Bomoko and other nonsense words

Stats Saturday 1 - MySQL and R

2012-01-21T01:42:00.000-08:00

Fig. 1 - QQ-plot of pretest reaction times

I've decided to try and devote my Saturday mornings to working out the technical bits I need for my dissertation - which, at this stage of the project, means stats stats stats.

Although I'm not sure if I'm going to end up using R to do all the stats for my dissertation - but I'm currently using it poke at my dataset a little.

Today I wanted to accomplish two things. I wanted to get R connected to the MySQL database storing all of my raw data, and I wanted to work out how to generate a QQ-plot from that data.

This was all surprisingly easy ...

Step 1 - load the library

MySQL connectivity to R is provided through the CRAN package, rMySQL.
To import the library you merely need to run the command

library(RMySQL)

You shouldn't have any problems unless you haven't actually got the library installed - I had to "apt-get install r-cran-rmysql" under Ubuntu to get it.

Step 2 - get a connection object

Next, we connect to the database and grab a connection object that will be used in subsequent interactions with the DB. We use the command

conn <- dbConnect(MySQL(), user="USER", password="PASSWORD", dbname="DBNAME")

Where "conn" is the connection object, USER is your username, PASSWORD the db password, and DBNAME the name of the database you're trying connecting to (I'm assuming you're connecting to localhost here)

There are a bunch of ways you can set these connections up - check this out (it's a PDF by the way...).

Step 3 - run a query

This part was surprisingly easy - there are a couple of ways you can do this, including stepping through results in stages, but I was just interested in reading the output of a db query into an R dataframe straight.

data <- dbGetQuery(conn,"select ur.user_name,avg(resp_time_per_deg) as resptime \
from tetris4km_mr_test_data as td \
inner join tetris4km_user_roles as ur \
on td.student_number = ur.user_name \
where td.pretest_posttest = 'pretest' and td.reason_excluded is null \
and td.correct_incorrect = 'correct' and td.resp_time_per_deg < 200 \
group by ur.user_name")

The dbGetQuery() function accepts two arguments, the first being our connection we made in step 2, the second being the query itself. In my query here, I'm interested in pulling out my participants' student numbers and their average reaction time on their mental rotation pre-test.
dbGetQuery() then returns a dataframe with our data. We'll use this for our QQ-plot.

Step 4 - do stuff with your data (QQ-plot)

So I wanted to do a QQ-plot of this data to perform a visual test of normality. I simply ran the following commands

qqnorm(data$resptime);qqline(data$resptime)

and got the lovely fig. 1

Mental Rotation 1 - Introduction and Discovery

2012-01-03T21:17:00.000-08:00

What is "Mental Rotation"?

Fig.1 - trial pairs from
Shepard & Metzler (1971)

The Wikipedia entry on Mental Rotation tells us that the term designates the ability of (certain) animals, including humans, "to rotate mental representations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects".

As we will see in this series of posts, this straightforward, even trivial seeming, definition is not necessarily uncontroversial - so, for the moment, it is best to think of "Mental Rotation" as being whatever it is that allows one to look at the pairs of images in Fig. 1 and tell, without manipulating anything in physical space, whether the "object" in the left circle is the same as that in the right.

In this post we will be taking a quick look at the paper that kick-started the study of Mental Rotation and related phenomena.

Shepard and Metzler's 1971 paper - uncovering the phenomenon

Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler's seminal paper "Mental Rotation of Three-dimensional Objects" is rightly considered to be one of the classics of cognitive psychology because of its beautifully simple design and the implications of its results.


Fig. 2 - Shepard and Metzler's results

Shepard and Metzler (1971) presented their participants (n=8) with pairs of two-dimensional projections of three-dimensional objects such as those in fig.1 above.There were 1600 trials in total, presented in a randomised order. Half of the trials showed the same object in the left and right positions. These projections of the object were rotated, at multiples of 20 degrees, either in the image plane (around the Z axis) or in depth (around the Y axis). The other half of the trials showed different, enantiomorphic, pairs in the left and right positions, similarly rotated in the image plane or in depth.

A tone signalled the start of each trial to the participants, after which the pair of images were revealed and a timer started. The participants were then required to determine whether the objects in the pair of images were the same or different by pulling one of two levers which recorded their response and stopped the timer.

Fig. 2 shows the results of plotting time as a function of angle of rotation between identical images. The top graph shows the results for rotation in the picture plane, while the bottom shows the results for rotation in depth. What is striking about these graphs is their linearity - they show that as the angle of rotation between the two images increased, so did the time taken to recognise if they were the same image. Further, not only did reaction time increase but it increased at a fixed ratio (this is what gives it it's linear shape).

This is the same kind of result one would get if one took two physical (identical) pictures, laid them down next to each other at different angles, and then rotated one of them at a fixed speed until the two images faced the same direction. As you increased the difference in angle between the two images it would take you longer to rotate them until they were both at the same orientation. Incidentally, Shepard and Metzler fixed the average speed of this (mental) rotation to be around 60 degrees per second for their participants.

