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

Il Pleut…

…not right now, but it seems a good title given what my day’s been like.

It got off to a good start, getting away from the hotel near Canterbury in good time to catch the 8am sailing from Dover to Dunkerque (check in 45 minutes early, after dealing with customs and passport control, which in this case consisted of a chap looking at you from a kiosk as you drove past). The weather was dullish but dry and still.

The crossing was uneventful. I’d paid a tenner extra to get access to the VIP lounge, but there were no VIPs there, or at least I didn’t recognise anybody. It was very quite, just me, a couple of retired-seeming couples and two or three business people. I spoke to one of the couples and we took turns watching each others’ things, allowing some unencumbered exploring, not that there was much to see, besides the sea. (Sorry.) And the duty free, of course, but I resisted the temptation. I’ve been cutting right back on the demon drink recently. Which is not to say I might not pick something up on the way back.

(By the way, maybe the best bit of the VIP treatment is priority in getting on and off—I was one of the first two or three cars each way. Some people might consider that alone worth £10.)

I managed to find a place to park just outside the docks and pointed the satnav at the Auchan Hypermarket, which I vaguely remembered from the last time I took a vehicle across the channel, about 20 years ago. It was just as big and stuffed full of stuff as back then, but it was a bit of a waste of time because all I got was a cheese roll. Well, actually half a French loaf split and loaded with butter and Leerdammer, which was very nice and quite cheap, but I could have gotten something just as good on the road, and it was noon before I got going, with a six hour drive to look forward to.

I think it rained, quite heavily, for somewhere between five and six hours, altogether, though not quite continuously. The journey actually took a bit over seven, door to door.

It’s all sort of merging into one tedious, soggy memory, but two points stand out.

(1) My first encounter with the French toll road system. I was slightly apprehensive about this, after reading that you should be careful to have plenty of change, and so on. There were no manned kiosks, and when I drove up to the box, which of course was on the wrong side, all I could see was a slot, with no indications as to what should be put in it. I will freely admit that at this point I panicked, put the car into reverse, switched on the hazard lights, and starting moving back very slowly. Then I made a very stupid move, causing a large truck to brake very sharply. For that I got, not so much a mouthful of abuse, as a belly and two lungs-full. The only word I understood was “English”. He must have seen the GB plate. The only response was a sort of shrug, but as apologetic as I could make it, unlike the French variety. Eventually he gave up trying to convey his meaning to me and drove on. I’ll cut the story short—it includes me crossing the streams of traffic back and forth on foot trying to find a clue what to do—eventually I decided that it must be a collection point for tickets, and if you didn’t have one, it would let you through, but when I drove up to it the second time I noticed another slot, this one with a ticket poking out, so I grabbed it, the barrier went up and I was on my way.

(2) The last hour or so stands out too, and not because it was such great fun, either. But I need to go back and tell you that I’d originally intended to put the beam converters on the headlights in Dunkerque, but forgot. I lived to regret that, because due to a combination of the time difference and the weather it began to get dark much earlier than I’d expected. I’d been running on sidelights most of the afternoon anyway, but it got to the point where just about everybody else had their headlights on with about 40 minutes of the journey left. I was on an autoroute so I couldn’t just stop and do it, and it really wasn’t a job I fancied attempting in the pouring rain anyway. I tucked in behind a big truck and prayed we wouldn’t get overtaken by a police car. We were, but in one of my few pieces of luck on this journey so far, it happened to be when the sky had lightened up a bit. Or maybe they wouldn’t have noticed, or cared that much, anyway, but the point is that I got away with it.

I’m still thinking about whether this is a good substitute for a postcard. I have free wifi where I’m staying tonight, but that’s a bit iffy when I get where I’m going. It would be nice to add to this, with some photos, though. We’ll see how it goes. Another six hours of driving tomorrow, but I’ll get a much earlier start, and there should be plenty of time to pitch the tent and get a meal under my belt before the sun goes down on the Côte d’Azur tomorrow night! (And the weather forecast is pretty good!)

