Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

DTMD abstract and slides

My talk at the DTMD workshop (see recent posts) is this afternoon, and I thought I’d make the abstract and slides available.

September 7, 2011   Posted in: announcements, consciousness, Dennett, information, philosophy, physics  No Comments

Dissertation comments

Throwing caution to the wind, I’ve decided to publish selected markers’ comments on the MSc dissertation. I’m striving for a degree of balance, here, but I’m not claiming to have achieved it. There were two markers, who wrote about 3.5 sides of A4 paper between them. (“Selected” in the first sentence applies to the comments, [...]

July 21, 2011   Posted in: announcements, philosophy  No Comments

Feeling my way forward

I was slightly shocked to realise that it’s been nearly ten months since my last post. I suppose I got out of the habit while working on my MSc dissertation. The eventual submission date was 22nd December, and since then I’ve been trying to decide what to do next. For a number of reasons—mainly the [...]

March 19, 2011   Posted in: announcements, information, philosophy  3 Comments

A movie with its heart in the right place, but…

…to be honest I haven’t seen Being In The World yet (it doesn’t seem to have been released), so what follows is based on the website, but there are enough trailers, clips and text there to get me thinking. Being In The World is a new movie by Tao Ruspoli, and, as is common these [...]

March 30, 2010   Posted in: AI, philosophy, psychology  No Comments

The brights, mysticism and me

I recently joined the brights. What’s a bright? A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview A bright’s worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview That’s from the website’s home page. Naturalism is “the doctrine that the world can [...]

March 2, 2010   Posted in: philosophy  No Comments

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

January 30, 2010   Posted in: philosophy, psychology  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