Importance of work

The biggest impact that Shepard and Metzler's study has most likely had is in the debate around the nature of mental representation, in particular in the debate about whether the nature of our mental representations (assuming there are such structures) are propositional (that is, sentence-like) or image-like (or that are functionally equivalent (Sternberg, 2011) to images).

It has been supposed that, because the relationship between the angle of rotation and reaction time is so strongly linear, there is a continuous, analogue process underlying mental rotation - something reminiscent of the example I gave above of physically rotating a picture at a fixed speed. There are two important things to note here though. First, this does not mean that there are literally pictures in the head being rotated, it only suggests that there is some process that is, like I said above, functionally equivalent to rotating actual images (i.e. they work the same way, they don't have to look the same - this will be explored in more detail in future posts). Second, it doesn't necessarily mean that the subjects are aware that this process is going on - it could be that this rotation of image-like representations is entirely sub-personal or sub-awareness. However, when interviewed, all Shepard and Metzler's subjects reported experiencing some kind of visual imagery which they "rotated" in mind. Of course, as the researchers point out, introspective data is best "interpreted with caution" (Shepard & Metzler, 1971: 701).

References :

Pitt, David, "Mental Representation", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science, 171(3972), 701-703.

Sternberg, R., & Sternberg, K. (2011). Cognitive Psychology (6th ed.). London: Wadsworth Publishing.

Restatement of a small part of "Is necrophilia wrong?" by Tauriq Moosa

2012-01-01T16:05:00.000-08:00

"Is necrophilia wrong?"

This question is the title of Tauriq Moosa's latest article on bigthink.com. It's an interesting piece which I thoroughly enjoyed reading ... although, as I'm sure Tauriq would agree, the title can be taken as being slightly misleading. A more accurate title may have been something like "Why your answer to the question 'Is necrophilia wrong' probably can't be justified" or "Your intuitions about necrophilia aren't to be trusted" ... something like that.

In his piece Tauriq doesn't actually answer his title question but rather argues that, in the case of necrophilia

There is little reason to think the act automatically wrong. But being unconvinced by the arguments against an act does not mean one automatically supports or encourages it. All that we have done is reflect on arguments and justifications which proclaim necrophilia automatically wrong.

That is to say that his primary aim is not to establish whether the act of having sex with a corpse is morally (im)permissible, but rather to show that the usual ("common sense", knee-jerk, what have you) justifications for saying that it is wrong are unsatisfactory.
I think this is an extremely important point, and I think that this part of Tauriq's argument deserves a restatement in order to get clear about exactly what he is trying to establish here. This is especially important since a number of comments on the article suggest that some readers have been confused by it in spite of it being crystal clear (I suspect that this partly vindicates Tauriq's thoughts about how our disgust reactions cloud our judgement).

The argument

So what is the argument? There are a couple of steps.

Firstly, we should not believe that an act is wrong (or right) without some reason for believing that it is wrong or right, that is, there needs to be some kind of justification supporting our moral beliefs, claims, and judgements.
Now, it may seem that this is such a basic point that it need not be articulated, but it actually plays a very important role below, so it deserves just a little attention. A lot of work in meta-ethics concerns just what kind of justifications suffice to underwrite our moral claims, but - regardless of how that debate eventually gets settled - the most important thing to note is that anyone who makes a moral claim, or holds some kind of moral belief, will justify it in some way. This may take the form of an appeal to a God, to Reason, to a moral calculus, to societal norms, or whatever - in this point we're not concerned with the quality or success of the justifications, just with the fact that they're pretty much always in play.

Secondly, Tauriq thinks that the standard justifications of the belief that necrophilia is wrong don't actually stand up to scrutiny - this is really the core, and bulk, of the argument. These "standard justifications" are (1) the notion that there is something intrinsically special about the human body that makes it sacred/inviolable thus rendering necrophilia intrinsically/automatically wrong. (2) there is something about the (moral?) disgust that we feel towards necrophilia that makes the act intrinsically wrong. (3) a weaker argument that sex with corpses poses a health risk and is therefore wrong (he briefly mentions a fourth - finding it is left as an exercise for the reader).
I wont rehash the arguments that Tauriq gives against these three points, the original article does a bang-up job at doing that. What is important to note here is that in order for this second step in the argument to work it is imperative that (a) it covers all the most commonly used arguments against necrophilia and (b) that the arguments against points 1-3 actually do show them to be inadequate as justifications for the claim that sex with a corpse is wrong. I think that the article manages (a) quite nicely, and - given the context in which the piece appears - I believe (b) to be pretty well established too.

