virtues of clarity and repose. The book’s success was limited, and its author was mocked by one leading classicist as an atavist run amok who should “gather tigers and panthers about his knees, but not the youth of Germany.”
Written by ALEXANDER STAR at The New York Times. Continue HERE
The idea of happiness has changed. It has emerged as a measurable, autonomous, manageable, psychological variable in the global middle-class culture. The self-conscious, determined search for happiness has gradually transformed the idea of happiness from a mental state to an objectified quality of life that can be attained the way an athlete after training under specialists and going through a strict regimen of exercises and diet wins a medal in a track meet. Might it be that the sense of well-being of a mentally healthy person shows its robustness by being able to live with some amount of unhappiness and what is commonly seen as ill-health?
This is based on the 13th Kappen Memorial Lecture, delivered at Bangalore on 22 September 2011.
It has grown out of a trialogue among Tamotsu Aoki, Nur Yalman, and the author, organised some years ago by Iwanami Shoten at Tokyo. The discussion spilled into a conference on “Culture and Hegemony: Politics of Culture in the Age of Globalisation”, organised by GRIPS project of the University of Tokyo and by the Institut fur Ethnologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universit, Heidelberg, and into a small article published in Spanish in an Yearbook.
Ashis Nandy is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.
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In 2007, one of Britain’s leading schools, Wellington College at Crowthorne, announced that it would offer classes on happiness to combat materialism and celebrity obsession.1 The following year, New Scientist summarised the results of a 65-country survey to show that the highest proportion of happy persons lived in, of all places, Nigeria, followed by Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico. It is true that happiness surveys differ in their findings. According to some, happiness has much to do with prosperity, levels of development and healthcare; according to others, these things do not matter. It is the second set that has produced countries like Vanuatu, a former happiest country in the world that most have not heard of, and last year’s world champion in happiness, Bangladesh, which many believe could well qualify as one of the world’s unhappiest countries.2 In comparison, some of the richest nations languish near the bottom of the list.
However, I am not concerned here with comparative happiness or the methodology of studying happiness. I am concerned with the emergence of happiness as a measurable, autonomous, manageable, psychological variable in the global middle-class culture. And the two events can be read as parts of the same story. If the first factoid – discovery of happiness as a teachable discipline – suggests that in some parts of the world happiness is becoming a realm of training, guidance and expertise, the second reaffirms the ancient “self-consoling” “naïve” belief that you cannot always be happy just by virtue of being wealthy, secure or occupied. You have to learn to be happy.
Together they partly explain why clenched-teeth pursuit of happiness has become a major feature and a discovery of our times. The other explanations possibly are the growing confidence in some sections of the globe in the power of human volition and the developing technology of human self-engineering as by-products of the ideology of individualism. These changes have pushed many to believe that it is up to them, individually, to do something about their happiness, that happiness cannot happen, nor can it be given. It has to be earned or acquired. This self-conscious, determined search for happiness has gradually transformed the idea of happiness from a mental state to an objectified quality of life that can be attained the way an athlete – after training under specialists and going through a strict regimen of exercises and diet – wins a medal in a track meet.
Duke University Press ends its influential Series Q this month. It has been an impressive ride since the first book in the series: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark 1993 collection of essays, Tendencies. Rereading her introduction, “Queer and Now,” I am reminded of the potent sense of possibility opened up 20 years ago by the idea of queer theory. The sense of a historical moment is strong in the essay, as its title underscores. Sedgwick’s optimism was far from naïve; the same introduction disclosed her diagnosis of breast cancer, which she lived with and against until her death in 2009. Fittingly, the last volume released by Series Q is a posthumous collection of her remaining essays, The Weather in Proust.
Taken together, Sedgwick’s death, the passage of time, and the news from Duke all seem to be occasions for taking stock. Even before the press’s decision, many in the field were already in a retrospective mood. A recent book in the same series, After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, asked leading queer theorists to look back on the great ferment of the last two decades. The title of the book seems to place queer theory firmly in the past, though the editors, Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, generously shift the emphasis in their introduction: “What has queer theory become now that it has a past?”
