I'm not talking about inspiring children though.

How do adults know science is "cool", or that they "fucking love" science, from watching a video on Youtube or looking at a well produced photograph?

Should a person claim to "fucking love" history because they see a painting of George Washington?

Doesn't it seem weird you have backwater guys on the internet bitching and moaning about nihilism, jerking off to their tears, while the guy who coined the term "Hard Problem" is talking about consciousness collapsing the wave function and how he's increasingly seeing a role for mental causation?

(Why Kitchen Sink)

Great interview with one of the biggest names in philosophy, going over his past and present views on the subject of consciousness:

On the problem of consciousness and the nature of philosophy

The easy problems of consciousness are those about explaining the relevant objective functions associated with consciousness, such as perceptual discrimination, control of behavior, verbal report, and so on, whereas the hard problem is that of subjective experience. In the book, I went on to describe my preferred theoretical approach to the hard problem. I always thought of the distinction between the easy problems and the hard problem as just five minutes in the background of saying the obvious. Everybody knew all along what the hard problem was, but at least the terminology seemed to catch on quite fast, especially for scientists. It has proved to be quite a useful heuristic device for isolating the problem of what philosophers call “phenomenal consciousness”, and drawing it to the attention of scientists and so on as a distinctive problem.

I have also been exploring interactionism – which I was quite opposed to in the book – which is the idea that consciousness might be non-physical but still play a causal role in physics, and I have become interested in the idea that consciousness might play a role in quantum mechanics and in collapsing wave functions, which in fact is what I’m going to talk about in the talk tomorrow.8 In the book I actually argued against that. I said, “I don’t think this can work and here’s why”, whereas I’m now inclined to think that that was much too hasty. So I’m at least interested in exploring that idea. I don’t know that it’s correct, but it might be. Another direction in which my views have developed is that I have become much more inclined to see deep connections between consciousness and intentionality than I was at the time of writing the book.

I said that intentionality has functional aspects and phenomenal aspects, and maybe I put more emphasis on the functional aspects, whereas now I would be inclined to put more of the emphasis on the phenomenal aspects. Maybe the core of intentionality is the kind of intentionality you find in consciousness.

I think panpsychism has many attractions. It offers a very integrated picture of the place of consciousness in the natural order, in a monistic, simple picture. It provides a potential causal role of consciousness in the natural order. I think of it as having many of the advantages of materialism and the advantages of dualism without having the disadvantages associated with the respective positions: too much reductionism for materialism and problems of physics for dualism. The big problem for panpsychism for me is not the counter-intuitiveness; I don’t find it particularly crazy or outlandish. It’s maybe a little counter-intuitive, but I don’t know that our intuitions about consciousness and where it is present count for all that much. After all, it’s not something you can observe. These intuitions are very culturally relative and some cultures have found it very plausible.

I consider the main problem with panpsychism to be the combination problem. How do the little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of consciousness we have?

What I’m skeptical of are certain reductionist approaches to the problem of consciousness, about developing a theory of consciousness in wholly physical terms. I think that’s probably not going to work out. But I’m very much open to scientific non-reductive approaches to consciousness, which take consciousness to be something fundamental and primitive and develop theoretical principles about it. I think there’s a lot of that happening right now. The talk I’m doing tomorrow can be viewed as a contribution to that project – consciousness collapsing wave functions.14 The work of someone like Tononi is also interesting.15 He very much sees his work as a non-reductive approach. So what we have got out of the science of consciousness in recent years, as I see it, is basically a non-reductive science. It doesn’t try to reduce consciousness to the brain.

Ted Dace relates how morphic resonance came about from Sheldrake reading about some interesting philosophical positions regarding time & memory:

http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/Examskeptics/Dace_analysis.html

The job of the brain, according to Bergson, is to calculate possible actions in response to sensory data.7Inputs are converted in the most efficient possible way to outputs. That’s all there is to it. Within those cerebral folds you will find no representations of the world, no emotions, no thoughts, no desires, no psyche. For Bergson, locating the qualities of mind in the brain amounts to a kind of neural mysticism. Is the brain so special that it can simultaneously be a part of the physical world and yet step outside it to represent it?8

Rather than constructing images of the world, says Bergson, our brains simply facilitate our perception of it. Because the brain does its job, we directly perceive what is around us. But how does Bergson grapple with memory? In this case, the images we perceive are no longer physically given. Surely here we must rely on cerebral storage of images.

Just as he maintains that we actually apprehend what is around us, Bergson argues that in memory we literally perceive the past. Far from merely representing the past, a memory is the resuscitation of a perception.9 To explain how this can be, Bergson must reinvent time itself.