Thirdly, and finally, we can now turn to the question of the moral status of necrophilia. On the one hand we have the idea that we need to be able to justify our moral claims. On the other hand, we see that the common justifications for claiming that necrophilia is automatically wrong don't actually do the job of justifying that claim. And it is here, at this point, that people seem to have gotten confused.
Pointing out that a justification fails to pass muster doesn't thereby commit one to some position regarding the truth value of a statement like "necrophilia is automatically wrong". For example, let's imagine a situation where Manchester United was going to play a (genuine) game against the Amanzimtoti under-8-year-old's soccer team. Let's then say that one of my friends claims that "Manchester United is going to beat Amanzimtoti under 8's in soccer" and I ask him to justify this claim. Let's further imagine that he then goes on to say "Well, Manchester United always win when I eat pizza for lunch, and I've eaten pizza for lunch, so they'll win". This is a mad justification for his belief, and I tell him as much - it goes no way towards establishing the truth of his claim. But, having rejected the justification he has offered, I'm not thereby committing myself to the falsity of his claim, in fact, I think it's fair to say that Man.U would cream the Toti under 8's and my justification for this would be because they're an professional soccer team made up of adults! I can (and do) agree with the claim itself, but not the justification.
It's the same thing with Tauriq's argument - he's pointing out that these justifications are shabby and aren't adequate to establish what they're meant to, not that he thinks that necrophilia is right!
It might be that there is an answer to the question "is necrophilia right?", it might also turn out that that answer is "no, it's intrinsically wrong". But the standard justifications given for that answer don't manage to establish that - the question of the moral status of necrophilia remains unsettled given these justifications.

** Edit - Reply from Tauriq Moosa **

Thanks to Tauriq for the following response:

Thanks for this.

I should clarify that I'm in two minds about ideas of right and wrong. On the one hand, I don't think anything morally interest is, by definition, right or wrong: otherwise, there's no moral discussion. For example, if we define murder as morally wrong killing, then there's no discussion. It's wrongness is in the title. However, killing, the neutral term, can be right and wrong - depending on circumstances, consequences, etc.

On the other hand, I'm more and more convinced by the ideas of objectivity in ethics: that there are things that are right and wrong. Or rather, that morality is not subjective at all: that, if we term something wrong, then it IS wrong (by whatever moral framework we're focused on). In other words, I'm becoming more and more convinced that Hume's Guillotine is blunt.

Thus necrophilia might be neither right or wrong, by definition. I think there ARE cases where it is wrong - but then it comes down to property violation, only instantiating that necrophilia is not wrong. I can't fathom that ONLY having sex with dead bodies is wrong, since, like killing, we must further investigate the surrounding moral environment. So I don't think necrophilia is wrong and I don't think there are any arguments that have been made to counter that, though I hope someone does create one.

Introduction to the next few posts.

2011-12-21T12:52:00.000-08:00

Over the next few months almost all of my intellectual effort is going to be focused on the writing of my dissertation.

This is the first time that I have ever "done genuine science", that is, the first time that I have designed and run an experiment and so I thought it might be interesting to post regular updates about the various stages of composing the final text that documents the empirical and analytical work I've done and any of my findings (or failures to find).

My background is in philosophy, and so moving to a more empirical mode of thinking has been a difficult transition. It's quite different, indeed, the most unexpectedly different and difficult part of doing empirical work has been realising just how much work - sweat and greasy elbows work - is required to actually design and run an experiment.

Some of the topics I want to deal with in the next 6 months are:

Mental Rotation (what it is, neurobiologicial evidence for it, training it)
Tetris (Expertise, training, any cognitive benefits)
Situated/Embodied/Embedded Cognition
Statistics (R, techniques, nightmares etc.)
The software/typesetting system I'm using to compose the document (LyX and LaTeX)

By this time next week I will have posted my first piece on Mental Rotation - specifically, covering just what it is and describing Shepard and Metzler's seminal 1971 paper. I'm hoping at least some of this will make it into the final dissertation.

First stab at Maze Generation

2011-12-06T10:09:00.001-08:00

This is a quick and dirty first stab at Maze generation using recursive backtracking and the HTML5 Canvas element. It's the first in what I hope will be a series of experiments with Canvas.

UKZN/Meraka KRR MAIS '11

2011-10-02T23:05:00.000-07:00

So last week I spent a week among computer scientists at the UKZN/Meraka KRR Masters Artificial Intelligence Spring School 2011.

I was initially a bit apprehensive, I was almost certainly going to be the only non-computer scientist among them. Although I'm in cognitive science/philosophy (both of which have quite strong ties to computer science on their best days) I was concerned that my lack of a more advanced background in theoretical computer science and logic would be a hindrance and that I would be stuck staring blankly at pages of formulae that made as much sense to me as ancient Sanskrit.
Thankfully, that wasn't the case.

The primary coursework for the week was Allesandro Artale's "Formal Methods" - which was firmly based in Formal Logic - more specifically, the course deals with "model checking" - which is the process of checking whether some or other property holds over a model of some system. The system in question could really be anything that's able to be modelled formally, but the focus was on modelling software systems.
The course is meant to be - I think - run over a number of weeks, so the pace was quite brisk and I could have used a little more time to digest some of the concepts - but I learned a hell of a lot. The highlight of the course, for me, was the discussions of the syntax and semantics of a number of temporal logics, which I have only barely touched on before. Temporal logic is really just a species of modal logic, so if you've done the latter the former will be easily digestible. Specifically, we looked at Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), Computational Tree Logic (CTL), and CTL* (which is a superset of LTL and CTL). Once we had a decent grasp on the semantics of these Logics we moved on to verifying whether particular kinds of properties help over models described in these languages.
We also did a little practical on specifying models and checking properties using the application NuSMV ... I'd like to see how this is used in industry (if it is) because we really only looked at toy examples.