The answer depends on how much queer theory is defined by the speculative energy that the phrase itself generated in the 1990s. The label, after all, came into circulation only after the major theoretical innovations that defined it—in the work of Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Leo Bersani, the early Sedgwick, Judith Butler, as well as many others. Those writers had already developed an analysis of sexuality that looked to relations of power rather than to individual psychology or “orientation.” And they had already shown that sex, pleasure, and the formation of sexual cultures posed deep challenges to the normative frameworks by which some kinds of sex are legitimated and institutionalized as the proper form of sexuality. As several contributors to After Sex? point out, queer theory’s intellectual concerns have given rise to newer kinds of work, and are continued under other rubrics.
When Teresa de Lauretis and her colleagues at the University of California at Santa Cruz organized a conference called “Queer Theory” in 1990, it was manifestly provocative. The term “queer” in those days was not yet a cable-TV synonym for gay; it carried a high-voltage charge of insult and stigma. The term caught on because it seemed to catalyze many of the key insights of previous years and connect them to a range of politics and constituencies that were already developing outside academe, in a way that looked unpredictable from the start. At the 1991 Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Rutgers University at New Brunswick—the fifth to be held since John Boswell started the meetings at Yale University in 1987 and exponentially larger than its predecessors—the informal talk about “queer” was almost as frisky as the cruising.
A paper by Michael Warner at the The Chronicle Review. Continue HERE
‘This is a book for atheists’. Rosenberg makes this explicit in the preface. Atheism requires a whole view of the world based on science that is ‘demanding, rigorous, breathtaking.’ There’s a feeling you get when reading Rosenberg that he’s fed up with atheists who avoid facing up to the big persistent questions such as: ‘what is the nature of reality, the purpose of the universe, and the meaning of life? Is there any rhyme or reason to the course of human history? Why am I here? Do I have a soul, and if so, how long will it last? What happens when we die? Do we have free will? Why should I be moral? What is love, and why is it usually inconvenient?’ Rosenberg demands that atheists just stop arguing with theists, for one because ‘contemporary religious belief is immune to rational objection’ but also because it eats into the time atheists should be taking to work through the implications of their own worldview. Atheists need to spend more time getting to grips with what they should know about the reality we inhabit because science reveals it is ‘stranger than even many atheists recognize.’
So he’s just not all that interested in going over the old arguments that keep getting reheated by lazy atheists who haven’t any news but do have a publishing deal. The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter To A Christian Nation and so on are dull books that probably make more sense in the USA than from where I am but they bring nothing new to the table, play to a home crowd and change no one’s mind. Rosenberg is doing something different from being a cheerleader. He’s bringing a few home truths to the table. I suspect some atheists will not be able to swallow them whole and that just like the theists will also find ways of ducking the question.
So what are his answers to the persistent questions, as he calls them, the ones at the head of this article and his book, the ones we have that begin early in life, get crowded out by thoughts of sex in adolescence and then come steaming back afterwards? There is no God. Reality is what physics says (and evolutionary biology). There is no purpose to anything, anywhere. Never was, never will be. There is therefore no meaning to life. I’m here because of dumb luck. Prayer doesn’t work. There is no such thing as a soul. There is no freewill. When we die, everything stays the same except without us. There is no moral difference between good and bad, right and wrong. You should be good because it makes you feel better than being bad. Anything goes. Love is a solution to a strategic coordination problem. It’s automatic, programmed so there’s no need to go out looking for it. History has no purpose (see above) because the future is less and less like the past. Ditto economics. Technology makes predicting the future a guessing game and their rational choice theories are outrageously bad psychology.
Rosenberg argues that belief in free will and purpose and all that (see above) is belief in hokum of the same order as belief in God. The atheists’ self-image as the hero nihilist choosing her fate is condemned as being just as hopeless as the religious self image. This is why this is a book with some tough and strange lessons for the atheist. His book is a genuine guide, giving the reader a thorough reading list of the key texts that everyone should read, summarizing the main points quickly, smartly and expecting you to go away and do further work. He’s a teacher after all, a very, very smart professor who assumes you too can be even smarter if you sweat a little more and put in the hours. So he’s a good teacher with high aspirations for us all. But what reason does he have for his worldview? He argues for a naturalism that results in what he calls a ‘nice nihilism’. By this he means that atheists are not nihilists (although their scientific world view is) and that for good evolutionary reasons everyone tends to be nice.
