Tag Archives: philosophy

reading and memory

I like this post on reading and memory from Horace Bianchon.

…the value of reading lies less in retention than in integration. A good book tweaks your internal models and you begin to see a familiar problem in a new frame. You revise the assumptions behind a mental shortcut or you absorb a phrase that becomes part of your vocabulary of thought.

I read for two reasons. First, it’s my favorite leisure activity, one of the only times I achieve the “flow state” that is the key to happiness in the moment for me. But second, yes, it is about tweaking my “internal mental model” of the world. Over time, that will change how I perceive and react to the world and the small and large decisions I make and ultimately how I live my life. I am a different person than I was 5 or 10 years ago, and I will be a different person 5 or 10 years from now (unless I’m dead), and that is largely from those tweaks to my mental model of the universe I am part of. Because that mental model of the universe IS the universe for me. We are each living side by side and interacting with each other within our unique mental models of the universe. Now, I would argue that for practical human purposes, we should assume that there IS such a thing as objective reality, even if we can’t measure or agree with perfect clarity on what it is. We can keep searching for it and approaching it, and some of our mental models are going to be a lot closer to the true reality than others.

7 philosophy books for beginners

Openculture.com has a list of where to start on philosophy. Perhaps I’ll add these to my retirement reading list.

They are as follows: Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, Simon Blackburn’s Think, the complete works of Plato, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, St. Augustine’s Confessions, René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

QBism

According to Scientific American, QBism is an idea stemming from quantum physics that objective reality does not exist, and rather the only true reality is that experienced from the point of view of each of our individual minds.

I happen to be reading The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene, which is about parallel universes. One (of many, many) things he talks about is the “anthropic principle”. The anthropic principle says that the answer to the question “why are we here” (humans, on Earth), is that Earth is the one out of countless planets and countless solar systems and galaxies that happens to have the conditions allowing us to be here and ask the question. This goes even farther if we accept the idea of parallel universes, to say that the reason we are here in this universe, which has all the right physical constants etc. for us to exist, is that this is the universe where we are able to exist and ask the questions. In this view, the number of universes is so large that there essentially has to be at least one allowing us to exist.

There is another theory that the entire universe exists inside a multidimensional “super string”, there are many of these floating around in the ether somehow, and two of them can keep colliding and drawing apart in an endless cycle that has no end or beginning – this would be an explanation for the big bang.

So to people who say science can’t answer the “why” questions, you don’t have to accept these answers, but they are at least plausible and possible. They may not be testable with our current knowledge and technology, but they can be investigated by continuing to establish the building blocks that would allow us to test them some day.

And none of this really matters to the daily experience of being inside an individual human mind, which brings us back to where we started.

virtual reality and philosophy

That’s right, this article is about virtual reality and philosophy.

Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers?

This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity. Among these examples are conscious experience itself, “Bayesian” and social VR, amnestic re-embodiment, merging human-controlled avatars and virtual agents, virtual ego-dissolution, controlling the reality/virtuality continuum, the confluence of VR and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as of VR and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), VR-based social hallucinations and the emergence of a virtual Lebenswelt, religious faith and practical phenomenology. Hopefully, these examples can serve as first proposals for intensified future interaction and mark out some potential new directions for research.

The main thing I got from this article is that it is really…long. It starts with a glossary of terms you need to learn before you read the rest of the paper, then gets longer from there.

Charles Bukowski on bullshit jobs

If a bullshit job is defined as one that is unfulfilling but pays well (see my post the other day), where does that leave all the people with unfulfilling jobs that don’t pay well? I recently came across this amusing but not so optimistic letter from Charles Bukowski:

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? …

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

So the answer is quit and become a bum? I’m not quite so sure. I’ll have a good look at my fingernails and give it some thought.

St. Augustine on lying

It turns out St. Augustine wrote a long essay on the subject of lying in 395. So George Costanza’s “it’s not lie if you believe it!” actually goes back a little further.

For not every one who says a false thing lies, if he believes or opines that to be true which he says. Now between believing and opining there is this difference, that sometimes he who believes feels that he does not know that which he believes, (although he may know himself to be ignorant of a thing, and yet have no doubt at all concerning it, if he most firmly believes it:) whereas he who opines, thinks he knows that which he does not know. Now whoever utters that which he holds in his mind either as belief or as opinion, even though it be false, he lies not. For this he owes to the faith of his utterance, that he thereby produce that which he holds in his mind, and has in that way in which he produces it. Not that he is without fault, although he lie not, if either he believes what he ought not to believe, or thinks he knowswhat he knows not, even though it should be true: for he accounts an unknown thing for a known.

So if you believe the thing you say even though there may be incontrovertible evidence out there in the world that it is false, and you just aren’t aware of that evidence or consciously ignoring it, you are not a liar. You may still be an arrogant idiot of course.

free philosophy courses

That’s right, this is a list of free online (or podcast) philosophy courses. I think if more people studied ethics and morality throughout their lives, and really challenged themselves to struggle with it (them?) on a regular basis, the world would be a better place. And no, I am not talking about just business and professional ethics, but personal ethics or morality, whichever you prefer to call it.