The Formal Methods course ran across the whole week, from 9-12 every morning. In the afternoons there were tutorials (one on Hyper-heuristics, and another on "SAT and efficient boolean reasoning" that I had to miss because of work). Other than that there were presentations of various hons, Msc, and PhD projects being done at UKZN and Meraka's KRR group.

Oh, and if anyone from the Spring School reads this, thank you so much for letting me sit in - I'll most certainly be back next year.

The "end of philosophy"

2011-09-12T04:15:00.000-07:00

I've just read a gloriously stupid discussion online where a number of science "fans"* were having a discussion about the status of "philosophy".

Except for one of the contestants, both the pro-philosophy and against-philosophy people had cringe-worthy arguments. The primary instigator seems to hold some kind of quasi-instrumentalist-positivist mishmash of a position, whereas some of the defenders seem to think that philosophy is nothing more than a bunch of techniques with which one can use to straighten up your thinking.

Perhaps the debate had something to do with Stephen Hawkings saying something about philosophy being dead? Maybe, maybe not ... but ...
What I think is most interesting about all of this this is that these people think that what they're saying would somehow be news to philosophers. In a discipline whose business is more or less to approach everything (everything ever) from a critical perspective you would think that at least someone would have thought "hey, what about philosophy? What is its status as a discipline?".

Of course they have. Duh.

In fact, to quote one of the books I read for an undergraduate course (entitled, if you can believe it, "After philosophy: end or transformation" by Baynes, Bohman, and McCarthy)

Agonizing over the "wherefore" and "whither", and even the "whether" of philosophy has been a staple of Western philosophical discourse since the time of Socrates and Plato. One might even argue, and with good reason, that periods in which self-doubt ran deepest were often periods of extraordinary philosophical creativity.

Following Baynes et al. one could take the "agonizing" of African philosophers around the mid to late 20th century about the status and possibility of a uniquely "African philosophy" to have been the very foundation that constituted a uniquely African tradition of philosophy.

Furthermore, the philosophers I know happen to be huge science fan boys and girls themselves, primarily because most philosophers are deeply committed to truth in some way or another - and science happens to be one of the most productive human activities in the way of truth production - what is there for philosophers not to like?

Well, perhaps there are some things. "Science", being a human endeavour, can on occasion set off down on paths that lead nowhere, and this is where philosophy comes in pretty handy sometimes.

Let's take an example that I'm interested in - namely, Artificial Intelligence (I'm sure there are examples in other disciplines, I'm just most familiar with this one). Back in the 1960's AI research was really kicking into high gear - researchers were convinced that within a few years they would have computer programs demonstrating human level intelligence in a variety of domains.

Then Hubert Dreyfus came along and spoiled all of the fun. Dreyfus, by the way, is a navel gazer who specialises in certain continental (gasp, horror) philosophers (Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Foucault, among others).
Anyway, Dreyfus noticed that the AI researchers were working with certain unstated philosophical assumptions that reached back to at least Descartes and which had been put to rest - as far as Dreyfus was concerned, anyway - by some of the people who he had studied.

I'm not quite sure how many people paid much attention to Dreyfus' critique - I know at least one very prominent AI researcher changed direction after taking in what Dreyfus had to say. Nonetheless, time has been kind to Dreyfus and not so kind to what has come to be known as "good old fashioned AI".

The point is, though, that scientists can learn from philosophers - at least some of the time. Philosophers certainly learn from science (even if there is a minority who may have anti-science tendencies). This is because, as I said above, both of the disciplines are pretty much dedicated to the truth - whatever that ends up meaning, and whatever means we use to get to that end.

* I'm not quite sure what else I can call this kind of person - but the SMBC pic I posted should help you recognise 'em when you see 'em

1st semester in review

2011-06-23T07:18:00.000-07:00

So my first semester as a cognitive science grad student at UKZN is done and dusted.

Here are the high points :

* my seminar on Dennett's book Freedom Evolves with Prof. David Spurrett.
* Writing a nice long - somewhat critical - paper on Experimental Philosophy.
* Writing a research proposal on Tetris and Mental Rotation.
* Having said proposal accepted - research can now commence.

So what's next? Well, in the second semester I'll be

* Carrying out the experiments described in my proposal
* Writing at least first drafts of my lit review and methodology sections of my dissertation.
* Doing some research on behavioural economics
* Generally hanging around the department a bit more (I might have an office next semester - cool)

I'm still not sure if I'll get much time to blog next semester (I still work full time, you know) but I'll try post about the stuff I'm working on.