A review by Richard Marshall at 3:AM Magazine. Continue HERE
Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque National, 1939
If 2012 is the year our world comes to an end, as doomsayers predict, that will provide additional employment for the angel of history, who observes the past and the wreckage of humanity as described by Walter Benjamin in his essay “On the Concept of History.” But if the world and its inhabitants continue to exist, they will be able to observe, next July 15, the 120th anniversary of Benjamin’s birth. His influence has only been growing in recent decades, and his writings are increasingly the inspiration for discussion and reconsideration.
The growing corpus of works about Benjamin is about to be augmented with the publication, in January, of a comprehensive study, “Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait,” by Prof. Eli Friedlander (Harvard University Press ). Friedlander, head of the Philosophy Department at Tel Aviv University, discusses Benjamin’s approaches to concepts such as history, mythology, language, beauty and truth. His aim is to tie together the threads of thought spun by the philosopher, who committed suicide in 1940.
“Many people,” Friedlander says, “emphasize the enigmatic and enchanting aspect of Benjamin’s writings. They present him, as Hannah Arendt did, as a kind of pearl fisherman retrieving precious treasures from the depths. But the amazement at that marvelous uniqueness is also a sure way to isolate him and avoid becoming seriously involved in his thought.”
Friedlander’s book revolves around the relationship between history and philosophy, which he elucidates through Benjamin’s unfinished work “The Arcades Project.” “Benjamin’s thought is faithful to concrete historical content, so much so that it sometimes seems his writing lacks the recognizable form of philosophy,” Friedlander observes. “Benjamin wrote philosophical history, or more accurately, wrote philosophy with historical materials whose ordering and arranging he worked on for years. The most salient expression of this commitment to concreteness is ‘The Arcades Project,’ which was intended to be a book consisting largely of quotations focusing on the arcades of Paris in the 19th century. After Benjamin’s death, the material he had compiled remained divided into convolutes according to subjects such as ‘modes of lighting,’ ‘iron construction’ and ‘the flaneur.’ These are certainly not the typical subjects of philosophy.”
Leonardo DaVinci noted that when trees branch, smaller branches have a precise, mathematical relationship to the branch they sprang from. iStockphoto.com
Joe Palca at NPR: Hurricanes topple plenty of trees, but when you think about it, the more amazing thing is that many trees can stand up to these 100-mile-per-hour winds.
Now a French scientist has come up with an explanation for the resilience of trees. And astonishingly, the answer was first described by Leonardo da Vinci 500 years ago.
Leonardo noticed that when trees branch, smaller branches have a precise, mathematical relationship to the branch from which they sprang. Many people have verified Leonardo’s rule, as it’s known, but no one had a good explanation for it.
French physicist Christophe Eloy wasn’t particularly interested in trees, but he does specialize in understanding how air flows around objects — objects like airplane wings and such. So he decided to see whether he could solve the mystery of the branching trees.
“I just did it because it was a nice problem, but I think there are some implications for real-life applications,” Eloy says.
Leonardo’s rule is fairly simple, but stating it mathematically is a bit, well, complicated. Eloy did his best:
“When a mother branch branches in two daughter branches, the diameters are such that the surface areas of the two daughter branches, when they sum up, is equal to the area of the mother branch.” Translation: The surface areas of the two daughter branches add up to the surface area of the mother branch. Continue HERE
The Fifth International Deleuze Studies Conference, “Deterritorializing Deleuze,” is being organized in coordination with Southeastern Louisiana University, Department of History and Political Science Tulane University Department of Philosophy.
Although we wait to hear from several invited speakers, currently confirmed speakers include (among others):
Brent Adkins
Jeffrey Bell
Ronald Bogue
Levi Bryant
Ian Buchanan
Claire Colebrook
Gary Genosko
Eugene Holland
Joe Hughes
Eleanor Kaufman
Gregg Lambert
Mary Beth Mader
Catarina Pombo Nabais
Paul Patton
Patricia Pisters
John Protevi
Anne Sauvagnargues
Daniel Smith
Charles Stivale
James Williams
Individual abstracts as well as panel proposals are welcomed at this point and until the submission deadline, which is March 31, 2012. We will also have a mixture of plenary panels and quasi-plenary panels (with only three concurrent panels) on themes appropriate to this year’s theme, Deterritorializing Deleuze. There will thus be, for example, panels on Deleuze and architecture, Deleuze and literature, Deleuze and music, Deleuze and the philosophical tradition, etc. We especially welcome submissions that push Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) thought in these directions along others that are not listed.
