Second Annual Online Consciousness Conference

This might seem a bit gimmicky (or maybe I’m just behind the times—I certainly am as regards this announcement) but some big names are taking part.

February 23, 2010   Posted in: announcements, consciousness, philosophy  No Comments

Effects of media violence ignored by media?

I’ve been reading a paper by Susan Hurley (@Wikipedia), a philosopher who sadly died a couple of years ago aged only 53, for a university course. The title is “By-passing conscious control: imitation, media violence and freedom of speech.” (In S Pockett et al, Does Consciousness Cause Behaviour, MIT Press. I might be doing an essay on whether conscious control is really required for “free will.”) It really surprised me to learn that there seems to be widespread agreement among researchers in the relevant disciplines that there’s a link between the viewing of media violence and subsequent aggressive behaviour: “The consensus among researchers is that there is indeed a robust causal influence here.” (p301)

The last I heard about this, admittedly several years ago, was from a media studies academic, who insisted that no such link had ever been shown. However, Hurley cites many studies, including meta-studies (reviews of multiple studies), and the overall effect is very convincing. This bit particularly impressed me:

What is the magnitude of the effects of media violence? The effect sizes shown in the 1994 meta-analysis are larger than the effects of calcium intake on bone mass, lead exposure on IQ in children, or asbestos exposure to cancer… (p303)

So why isn’t this widely known? IMHO, the main reason is that there are connections between news and entertainment media businesses, and it’s not in their interests to publicise it. After all, what’s more important, to reduce the level of violence in society, or to maintain the profitability of big business? What do you think they think?

February 16, 2010   Posted in: philosophy, politics, psychology  No Comments

My study plans

After much cogitation, mainly about PhD possibilities, but also (very briefly) about whether I even want to complete the MSc, yesterday I reached some firm conclusions, which I’m publicising to confirm my commitment to them (ie for my own benefit even if nobody else is interested, which is entirely possible).

The main development yesterday was my realisation of the link between the MSc dissertation and what is now my main aim for a PhD project. So here’s my favourite expression of what I very much hope to do a PhD on:

It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory. Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland.

My thing always used to be consciousness, but having a much clearer view of the state of the art since starting the MSc course, I don’t believe there’s very much left to do there. Information is something else, and I have some very definite ideas, which remain intact even after studying Dretske and others last semester, and spending much of this week looking at philosophy of info on the web.

The link between the MSc dissertation (see the proposal) and the proposed PhD project is memes, as items of information. I’m now thinking that it might be possible to explain the difference between Blackmore’s and Dennett’s concepts of consciousness largely in memetic terms. That’s basically because Blackmore, unlike Dennett, provides a convincing account of how memes get going in the first place (though she didn’t make the link between that story and consciousness). That unfortunately reduces the emphasis on meditation (probably, I think), but you can’t study everything!

If that works out as I hope and expect it will, it’ll make a great jumping off point for the PhD project. The timing isn’t so great, though, because as yet I’ve no idea who might be willing and able to supervise it, so I’ll probably have to take a year out, and start the PhD in September 2011, which seems a long, long way away! But of course I don’t have to wait until then to get working on it…

[Later: I should maybe make it clear that my commitment to this plan isn't absolute, but any alternative would have to be very good to compete. Short of sheer fantasy, I can hardly think of anything better!]

February 13, 2010   Posted in: announcements, Dennett, information, philosophy  No Comments

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow

I discovered this while working on my PhD research proposal (which at the moment is on again, though maybe not for long). I’m interested in the implications of altered states such as flow for philosophy of mind. But you don’t need to be a philosopher or psychologist to learn a lot from this. Some of the comments are very interesting too, which is why I’ve linked to the page rather than embedding the video here.

January 30, 2010   Posted in: philosophy, psychology  No Comments

Empathy with robots

This is a fascinating, if short, article in New Scientist magazine.

Exposure to robots in the movies and television could affect our ability to empathise with synthetic beings, suggests a study of the brain regions thought to be responsible for our ability to relate to each other.

The team found that the MNS [mirror neuron system] was activated when the robot performed actions – but only when the actions were robotic, not when the robot’s motion was smooth and human-like.

When they watched the virtual human, exactly the opposite was true – the MNS was activated when the movements were human-like, but not when they were robotic – and the contrast was even greater between these two scenarios.

January 22, 2010   Posted in: pro-social, psychology  No Comments

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