Should we be surprised? X-phi meta-survey results

2011-05-05T22:42:00.000-07:00

There's a post up on the Experimental Philosophy Blog detailing an in-progress study by Billy Dunaway and his collaborators - it's a meta-survey that tries to assess whether philosophers can accurately predict the results of other X-phi surveys.

It turns out that philosophers don't do too badly when guessing which way the "laity" would go :

"at least 73% of philosophers who claimed to have no prior familiarity with these studies predicted how non-philosophers would respond"

I don't think that we should be surprised by this result though - we wouldn't be surprised if philosophers were given a survey to guess what kinds of inferences non-philosophers would make when presented with arguments containing informal fallacies. I'm not suggesting that critical thinking and the deployment of intuitions are perfectly analogous, but rather that at least part of what philosophy does is modify one's intuitions the same way in which critical thinking modifies one's deployment of reason (in fact, I think that there is at least some reason to think that the two are related - this is for another time though).

The study does a couple of interesting things - Firstly, it shows that philosophers aren't entirely out of touch with folk intuitions. David Manley raises an interesting question here though when he asks "are theorists who specialize in a particular area more likely to be out of touch about folk intuitions in that area?"
Secondly, it shows that philosophers have at least some notion that intuitions can vary along dimensions that are not philosophically relevant (in this case, with the amount of training a person has). Whether this shows that philosophers are in any sense experts at intuitions is questionable, but it does show that there is at least some critical self-awareness (and, really, we do philosophers a disservice to think that they would be anything by critically self-aware, however ensconced in the "armchair" they might be)

It's going to be interesting to watch the discussions around this work in the next few days. If something cool comes from it, I'll post it up here.

Fear of Knowledge

2011-04-28T23:24:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was going to be reading Paul Boghossian's Fear of knowledge : against Relativism and Constructivism for a course I was auditing.

Boghossian's strategy is to set up the strongest versions of the claims that are supposed to support relativism. He then goes about showing why - even given their best shot - they fall short of their mark. I wont spend time rehashing his arguments, his book is short and the arguments are clear and tight, any further compression seems unnecessary - if this is the kind of thing you're interested in, then the book itself is what you want to peruse.

It's possible that philosophy mavens might take issue with parts of Boghossian's book. There are certainly some technicalities to these debates that might complicate matters - as Boghossian himself notes in annotations scattered throughout the text.
This isn't really a problem for Boghossian though - the intended audience is not necessarily philosophers, but rather educated people in general. Specifically, people who find themselves drawn to relativism or constructivism for some or other reason. These are not people who have been convinced of relativism as a consequence of years of deep immersion in epistemology, but who have, perhaps, picked up the "profound" relativistic insight from a book on cultural theory, or a course in post-colonialism. It is primarily for this kind of reader that Boghossian wrote his little book.
That having been said, there is much in here for long time students of philosophy, especially for those like myself who have grown up on the "fuzzy" side of the divide.

I'm happy to say that I can recommend the book without reservation - if you find yourself attracted to, or even endorsing, some vague form of relativism, read this book and then reconsider.

Does defending intuitions against restrictionism require more Experimental work?

2011-04-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

There is a common response to the restrictionist challenge (see my last post for a sketchy overview) called the "expertise defence" that makes the claim (which we'll accept for the sake of argument) that :

Φ - on the grounds of their philosophical training, some people are expert philosophical intuiters.

What are the consequences of Φ? The first thing it manages to do is to undermine the results of the existing studies that claim to derive some kind of philosophical raw data from the intuitions of the folk because the folk are just the wrong people to ask about these things. As such, Φ helps meet the current version/state of the restrictionist challenge. However, establishing Φ doesn't necessarily help fend off restrictionism, in fact, it opens up the possibility of a stronger challenge.

To see how this might be, consider the possibility that two philosophers have conflicting intuitions about some thought experiment / application of a concept / whatever. Note that nothing about Φ rules these kinds of conflicts, all Φ serves to establish is that philosophers' intuitions should be considered as the "proper" source of intuitions about philosophical matters.
There are a number of possible responses to this situation.

Our first would be to reject these conflicting intuitions straight out - doing this is actually just to reassert the restrictionist's challenge, only focused on a narrower domain.

Our second response could be to assert an updated version of the expertise defence, let's call this

Φ* - on the grounds of specific kinds of philosophical training, a subset of philosophers are expert intuiters.

Even if we grant Φ* though we have a problem - this is actually identifying which kinds of training lead to expert intuitions. The answer to this question will be at least partly empirical - we can't hope to come to any useful conclusions about the nature of the training required to support Φ* without actually going out into the field (I've also ignored the fact that in order to even establish a claim as strong as Φ* we would need some kind of empirical evidence to back it up).

Does defending intuitions against restrictionism require more Experimental work?
Any thoughts?

For more on this check out Weiberg et al's Are philosophers expert intuiters?