The conference registration fee has yet to be determined, though it will be listed here when it has been. Deadline for registration fees will be June 1, though fees will be discounted for those who pay on or before May 15.
Summer Workshop
Prior to the conference we will have the 6th Annual Deleuze Camp. Spaces are limited so it is recommended that those interested submit their application and registration fee ($225.00) to the Conference organizer by February 1. Applications should include a brief statement of one’s research interests in Deleuze. Selection is made on a first-come first-serve basis. There is also the possibility for presenting a brief 15-minute summary of one’s research work during the workshop. If you are interested in doing so, please make sure to state your desire to do so and provide some detail of what you will be discussing. Applicants will be notified by March 1 whether they will be allotted one of the open-mic slots.
The notion of immortality arises out of our first awareness of death. It is impossible for us to imagine ourselves ceasing to exist. The concept of an afterlife, Ponce de Léon’s fabled Fountain of Youth, enduring fame, and offspring as the torchbearers of the family name – these are all embodiments of our desire to keep some piece of our being intact post mortem – even in the absence of consciousness.
Jason Gots: The field of Medicine has always been locked in a struggle with mortality, and it has won some significant victories. Life expectancy in the United States has increased by about 30 years since 1900. AIDS – once a death sentence – is now medically manageable (for those who have access to adequate health care). And now, with the help of bio- and nanotechnology, scientists are gearing up for an all out assault on Old Cloak ‘n Hood. Big Think has shared the views of futurists Sonia Arrison and Ray Kurzweil and geneticist Aubrey De Grey on emerging technologies that will enable us to slow aging or end it altogether. At the forefront of this science, Cynthia Kenyon has identified and blocked a “regulator gene” in worms that tells their cells when to age, increasing their life span by up to six times.
The Ethics of Immortality
So you want to live forever? Whoa there, Methuselah – double-check your motives, says Paul Root Wolpe, Senior Bioethicist at Nasa and Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University. For Wolpe, the question to be asked of any new technology is ‘how will we use this to improve our lives (plural)?’ A 2006 NIH report on the realities and costs of longer-lifespans worldwide highlights some of the concerns we ought to keep in mind as we contemplate immortality:
Family structures are changing. As people live longer and have fewer children, family structures are transformed, leaving older people with fewer options for care.
Patterns of work and retirement are shifting. Shrinking ratios of workers to pensioners and people spending a larger portion of their lives in retirement increasingly strain existing health and pension systems.
Social insurance systems are evolving. As social insurance expenditures escalate, an increasing number of countries are evaluating the sustainability of these systems.
New economic challenges are emerging. Population aging will have dramatic effects on social entitlement programs, labor supply, trade, and savings around the globe and may demand new fiscal approaches to accommodate a changing world.
“Deleuze and Computers” – a lecture by Alexander R. Galloway at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on December 2nd, 2011.
Abstract for the talk:
Could it be? Could it be that Deleuze’s most lasting legacy will lie in his “Postscript on Control Societies,” a mere 2,300 word essay from 1990? Such a strange little text, it bears not the same Deleuzean voice so familiar from his other writings. Cynics will grumble it falls short of the great books of ’68-’69 or the radical collaborations with Félix Guattari during the 1970s. In the “Postscript” he indicts capitalism by name. He raises his wrath against corporations and television shows. Yet his frame includes the culture at large, not just the mode of production. He talks about snakes and surfers and other features of the dawning millennium. He references such figures as Roberto Rossellini, Paul Virilio, Franz Kafka, and most importantly Michel Foucault. He tells us exactly what is wrong with the business sector, as well as with the prisons, schools, and hospitals. It reads almost like a manifesto, the “Manifesto on Control Societies.” In this talk we will investigate the last few years of Deleuze’s life, a period in which he elaborates, however faintly, an image of what it means to live in the information age.