September 1, 2009   Posted in: announcements  No Comments

My knee and me

Nobody understands me.

OK, that’s an emotional over-reaction. Nobody understands my knee.

But that’s not true either. Or rather, it is and it isn’t.

I have a patellar maltracking problem in my left knee, due to atrophied quadriceps muscles, in turn due to previous knee problems. As the knee bends and straightens, the kneecap tracks off to the side of where it should be, causing irritation to the underlying tissues, because the quads aren’t pulling as strongly as they should in the opposite direction.

That condition is well understood by the appropriate medical specialists. But, in my experience, management of it is not. I’ve seen two specialists, two or three general practitioners and maybe six or eight physiotherapists. Of those who thought they understood the situation, all seemed to think I was over-sensitive to pain, or lazy, or that the main issue was really depression, or some combination of these. You might well be thinking they might be right, but I’m writing this, for myself in the first instance, to try to get down what’s really going on in and around my knee, and in the hope that it might help somebody in a similar situation.

OK, I was over-reacting, at the top of this piece, for a number of reasons that I won’t bore you with, except this one: I’m prone to depression anyway (so the medics were not completely wrong, or at least had some excuse), and this condition, imposing physical inactivity and social isolation as it does when at its worst (in combination with some other factors), dragged me down really quite deep at times, and it’s been threatening to do so again. This after a longish period of feeling all that was behind me—I’ve been off anti-depressants for the best part of a year.

The problem, which many people don’t seem able to get their heads around, though it seems quite simple to me, is that sometimes the condition flares up—the irritation causes inflammation—and that’s a slippery slope, because the worse it is, the more easily it’s made worse still. And on the other side of the coin, the less flared up it is, the more of the exercises I can do, so the better still it gets. Until I go too far.

The solution as the medics see it is very simple: build up the quads. But, depending on the degree of flare-up, the exercises can make it worse.

For a few months up to around mid-summer I was doing the exercises, and the quads were getting stronger, to the point where one day I managed a nine mile walk over rough ground with no ill-effects, the most I’d done in several years. But the following week I went to a three day conference in Edinburgh, by public transport (parking in Edinburgh is nightmarish), which was too much, and then, a week or so later, when it seemed to have improved a little, I thought I’d get away with doing some gardening, but I was wrong, and that started a downward spiral, so that now I’m spending all day every day sitting in my easy chair using my laptop, reading, playing my guitar or watching television. Not only are the unavoidable trips to the toilet and kitchen painful—not seriously so, but a sign it’s getting no better—but just getting a bit tense, so the quads contract a little, hurts too. Meanwhile, because that’s hardly exercise, they’re wasting away again.

I think maybe what the medics don’t appreciate is that, when it’s flared up, the off-centre kneecap is no longer the main problem. Almost any movement that involves the kneecap causes pain and prolongs the flare-up. The priority at that point is to get the inflammation down. (By the way, the inflammation is of the tissue under the kneecap, and it’s not visible, the pain being the only symptom.) But, back when I was still talking to the medics, it was flared up most of the time, but I didn’t really appreciate that and so failed to communicate it to them, and they just said “if you won’t do the exercises, it won’t get better”. But to me, doing the exercises was one of the surest ways to make it worse.

Five weeks later: Not only am I now managing to attend a full-time course at Edinburgh University, but I’m keeping the business going too, and I’ve had a two week camping holiday on the French Riviera since writing the foregoing. What made the difference? In general terms, a much more positive attitude. Specifically, I realised that I had to learn to walk again, in a way, but that it would be very easy. I already knew that I could do a great deal more wearing my walking boots than without them. What I then realised was that I should walk as if wearing them even when I wasn’t. My main problem had been not using my left leg properly, but the relative inflexibility of the boots forced me to do that, and I just had to get into the habit of doing it all the time. So far so good!

August 21, 2009   Posted in: announcements  No Comments