Life w/ a Mac

I've been looking at Macs for about a year. I finally purchased one this week. But now I have to contend with learning how to use blogger.com with a Mac. You should notice that I've failed to create links in the previous post on Natural rationality. This is one thing I'm not sure how to do yet.

I'm learning; hopefully, I learn quickly. Back to dissertating!

Natural rationality

Natural rationality has a nice blog post on experimental philosophy (http://naturalrationality.blogspot.com/2007/07/moral-stance-brief-introduction-to.html). His blog isn't too shabby either - well, it's down right really cool.

HT: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2007/07/natural-rationa.html

Dissertation progress report

Many of you don't know that I'm currently working on revising my dissertation. I am!

At this stage, my dissertation advisor has suggested several revisions. Yesterday, I completely revised chapter 3, which turns out to be largely a review of literature chapter.

The next few blog posts will be dedicated to material in my dissertation, whether I explicitly refer to it or not. Your comments would be greatly appreciated. The first few blog posts will be excerpts from chapter 3.

Today (and tomorrow and next week, for that matter) I'm revising chapter 2. Chapter 2 is defending experimental philosophy, and it employs a lot of material from a colloquium paper I presented at Weber State University in April 2006. Given that much has been published about experimental philosophy as a philosophical subdiscipline, I've had to incorporate arguments from these published articles.

A full draft of my dissertation must be completed by August 10th.

Around the horn: x-Phi edition

Dave Chalmers has posted a re-cap of the x-phi meets a-phi conference held at ANU (available here). Ditto for Alex Plakias's blog post at GoGrue (available here).

Thomas Nadelhoffer has posted a list of experimental friendly departments (available here, the new post is somewhat a follow-up of this post); the list is ordered chronologically using Brian Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet Report.

Wes Anderson has created an experimental philosophy page on Facebook. Search for it using the group search box in Facebook.

What's going on in Wyoming?

I find this hard to believe. Anyone who's been to Wyoming knows how much space there is for wildlife to roam free. Although I think the new development has forced wildlife to relocate, I don't think mule deer or grouse are "in jeopardy."

Whether the new development has endangered a species is questionable too. I'm not supporting more drilling in Wyoming - after all, that would ruin Wyoming's charm - I just want more concrete evidence for the claims in the article.

Grow a brain!!!

Much discussion has been circulating around the blogosphere about a man who has only about 14% of his brain. Even though he fails to have all of his brain matter, he can still interact with the world at large, e.g., hold a job, raise a family, etc.

A picture of the man's brain I copied from Cognitive Daily is to the left of the text. Given the discovery of this man's brain and the recent finding that cochlear implants may restore hearing to those who went deaf as a child, the evidence seems to show that the brain is highly adaptable.

HT: Cognitive daily

The Kamm Poll

Matthew Liao, a graduate student partial to experimental philosophy, has posted a poll at Ethics-Etc. on a thought experiment that appears in Frances Kamm's new book Intricate Ethics. You can view the poll here.

Though I think the poll is sufficient for discussion on the blog, there might be a problem in its design. (Perhaps I'm being a bit uncharitable in my next comment; I'm not too concerned b/c it's nit-picky and one that I'm sure Matthew would fix in a laboratory setting.) The question is ambiguous. It asks, "is it permissible to bomb?" Of course, the answer has to be yes because one could bomb anything if they choose to do so - they just have to have the right equipment, i.e., a bomb and - presumably - a plane from which to drop the bomb. The question needs to be more specific. The question might be: is it morally permissible to bomb the munitions factory? (I believe this is implied by the context of the blog post.)

Action under a description: what the folk say

Here's a brief experimental philosophy paper (click here) I threw together very quickly based on some data I gathered in the Spring. The paper argues that people's intuitions about reasons for action influence the way they individuate actions.

Comments are welcome and very much appreciated!

(I may take down the link if I find too many problems with the paper when I read it through again.)

MySpace and Experimental Philosophy

(I believe) Thomas Nadelhoffer has set up a myspace page for experimental philosophy. (At the very least, he's alerted us to the page in the experimental philosophy blog.) See it here.

I'm not a member of myspace.com, but I'm a member of Facebook. And Facebook doesn't have an experimental philosophy group or member page. So, Facebook members - especially those who are friendly to the experimental philosophy movement - may want to pull together a page (or at least a group) for experimental philosophy.

What would be really interesting is for a Facebook group to emerge with a polling widget so that we can poll visitors to the experimental philosophy Facebook group page. We may want to start with an easy question like: "how many fingers am I holding up?" (Sorry, inside joke.)

HT: Experimental Philosophy

Addendum: I stand corrected. There are two groups in Facebook concerning experimental philosophy. But I don't think they're what Nadelhoffer or any other x-phil'ers have in mind.

Wonderful tribute to a great "college teacher"

Stuart Rachels has a wonderful webpage dedicated to his father James Rachels, a philosophy professor and very influential moral philosopher of the 20th century. He died of bladder cancer in 2003. His books (and edited collections) are very popular in introductory and advanced undergraduate philosophy classes.

Anyone interested in moral philosophy, particularly applied ethics, should read at least one of James's essays. Perhaps his most widely read work is "Active and Passive Euthanasia." His argument is that there's no rational basis for the distinction between killing and letting die.

HT: Leiter Reports

Carnival time... 'the Dog Days of Summer'

The new philosophy carnival is available here.

Thinking Blindspots

How many times have you read an essay by an author who's considered very important by everyone you know only to ask: why didn't s/he say x? It turns out that thinking has blindspots, just as there are blindspots in driving a car. See this brief article on the phenomena.

If we have thinking blindspots, then could this at least partly contribute to an explanation of why we are so bad at selection tasks? Perhaps better thinkers have a greater capacity not to become distracted by the details, whereas everyday folks become easily distracted by the details.

Muscle memory or brain power?

Sport psychologists, personal trainers, and - sometimes more importantly - golf professionals speak of "muscle memory." According to their interpretation, since the body's muscles have some kind of special memory capacity, you will be able to repeat appropriate mechanical physical movement just by doing whatever it is you're doing well over and over again.

I've always been skeptical of the notion of muscle memory, even though - for all intents and purposes - the best athletes in the world seem able to repeat physical movements very precisely.

I've thought that our brain is composed in such a way that the best athletes in the world are able to repeat physical movements precisely because they are able to learn from their mistakes and not repeat those mistakes. Apparently, this applies to the lay person too. As CogNews reports, a new study at the University of Exeter may shed some much needed light on the idea of muscle memory.

If a study's not already been done, one may want to compare the way athletes learn from their mistakes and the way that a lay person, i.e., a non-athlete but a "weekend" golfer or an "intramural" softball or baseball player, learns from mistakes. I imagine there must be some kind of statistically significant difference to account for the professional - amateur divide.