Experimental philosophy - themes and methods

2011-04-18T01:54:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd post something on experimental philosophy, intuitions and philosophy because I may be writing some stuff about it in the coming weeks - so what follows tries to lay out some of the basics. If you're interested in experimental philosophy (either for or against) I suggest you check out the Experimental philosophy page - from there you can get access to draft versions of most of the important work being done in the field (again, for or against ...)

So ... How are we to understand appeals to intuitions in philosophy? Whose intuitions are being appealed to when philosophers state that some claim or position is intuitive?

Proponents of “Experimental Philosophy”, a burgeoning movement in (mainly) English speaking philosophy, interpret at least some of these claims about intuitions to be hypotheses about the pre-theoretic judgements of non-philosophers. Further, philosophers who identify with Experimental Philosophy, or X-phi, typically hold that assessing claims about “what is intuitively plausible” or whether “we intuitively judge X to be a Y” is best done not simply through traditional armchair reflection but by going out into the world and conducting systematic experimental studies to determine just what and how the “folk” think (Knobe, 2007 : 96). Here we will provide an overview of some of the important trends in X-phi and the nature of the challenges that they raise for appeals to intuition in philosophy.

Experimental Philosophy is not a deeply unified research project, a fact that is sometimes missed by its critics (Nadelhoffer & Nahmias, 2007 : 124). It is rather a loose collection of different projects with diverse aims and approaches that find what unification they have through their broad acceptance of the claim that empirical data are important for philosophical work. Further, and importantly, philosophers and psychologists who identify their work with X-phi are actively involved in running experiments and analysing the resulting data themselves. This latter point about experimental engagement serves to distinguish Experimental Philosophy from other kinds of philosophy that may be deeply informed by the natural and social sciences (Nadelhoffer & Nahmias, 2007 : 124). Although work in X-phi is rather diverse in it's ends as well as in its objects of study – there has been experimental work carried out on, among other things, ethics, causation, and free-will – there has been a fairly constant methodological thread running through most of the past and current work. This is the heavy use of surveys and polling (Cullen, 2009 : 1-4). There is no principled commitment to any particular methodology though, any and all experimental techniques are available for use by Experimental Philosophers. For Example, Joshua Greene's celebrated work in moral psychology and meta-ethics (Greene, 2002) makes heavy use of neural imaging data from his fMRI studies and Tamler Sommers has recently (2010 : 210) suggested that Experimental Philosophers could get philosophical mileage from designing behavioural experiments that might shed light on, inter alia, how subjects' explicit moral judgements might correspond, or fail to correspond, with behavioural responses.

The empirical work on the cluster of questions surrounding free will, determinism, and moral responsibility has been conducted almost exclusively through surveys ( for examples see Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2004, 2006; Knobe & Nichols 2007; Feltz & Cokely, 2008; ). We now turn our attention to this work.

Experimental Analysis

The seminal studies of Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (NMNT) provide a useful entry point into the field (Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2004,2006).
In their work NMNT provide a number of examples where philosophers such as Robert Kane, Galen Stawson, and Thomas Pink have claimed that the folk are “natural incompatibilists”. By making the claim that their positions are in accord with common sense incompatibilists but the burden of proof on compatibilists to show both why our common-sense intuitions are wrong as well as why we would have misleading intuitions in the first place ( Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2006 : 564). NMNT then argue that philosophers who make claims that their theories are somehow supported by, or are in accord with, our everyday intuitions are making claims that can and should be tested empirically.

In order to test these claims about people's natural compatibilism, NMNT ran a series of experiments that were designed to “directly probe” (Sommers 2010 : 201) the folk's intuitions on these matters. In one of these experiments participants were presented with a vignette which described a world in which a Laplacian version of Determinism holds. It the vignette they described a world in which scientists have built a supercomputer that is able to accurately predict events that will happen in the future. These scientists then use this computer to determine, twenty years before he is even born, that a man named Jeremy Hall will rob a particular bank at a particular time. As predicted, Jeremy Hall robbed the predicted bank at the predicted time. Subjects were then asked a series of questions meant to interrogate their intuitions about Jeremy's freedom and responsibility. When they were asked whether they thought that Jeremy acted of their own free will, 76% of the participants answered that he did. Further, when questioned directly about whether Jeremy was “morally blameworthy for robbing the bank”, 83% of the participants responded that he was indeed responsible (Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2006 : 567-568).
NMNT interpret these responses as being in favour of compatibilism. While they are careful to stress that they do not think that their results are any bearing whether or not any particular account of free-will is true, NMNT argue that their results potentially undermine the claims of “naturally incompatibilism” and argue that the burden of proof for motivating their theories of free-will (at least in the case of the more “metaphysically demanding” libertarian accounts) should therefore fall on the shoulders of the incompatibilists.

