Specter of Reason

The following is a post I put together for my TOK class this year:  We're often told to listen to reason and not our emotions.  Emotions might help us in the moment, but they won't help us in the long run.  Emotions are about immediate gratification (getting what you want right away, living for the moment), not long-term planning.  Emotions are wild and unpredictable.  Reason is domesticated, calm and respectable. But is that really so? Or is the truth more like this:  People who try to change your mind about something by telling you not to follow your emotions are actually being hypocrites.  When they tell you not to follow your emotions, they are actually appealing to your emotions.  They are appealing to your sense of responsibility, and where does responsibility come from, if not emotions? Emotions give us love, empathy, compassion, joy and excitement.  Emotions may just be the glue that holds society together. Consider this sce...

The following is a post I put together for my Theory of Knowledge class this year: How important is your language for your sense of identity--your identity as an individual, but also as a member of a nation?  It's common nowadays to associate a nation with a language, even though many nations have more than one national language.  Should a nation be defined by a single language? Consider what political factors have shaped the language that you speak.  Why do you speak Polish, Flemish, Danish, Czech, German, Russian or English?  Why did you grow up learning your native tongue, and why are you learning new languages today?  Are you learning new languages so that you can join new knowledge communities?  Bigger knowledge communities?  Better knowledge communities? Communities rely on communication.  Community, communicate:  Both words come from the latin root,  communia , meaning a large gathering of people sharing a way of life. Commu...

What follows is a collection of illusions I put together for my Theory of Knowledge class this year:  Everybody's familiar with optical illusions, but there are other kinds as well.  We experimented with tactile illusions in class and I mentioned that there are also aural illusions.  Have you experienced any other kinds of illusions?  Illusions of taste or smell? Here are some optical and auditory illusions to enjoy.  What do they reveal about the limits of sense perception? First, an image.  When you look at it for the first time, you might not see a pattern at all.  It just looks like random black spots on a white background.  But eventually, all of a sudden, you can see a picture. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Here's another one with the same effect:             These examples raise the question:  How much of what we see depends on what we have learned to see? The same phenomenon c...

Deepak Chopra, a well-known spiritualist, does not like physicalism. Physicalism says that everything is physical and can be entirely explained in non-mental terms.  So, according to physicalism, consciousness can ultimately be explained in physical, non-mental terms.  Chopra says this view is an unreasonable dogma, and that it makes much more sense to believe that thoughts are non-physical.  When we think, he says, non-physical phenomena affect the workings of the brain.  To add muscle to his position, he has issued a challenge:  According to the New Statesman , he will award  a prize of $1 million  to anyone who can demonstrate, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, that human consciousness is created by the brain.   This is not a challenge to demonstrate that Chopra has misunderstood physics, nor is it an invitation to critique his own arguments about consciousness.  The challenge is to scientifically demonstrate that brains create consc...

I've been discussing things to do with Sam Harris' Moral Landscape Challenge lately, but I forgot to congratulate the winner, Ryan Born .  Though it was Harris' challenge, it was Russell Blackford who chose the winning essay.  I've only read a handful of the entries, but I don't recall reading any that were better than Ryan's.  It's a well-written and interesting essay, and I trust Russell to have found the best of the lot. That said, I'm not thrilled with Ryan's essay.  I like the general strategy of taking up the Value Problem.  However, Ryan's primary tactic is problematic.  He takes up the idea of self-justification in a confused, or at least confusing, way.  Sam Harris has said that he would change his mind if he could be convinced that "other branches of science are self-justifying in a way that a science of morality could never be."  Ryan mistakenly takes Harris to be saying that science is self-justifying.  This allows Harris ...

This is a logic puzzle I came up with over twenty years ago, when I was in high school.  I will post the solution in a separate post in a week or so, if nobody solves it before then. Once upon a time, a bored and whimsical millionaire invited five of the world's most prominent logicians to his house for a game.  The winners were promised a prize of five million dollars.  (The losers, needless to say, were promised nothing.)  "But you must use logic," said the millionaire.  "This is no game of chance!" The millionaire placed a hat on each of their heads such that nobody could see the color of their own hat.  They could only see the colors of the hats on the other logicians' heads.  They were told that the hats were randomly selected from a batch consisting of five white, three red and one black hat.  The logicians were then numbered one through five and told that they would be asked, in order, if they knew the color of their own hat.  They...

I've just turned my attention to Plato's Cratylus for the first time.  Nothing of significance brought it to my attention, but when I learned it is considered his only sustained treatment of language, and that it deals with the question of whether meaning is natural or conventional, I thought I should become familiar with it.  I have only looked at the very beginning, but already I wish I had more time to explore it and its relation to 20th-century philosophy of language. At the beginning of the dialogue, Hermogenes affirms a view of names which is relativistic:  the designation of a name is entirely dependent on conventional usage.  The rightness or wrongness of word meaning is relative to a linguistic community.  If I use the word "horse" to refer to humans, and "human" to refer to horses, then I am right as far as my own usage goes, though I am not in line with the majority. Socrates leads Hermogenes to find a problem with this view with a curious arg...