A half century after Russell’s investigation, the task of synthesizing Semon and Bergson fell to a young biologist-in-training at Cambridge University, a theoretical nonconformist who took a year off from his laboratory work to study philosophy at Harvard. Unlike Russell, whose reading of Bergson was colored by professional rivalry, Rupert Sheldrake was captivated by Bergson’s radical take on time and its implications for memory. By coupling Bergson’s time-as-duration with Semon’s mnemic homophony, Sheldrake obtained the basis for a scientific theory of mind, the very thing Russell had sought with his Analysis of Mind.

Flabbergasted by Sheldrake’s audacious proposal, neuroscientist Steven Rose designed an experiment that would surely dispose of it once and for all. The experiment involved day-old chicks divided into two groups. Test chicks could peck at yellow diodes, while control chicks could peck at chrome beads. After pecking, the test chicks were injected with lithium chloride, a toxic substance that made them mildly nauseous, while control chicks were injected with a harmless saline solution. The same procedure was followed for 37 days with a new batch of chicks each day. The data indicated that successive batches of test chicks became gradually more hesitant to peck relative to control chicks. While this finding indicated that test chicks were influenced by previous test chicks, the most clear-cut result concerned control chicks that were allowed to peck at either the yellow diodes or the chrome beads three hours following their injection of saline solution. Over the course of the experiment, successive batches of control chicks became increasingly reluctant to peck at the yellow diodes, indicating that they were influenced by the cumulative experience of chicks that had pecked at the yellow diodes and then been injected with lithium chloride. After stalling for months, Rose reneged on his agreement to write up the results with Sheldrake for publication.35

It's just hard to know what a "balanced" view of scientism would be, without lapsing into "science goes wrong when it doesn't tell us what we want to hear." It seems like the "god of the gaps" strategy mutates into "humanity of the gaps", which is not promising when you think how feeble the theological version is, and the only other move is to devalue science/rationality, aka the three monkeys method.

I don't know about that. Massimo and Cain both have made good arguments for the importance of philosophy as well as the other humanities. (Massimo has a variety of them on his page, I'll post a few later as they're on the whole more...well, life-affirming than Cain's stuff.)

I think Chomsky & McGinn have the right of it when they say we're better off regarding free will as a mystery. I've yet to see anyone make good on acting as if they don't have free will, though I notice people trying to pretend compatibilism gives one a means to act exactly as one normally would if they believed in free will.  I find most people agreeing with the pessimistic conclusion, despite their first-person experience, do so because the third-person ontology just has to be right or you're one of the "stupid religious folk".

Watts wrote Blindsight years ago, and in the Appendix he said believing in free will is silly. Yet during the whole Acrackedmoon battle he seemed pretty wound up for someone who should "know" our actions are supposedly born from the collision of atoms.

Hell, even Brassiere complains about what he sees as the immoral Israeli occupation!

As Hoffman notes, we can't use science to prove or disprove God. I figure we can also just regard ourselves as free willed for similar reasons, at which point meaning and all that jazz is preserved and so philosophy regains its seat of respectability.

Naturally I'll just be watching hot people in K-pop videos, which is what I'll probably be doing if anyone disproves free will to my satisfaction by taking it on as their lived truth. So for me it's just SSDD (Same Shit, Different Day)

Scientists Say 'Printing' Humans May Be The Best Way To Conquer Space

From pizza to prostheses, 3-D printers are being used to whip up all sorts of things. And now scientists are talking about "printing" out batches of people to colonize outer space.

Sounds wacky, but these guys are serious.

"Our best bet for space exploration could be printing humans, organically, on another planet," Adam Steltzner, lead engineer on NASA's Curiosity rover mission, said at a futurist conference held this month in Washington, D.C.

After all, scientists including Stephen Hawking believe our very survival depends on "escaping our fragile planet" and colonizing other planets. Of course, landing humans on other planets is no simple task. A short hop to nearby Mars could take up to 300 days and cost over $6 billion. Once we got there, if we were to hit the red planet's atmosphere at the same speed that the Curiosity rover did, our retinas would detach from our eyeballs. Yikes.

Instead, why not just seed the galaxy with tiny organisms designed to recreate our species? Here's how that might work.

Retrospective by Gary Wolf on his refusal to join up with the New Atheists:

The Church of the Non-Believers

Prophecy, I've come to realize, is a complex meme. When prophets provoke real trouble, bring confusion to society by sowing reverberant doubts, spark an active, opposing consensus everywhere – that is the sign they've hit a nerve. But what happens when they don't hit a nerve? There are plenty of would-be prophets in the world, vainly peddling their provocative claims. Most of them just end up lecturing to undergraduates, or leading little Christian sects, or getting into Wikipedia edit wars, or boring their friends. An unsuccessful prophet is not a martyr, but a sort of clown.

Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I've decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism – this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism – is too much for me.

The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn't necessarily mean we've lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.