Experimental philosophy of Freedom...

Free Will....

Philosophy : The Science of Free Will

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds | Prospect Magazine March 2009 issue 156

Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds

Situations have a bigger influence on how we behave than we think they do. Perhaps, then, rather than worrying so much about character building in an Aristotelian vein we should be making people more aware of how easily apparently irrelevant factors can shape what we do. As Appiah asks: “Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”

Is this all a storm in a common room? The repercussions of the experiments cannot be so easily dismissed. Think of the impact on political liberalism. At the heart of liberalism is the idea that an educated adult is and should be capable of choosing how he or she lives. But if, for example, situations affect us more than the reasons we give for our actions, and we use those reasons to rationalise them retrospectively, this assumption may need revision. This branch of x-phi might be nudging us towards Nietzsche’s view that what we take to be the inexorable conclusions of clear rational thought are nothing but reformulations of our innermost desires—disguised as the products of logic. We are not as in control of our thoughts as we thought. Nietzsche fully grasped how profoundly unsettling this notion was.

On attention spans and Jim's hard determinism

So I was a test subject (think mouse running on that wheel thing) in a research study looking at cognitive skill deficiencies (or something to that effect) in those with bipolar disorder.

It was fun.

One of the questions she asked me was about my attention span problems. I replied bio-chemical. To which she looked at me funny, paused, looked down and then tried to follow up. I replied that since I have been tested to have adhd, and that my Psychiatrist hoped that the antidepressant I started taking would reduce anxiety levels reducing problems with attention span (and it has), that it must be neurotransmitters. She wrote it down and moved on.

Something tells me most people don't blame things on their neurotransmitters. Go figure.

Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Situationism

Review: The Political Mind by George Lakoff

Owen Flanagan knocks around Lakoff's recent book The Political Mind pretty successfully.

I don't think it takes away from the merits of the book, Flanagan is making a broader intellectual history challenge to Lakoff's context.

Also I'm gonna plug Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend.

ex phi in Scientific American

Can a Robot, an Insect or God Be Aware?

the end of economics as we know it...

The tendencies of irrational behavior

experimental philosophy

Good Political Theory post

The Fight for Science (and Justice)

Moral and political philosophers are concerned with how we ought to act, as both individuals and collectivity as societies. So we ask questions like: What makes an action right or wrong? What constitutes the “good life”? How should society distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation (like wealth, and rights and freedoms)?

As philosophers, it is not surprising that we turn to the history of philosophy to help us grapple with these timeless normative questions. So we turn to intellectual giants like Aristotle, Kant, Mill and Marx for guidance on how we can sensibly deliberate about the demands of morality and justice.....

.....But the history of Western moral and political thought is one that has, for the most part, evolved from religion or speculations into human nature. We now live in the rare and exciting times were this “veil of ignorance” is being lifted! We are beginning to see and understand how our brain works, why we age and the role genes play in things like intelligence and political behavior. Imagine if Aristotle, Hobbes or Locke were alive today. Do you think they would be flipping through the pages of philosophy journals pondering the abstract ideals of equality, or do you think they would be reading science journals and pondering the really big questions concerning the future of humanity? I reckon it would be the latter.....

....So my central point so far is this- if philosophers really “love wisdom”, then we ought to recognize the unprecedented bounty of knowledge that science now provides us with. Rather than viewing moral and political philosophy as a dialogue that occurred among the greats of the past, we should strive to connect the new empirical insights to these debates. While we may not have intellectual giants like Aristotle, Mill or Marx living among us today, what we do have is a wealth of empirical knowledge that ought to be an integral part of moral and political philosophy. No doubt some of you will still ask- “But why?” So let me come at this again from a different angle.

Moral and political philosophers should aspire to narrow the gap between science and normative theory because: (1) no other topic comes even close in terms of the important impact science has had on the wellbeing of humans; (2) these important issues have not received their fair share of attention from moral and political philosophers; and (3) if you want to teach something that will really get students excited about the relevance of moral and political philosophy to the real world, then explore the link between science and moral (be it moral psychology or applied ethics) and political philosophy (e.g. distributive justice).

Freedom

Freedom: an Experimental Analysis

Consider the following case:

Tanya lives in a small, newly created country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most important issue in the region is the treatment of a disenfranchised minority that lives throughout the country. Tanya truly dislikes the minority and wants to further damage them if she can. While public opinion concerning the minority varies greatly, the government has taken the side of the minority. Consequently, a ban has been placed on any action or public speech that is intended to hurt the disenfranchised minority. In other words, the government has made laws against hurting the minority, but Tanya wishes she could hurt them.

Now ask yourself: 'To what extent do these laws diminish Tanya's freedom?'

Once you have decided on the answer to this question, consider a very similar case with one important difference: Tanya wants to help the disenfranchised minority.

Tanya lives in a small, newly created country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most important issue in the region is the treatment of a disenfranchised minority that lives throughout the country. Tanya truly cares about the minority and really wants to help them if she can. While public opinion concerning the minority varies greatly, the government has sided against the minority. Consequently, a ban has been placed on any action or public speech that is intended to help the disenfranchised minority. In other words, the government has made laws against helping the minority, but Tanya wishes she could help them.

Now ask yourself the same question again: 'To what extent do these laws diminish Tanya's freedom?'

During an experiment I conducted in which participants were presented with these two cases, I discovered an very interesting result. Participants thought that Tanya's freedom was much more diminished in the second case than in the first. In other words, subjects thought that people's freedom was much more diminished when they were prevented from doing something morally good than when they were prevented from doing something morally bad. After noticing this interesting result, I conducted two other studies which further confirmed the interesting effect found in the first survey.

Anythoughts... in regard to the Positive and Negative Liberty debate?


"A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him." --George Orwell

Blogs do impact peoples lives... bloggers are a part of our cultural narrative, intellectual climate; and even though we almost never meet many of our fellow bloggers and/or readers they are human to us in so many ways...

lovely post on the death of a blogger... from her readers...

the color of your dreams...

New Studies on Black and White vs. Colored Dreaming

Understanding Language

Grey Matters: Understanding LanguageWhy are humans the only species to have language? Is there something special about our brains? Are there genes that have evolved for language? In this talk, Jeff Elman, UCSD professor of cognitive science and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, discusses some of the exciting new research that helps us understand what it is about human language that is so different from other animals' communication systems, and what about our biology might make language possible.