NMNT's experimental work is an attempt to get at the actual content of the folk's intuitions and concepts. As such it falls into the broad category of Experimental Analysis, or what Kauppinen calls “positive experimentalism” (Kaupinnen, 2006). Experimental Analysis comprises of work intended to explore, through empirical methods, the contents of the folk's intuitions and concepts and then determine the relevance of the results for current and future work in philosophy (Nadelhoffer & Nahmias, 2007 : 126). The philosophical relevance of these data might be, as it is with NMNT's work, determining burden of proof through to providing the raw data for revisionist theories of free-will or ethics. Whatever the project, if it makes reference to common-sense concepts or intuitions, Experimental Analysts think that it is somewhat premature to come to philosophical conclusions without first determining the content of these concepts and intuitions empirically (Nadelhoffer & Nahmias, 2007 : 126).

Experimental Descriptivism

Experimental Descriptivists, while sharing an interest in determining the content of folk intuitions, are additionally interested in understanding the psychological mechanisms and processes through which these intuitions are generated ( Nadelhoffer & Nahimais, 2007: 127). Knowledge about these psychological mechanisms are then used in the service of philosophical argumentation to support, or attack, “first-order” philosophical theories (Nadelhoffer & Nahimais, 2007: 127). Consider recent work in the free-will debate by Knobe and Nichols (2007). They presented participants in their experiment with a scenario describing a universe (universe A) in which

“everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before it … so whatever happned at the beginning of the universe caused whatever happened next, and so on right up until the present. For example, one day John decided to have French fries for lunch. Like everything else, this decision was completely caused by what happened before it. So, if everything in this universe was exactly the same up until John made his decision, then it had to happen that John would decide to have French fries” (Knobe & Nichols, 2007).

All participants were assigned to one of two groups. The first group was asked whether, in universe A, “it is possible for a person to be morally responsible for their actions?” to which 86% of the group responded in the negative (Knobe & Nichols, 2007). The second group was presented with a further vignette describing a man in universe A who falls in love with his secretary and who kills his family by burning his house down while they were trapped inside in order to be with her. When members of this second group were asked to judge whether the man was morally responsible for his actions to which 72% of the group responded in the affirmative (Knobe and Nichols 2007). The experimental method used in this study follows that of the NMNT study described above, however, the aim was not just to test a hypothesis about the content of folk intuitions but rather to test a theory about the way in which those intuitions are generated. Knobe and Nichols hypothesised that compatibilist intuitions might be triggered by “affect-laden” scenarios and, indeed, this hypothesis seems to be borne out in their results – the scenario in which the man kills his family was designed to affect the participant's emotions which then drew an overwhelmingly compatibilist response. Knobe and Nichols then try and account for their results by advancing a theory in which compatibilist intuitions reflect a kind of “performance error” (Appiah, 2008 : 102) and therefore, contrary to NMNT's conclusions, shouldn't count in compatibilism's favour.

Experimental Restrictionism

One notable feature of the experiments already discussed is that the responses aren't unanimous. For the 72% of participants who gave compatiblist answers in Knobe and Nichols' “high affect” scenario there was a substantial dissenting minority of participants who didn't. While Knobe and Nichols' affective performance error theory might be able to account for the general trend towards compatibilism we still stand in need of an explanation of why we see such a high number of responses for incompatibilism. Explaining these kinds of results has opened up a line of research that attempts to uncover correlations between differences in individuals and their intuitions. For example, in a 2009 study Feltz and Cokely set out to investigate whether and how differences in peoples' personalities were related to their intuitions concerning determinism and attributions of moral responsibility. Before presenting participants with surveys similar to the experiments already discussed, participants were administered a brief version of the Big-Five personality test. The Big-Five model of personality identifies five broad traits (Extroversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience) that appear as common factors across a range of different personality scales and that seem to be stable across different cultures (de Bruin, 2005 : 159). Feltz and Cokely found that measures of extroversion of personality were a reliable predictor of compatibilist responses to their survey questions (Feltz & Cokely, 2009). Among the possible interpretations that they suggest that their data support is the notion that there might not be a homogeneous set of folk intuitions at all, and further, that the long-standing debate about free-will that we see in professional philosophy could in part be due to differences in philosophers' personalities triggering different intuitions about free-will and moral responsibility (Feltz & Cokely, 2009 : 7).
Considerations along these lines, experimental results that show that intuitions my vary along socio-economic and cultural lines (Nadelhoffer & Nahmias, 2007 : 124) are sometimes thought to be reason enough to be suspicious of the use of intuitions in philosophical argumentation in general. This is the broad claim of the Experimental Restrictionists who are in some respects the most radical of the proponents of Experimental Philosophy. The central claim of Experimental Restrictionism is that empirical evidence showing the diversity and unreliability of intuitions should undermine philosophers' confidence in both appeals to the intuitions of the folk and to the more “discriminating” intuitions of philosophers.

References

Appiah, K. A. (2008). Experiments in Ethics. Harvard University Press : Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Cullen, S. (2009). "Survey-Driven Romanticism" Rev.Phil.Psych

de Bruin, G. P. (2005). "Personality Assessment" in An introduction to Psychological Assessment in the South African context Foxcroft, C. & Roodt, G. (eds) Oxford University Press Southern Africa : Cape Town.

