Daniel Goleman on compassion

As a follow-up to the last message, here’s a TED video of Daniel Goleman speaking on compassion. This is pro-social science—very nice!

January 16, 2010   Posted in: pro-social, psychology  2 Comments

Don’t Rage Against the Machine

It’s generally futile if not destructive and here’s why…

What, exactly, is this “machine”? A few minutes spent studying the politics of the group who took the coveted Christmas Number One slot in the UK Singles Chart in 2009 (see Rage Against the Machine on Wikipedia) makes it clear that what they’re against is the political-military-industrial power structure, or what’s sometimes called “the system”. And let me say here quite clearly that, in terms of general political orientation, I’m entirely with them, as is anyone who instinctively sides with the underdog and finds him or herself alienated from much of modern culture, in my opinion. But they go too far—not in their analysis, because analysis should be pursued as far as it will go, and if that takes you far beyond the current consensus, so be it—but in their reaction to it. Rage, or anger, is a destructive emotion.

It’s also entirely inappropriate when what you’re dealing with is machinery. I share Philip K Dick’s view (though it took me many, many years to come around to it). In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (filmed as Blade Runner), the only way to tell the most sophisticated humanoid robots from humans—short of opening them up—is to test their ability to empathise, because the robots lack that, though they can fake it to some degree. This aspect of his philosophy seems to have been quite consistent. In 1976, commenting on a story written in 1953, he wrote “It’s not what you look like, or what planet you were born on. It’s how kind you are. The quality of kindness, to me, distinguishes us from rocks and sticks and metal, and will forever, whatever shape we take, wherever we go, whatever we become.” To lack empathy is to be inhuman. And that’s true of all of us: whenever we speak or act without empathy, we are behaving mechanically, regardless of how humane we might be at other times. And for me, as for Dick, that’s not just a metaphor, but the literal truth (see the post No wonder people don’t like Dennett on this).

But what about “the system”? Well, it is a machine, and the people who work within it are just its components, machine parts, as long as they do so, no matter how kind they are to their children when they get home. When I started writing this I intended, after a little web research, to explain organisations and institutions as memetic machines, but my googling has brought up nothing relevant so far, and I have several other things that I should be getting on with (like the good little component that I am).

I’ll say just a little about “destructive emotions” before closing for now. That is the title of a book by Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. The subtitle of the emotions book is “A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama”, and Goleman’s thinking is very Buddhist-oriented as well as being quite thoroughly science-based. Anger is not one of Buddhism’s traditional “mind poisons”, but Goleman rates it as one of “the big three toxic emotions: anger, anxiety and depression” (see Daniel Goleman on emotions and your health). I must admit I’ve yet to read the book, but I’m fairly familiar with the Buddhist take on this sort of thing, and it looks like he’s promoting his concept of the “toxic emotions” as a modern and more scientific version of the “mind poisons”.

I’m going to have to return to this another time, but I’ll publish anyway, and see if there’s any response.

(Later: if not anger, what’s to motivate us to do the right thing? Compassion: see the next post.)

January 16, 2010   Posted in: politics, pro-social  No Comments

Dennett lecture on “free will”

A couple of years ago Daniel Dennett gave a public lecture at Edinburgh University on free will, determinism and compatibilism (the view that determinism and free will are compatible). He’s a very good speaker (as well as a great writer) and I think everyone who is interested in these issues should see this whether their views tend to align with his or not (unless they’re already very familiar with his position on this). Personally, I think he’s guilty of serious “sins of omission”, but what he does say is extremely hard to argue with (excepting only where he says things like “that’s all there is to it!”). Here’s the lecture on Youtube. (I’ll stop posting such stuff to Facebook shortly, because I think Twitter’s much more suitable. There I’m RobinFaichney.)

January 11, 2010   Posted in: announcements  3 Comments

Tweetdeck makes it very easy…

to keep an eye on your Twitter and Facebook accounts (among others). You can post to them from it too, but that’s maybe not quite as convenient. It’s a free download, from http://www.tweetdeck.com/

January 8, 2010   Posted in: announcements  No Comments

VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization

VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization http://tinyurl.com/yceysmc

Neuroscience, culture, empathy, eastern philosophy, etc, etc. All in about seven minutes. Amazing.

January 6, 2010   Posted in: philosophy, psychology  No Comments

No wonder people don’t like Dennett

In Kinds of Minds (1996, p15), Daniel Dennett quotes Elaine Morgan:

The heart-stopping thing about the new-born is that, from minute one, there is somebody there. Anyone who bends over the cot and gazes at it is being gazed back at. (1995, p99)

Dennett responds:

As an observation about how we human observers instinctively react to eye contact, this is right on target, but it thereby shows how easily we can be misled.

Last night I told a friend, a mother of three, about this and she was horrified—understandably so, I’d say. Viewing and treating a very young child as a “little person” is essential for their socialisation, but Dennett doesn’t seem to care about that sort of thing. In his quest for objectivity, he misses what’s absolutely crucial in the development of a mind: intersubjectivity. He is fixated by cognition to the virtual exclusion of affect. For him folk psychology is all theory and no simulation. That the attribution of personality could be based on the latter rather than the former seems inconceivable to him.

I’d like to pursue the idea that Dennett’s efforts to eliminate subjectivity and intersubjectivity from his own thinking were what caused him to miss their significance in what he’s thinking about: the normal human mind. Given the progress recently made by others, however (such as Vittorio Gallese (Wikipedia)), this issue seems to take on rather a historical tinge: Dennett as dinosaur. Hmmm, yes, I think so, one of the big ones, but…

Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996.
Elaine Morgan, The Descent of the Child: Human Evolution from a New Perspective, Oxford University Press, 1995.

December 19, 2009   Posted in: Dennett, differentials, philosophy  3 Comments

Essay on-line

For what it’s worth, if anyone’s interested, I just uploaded my one-and-only piece of coursework this semester, an essay on theory-theory and simulation theory for the ontology of mind course. See Papers.

December 11, 2009   Posted in: announcements  No Comments

A researcher again!

I just realised how happy I am to be back to doing full-time research. Except that previously it was in subjects that, while certainly interesting, were far from what philosophy has always been for me, that is, simply fascinating. Well, some of it, anyway. Though I expect that much of the rest would be too, if I ever got around to really looking into it.

What’s happened is that my research proposal has been accepted and I’ve switched from the taught MSc programme to MSc by Research. And I could hardly have gotten a more interesting topic—fascinating, in fact: what meditation can tell us about consciousness. I’ve linked the proposal from the Papers page.

December 5, 2009   Posted in: announcements  No Comments

Blogging about the blog: metablogging?

It’s now clear I’m not going to have the time to blog about the experience of doing this taught MSc course. I’m sure my millions of readers will be devastated! I still hope to do the occasional blog on philosophical and personal topics, but we’ll see how it goes.

On a brighter note, I’ve uploaded the current version of my PhD thesis proposal. See Papers.

October 29, 2009   Posted in: announcements  No Comments

Blog to get relaunched (yet again)

Well I didn’t manage to do any more posts on my holiday, but that’s fading fast, like my tan, so onwards and upwards…

What I intend to do with this now is record my academic work and experience, to whatever extent time allows. I’m fairly sure I want to put my essays on-line, and I’ve checked that’s OK with the University. I’d like also to blog informally about the experience (as well as other related stuff), but that will be quite a low priority, so we’ll see how it goes.

Now I’m going to open a new page where I’ll record the progress on my essays, and when they’re complete (or perhaps even before that point) I’ll put links to on-line versions.

September 30, 2009   Posted in: announcements  2 Comments