Presented by communication +1
www.communicationplusone.org | scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo
This talk was made possible by the UMass Graduate School, the University Libraries, UMass Free Culture, and the Department of Communication.
Researchers test a famous ethical dilemma called the “trolley problem” in a very real setting.
Christie Nicholson:
Would you kill one person to save five others?
Philosophers have posed this moral dilemma for decades. Typically they present the situation as a mental exercise. A runaway train is about to strike five people walking along the track. You can reroute the train and save the five people. But you will wind up killing one person walking on the other track.
Recently, researchers tried to make the dilemma feel much more real. They placed 147 subjects in a 3-D virtual environment where they are in front of a railroad switch controlling two tracks. They watch five people hike along a track bordered by a ravine. A single person hikes along the other track. Suddenly a train comes barreling toward the five people. The subject has the option to reroute the train using a joystick.
Ninety percent of the study subjects switched tracks, killing the lone hiker to save five. These findings match past studies that were only abstract thought experiments. The study is in the journal Emotion.
It appears that even in very realistic, action oriented situations, people will go through with a Sophie’s Choice, motivated by accomplishing the apparently greater good.
Dan Marner: Joan Bakewell interviews novelist J.G. Ballard about his life and works and asks him to talk specifically about objects that have meant something special to him.
(Apologies for picture quality: this was recorded via a coat hanger stuck in the back of a Betamax in the early 90s)
Memento: J.G. Ballard (1993)
Country of Origin: UK
Date(s) of Broadcast: 29 April 1993
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Production Company: Zed Productions
Producers: Glenn Wilhide, Sophie Balhetchet
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Director: Robin Bextor
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Joan Bakewell (herself)
J.G. Ballard (himself)
J. Hughes: Enlightenment values presume an independent self, the rational citizen and consumer who pursues her self-interests. Since Hume, however, Enlightenment empiricists have questioned the existence of a discrete, persistent self. Today, continuing that investigation, neuroscience is daily eroding the essentialist model of personal identity. Transhumanism has yet to come to grips with the radical consequences of the erosion of the liberal individualist subject for projects of enhancement and longevity. Most transhumanist thought still reflects an essentialist idea of personal identity, even as we advance projects of radical cognitive enhancement that will change every element of consciousness. How do ethics and politics change if personal identity is an arbitrary, malleable fiction?
This essay is the sixth in a seven part series.
Problems of Transhumanism: Introduction
Problems of Transhumanism: The Unsustainable Autonomy of Reason
Problems of Transhumanism: Atheism vs. Naturalist Theologies
Problems of Transhumanism: Liberal Democracy vs. Technocratic Absolutism
Problems of Transhumanism: Moral Universalism vs. Relativism
Problems of Transhumanism: Belief in Progress vs. Rational Uncertainty
Namit Arora considers the complexity of consciousness and its implications for artificial intelligence.
Namit Arora: As a graduate student of computer engineering in the early 90s, I recall impassioned late night debates on whether machines can ever be intelligent – meaning, possessing the cognition, common sense, and problem-solving skills of ordinary humans. Scientists and bearded philosophers spoke of ‘humanoid robots’. Neural network research was hot, and one of my professors was a star in the field. A breakthrough seemed inevitable and imminent. Still, I felt certain that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a doomed enterprise. I argued out of intuition, from a sense of the immersive nature of life: how much we subconsciously acquire and call upon to get through life; how we arrive at meaning and significance not in isolation but through embodied living; and how contextual, fluid, and intertwined these things are with our moods, desires, experiences, selective memory, physical body, and so on. How can we program all this into a machine and have it pass the Turing test, so that we couldn’t distinguish its responses from those of a human? How could a machine that did not care about its own existence ever behave as humans do? In hindsight, it seems fitting that I was then also drawn to Dostoevsky, Camus and Kierkegaard.
My interlocutors countered that although extremely complex, the human brain is clearly an instance of matter amenable to the laws of physics. They posited a reductionist and computational approach to the brain that many, including Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett, continue to champion today. (Recently Dennett declared, “We are robots made of robots made of robots made of robots.” – see ‘Daniel Dennett Explains How People Are Like Robots’, Bigthink.com, 9 Mar 2009.) Our intelligence, and everything else that informs our being in the world, had to be somehow coded into our brain’s circuitry – including the great many symbols, rules, and associations we rely on to get through a typical day. Was there any reason why we couldn’t decode this, and reproduce intelligence in a machine some day? Couldn’t a future supercomputer mimic our entire neural circuitry and be as smart as us? Continue HERE
Liquid Theory TV is a collaboration between Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Peter Woodbridge designed to develop a series of IPTV programmes. (IPTV, in its broadest sense, stands for all those technologies which use computer networks to deliver audio-visual programming.) The idea behind the Liquid Theory TV project is to experiment with IPTVs potential for providing new ways of communicating intellectual ideas, easily and cheaply, both inside and outside of the university. We want to do so not so much in an effort to have an impact outside of the academy, be it economic, social or cultural; nor to connect with an increasingly media-literate audience that books supposedly cannot, or can no longer, reach. Rather we want to experiment with IPTV in order to explore the potential for different effectivities that different forms of communication have – to the extent of perhaps even leading us to conceive of what we do as academics, writers, artists, media theorists and philosophers differently (see Wise, 2006: 241).
The second episode in the series takes as its focus Gilles Deleuzes short essay Postscript on the Societies of Control. While this episode is being made available for the first time in an issue of Culture Machine which has the theme of creative media; and while Liquid Theory TV could be described as a creative project, to the extent it is concerned with producing alternative, rival, or counter-desires to those currently dominant within much of society (at its simplest, a desire for philosophy or more broadly theory, rather than for the creations of Richard Branson, Simon Cowell or Rupert Murdoch, say), this does not mean that either the series, or this particular episode, should be regarded simply as an attempt to perform Deleuzes philosophy. The critical and interpretive aspects of scholarly work remain important to us here, even if they are being undertaken in a medium very different to the traditional academic journal article or book.
Presented as a contribution to the project/publication The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict .
22 March 1976 – The transcript presented here records a conversation between four figures from the 1970s-era art community: German artist, educator and activist, Joseph Beuys; Chilean-born multimedia artist and filmmaker, Juan Downey; Rosalind Krauss, art critic and co-founder of the new journal October; and the world-renown British sculptor, Henry Moore. The occasion of this conversation was suggested by Donald Lupton, a computer scientist and researcher working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a lab funded by DARPA. Lupton has been commissioned with restarting the Agency’s art and culture propaganda project, which has lain relatively dormant since the early 60s. Unbeknownst to the four participants, this conversation is an early test case for exploring new forms of cultural dissemination with the aim of using Western intellectuals for spreading democratic values. Please note that the respective computer terminals for each participant were identified by the names of gods from Roman mythology and have here been changed to reflect the actual names of the participants. The application, still in its early stage of development, had limited syntax capability, thus punctuation was limited to the full stop. Also, the original timestamps for each transmission have been removed for the sake of legibility.
Addendum: Upon completion of this discussion, Krauss, who was quite impressed by the novelty of the telecommunications medium as a way to internationalize artistic discourse, has requested the transcript for publication in the first issue of October journal. Lupton has reported her intentions back to the Agency, and the publishers at MIT Press have suppressed the publication. A copy of the transcript remains in the MIT Press archives.
Sy Montgomery: ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.
For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.
Many times I have stood mesmerized by an aquarium tank, wondering, as I stared into the horizontal pupils of an octopus’s large, prominent eyes, if she was staring back at me—and if so, what was she thinking?
Not long ago, a question like this would have seemed foolish, if not crazy. How can an octopus know anything, much less form an opinion? Octopuses are, after all, “only” invertebrates—they don’t even belong with the insects, some of whom, like dragonflies and dung beetles, at least seem to show some smarts. Octopuses are classified within the invertebrates in the mollusk family, and many mollusks, like clams, have no brain.
Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself. Continue HERE
Leif Parsons
Multiverse by BellaCielo
Alex Rosenberg. Photo by Jim Wallace
Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque National, 1939
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Photograph: Suzanne Kreiter/Getty Images
Leonardo DaVinci noted that when trees branch, smaller branches have a precise, mathematical relationship to the branch they sprang from. iStockphoto.com
Photograph: Brandon Cole
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