Feltz, A. Cokely, E., T., (2009). "Do judgments about freedom and responsibility depend on who you are? Personality differences in intuitions about compatibilism and incompatibilism." Consciousness and Cognition 18: 324-350.

Greene, J. (2003). "From neural 'is' to moral 'ought' : what are the moral implications of neuroscientific moral psychology?' Nature Reviews : Neuroscience Vol. 4 : 847 – 850.

Kauppinen, A. (2007). "The Rise and Fall of Experimental Philosophy", Philosophical Explorations Vol. 10, No. 2: 95-118.

Knobe, J. (2007). "Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Significance", Philosophical Explorations 10(2): 95-118.

Nadelhoffer, T., Kvaran, T., & Nahmias, E. (2009) "Temperament and intuition : A commentary on Feltz and Cokely" Consciousness and Cognition

Nahmias, E., Morris, E. G., Nadelhoffer, T. & Turner, J (2004). "The Phenomenology of Free Will" Journal of Consciousness Studies 11(7-8): 162-179.

Nahmias, E., Morris, E. G., Nadelhoffer, T. & Turner, J (2006). "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXXIII : 28-53.

Nadelhoffer, T., Nahmias, E. (2007). "The Past and Future of Experimental Philosophy" Philosophical Explorations. Vol. 10, No 2.

Sommers, T. (2010). "Experimental Philosophy and Free Will" Philosophy Compass. 5/2 : 199-212.

edit Infrequent posting

2011-03-08T21:47:00.000-08:00

With my own research kicking into high gear now I doubt I'm going to have much time to update this blog, at least during 2011. I'll post when something particularly interesting comes along though.

Thanks for reading :)

UKZN, epistemology and Logic

2011-02-03T00:56:00.000-08:00

This coming Monday I'm starting coursework at UKZN and alongside my Cog.Sci seminar, my supervisor has invited me to attend some lectures on Epistemology

I think the course is based around Paul Boghossian's book Fear of Knowledge - and, to be honest, I'm really looking forward to this course. In the preface of his book Boghossian mentions that he spends, or might seem to spend, a fair amount of time beating up on the work of Richard Rorty.

Now Richard Rorty has been a fairly big influence on me, I was introduced to him way back when I did a third year course on "post-modern" epistemology and was, largely, taken in by his style. I'm sure anyone who has read much of Rorty will know what I mean.

I know that at the time I was also quite impressed with his views of knowledge, and his book Philosophy and the Mirror of nature knocked my naive ideas about the progress of ideas and truth flat on my ass (never mind the fact that my "naive" ideas have turned out to be closer to my older more considered views ...)

I was in awe of the man, and of his ideas, and I devoured everything of his that I could get my hands on (and understand).
But as I've progressed I've come to see some real problems with his positions, both political and epistemological - this article by Susan Haack is a good place to start getting the picture - and so rather than rejecting him outright, I find myself reading him these days in the same way that I read Emerson, as an essayist or even a poet, not as a philosopher trying to get at truth ... somehow I doubt Rorty would have had a problem with that though.

So I'm consciously going into this course with the intention of gathering up all the forces, marshalling all of the arguments, mustering all of the intellectual muscle I can against Rortyism and crushing my younger self.

It's going to be fun.

Related to this, I've been digging through my old notes on Epistemic Modal Logic and trying to supplement my reading online. I've found a couple of useful resources.
The wikipedia page on Epistemic Modal Logic is good for a quick orientation, but is thin on details. For a more comprehensive treatment a good place to go is the SEP's entry on Epistemic Logic and follow up on some of the references there.

Then I've found a really nice resource on "The science of computational logic" which is a course run as part of the EM masters degree in computational logic. Check out the section Course Materials and download the "course manuscript from 2004" - very, very cool stuff. I just wish I had enough time to work through it.

Finally there is some nice looking course material up at Stanford for their CS157 : Computational Logic course. This is probably a good place to start - check out the "readings" for what amounts to an online textbook in CL. There are exercises and exams too. Fun times.

Follow up on my last post on Dlanga

2011-01-25T04:44:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick post to follow up on my last post that dealt with Khaya Dlanga's post on abortion and frivolity.

Jacques Rousseau of synapses.co.za has written a solid, but critical, response that is well worth checking out.

I think Jacques has given a fair assessment of the failings of my reaction to Dlanga's post, while at the same time articulating an important dimension to the debate that was absent in my response (although was picked up, to a certain extent, by the comments on my piece).

A quick response to Khaya Dlanga's latest

2011-01-18T01:02:00.000-08:00

I generally enjoy Khaya Dlanga's posts as they tend to be a breath of fresh, rational, and occasionally funny air on News24.

But in his latest column, in which he tackles the case of an Australian couple who aborted their twin foetuses because they happened to be male instead of the female that they were aiming for, he sorely disappoints.

He argues that their decision is "frivolous" - that their reasons don't carry the requisite "weight" (my words, not his) to be a reason to abort.

"To abort a child simply because they happened to be a wrong gender is beyond frivolous. If this is permitted, then where do we draw the line? If it were found, for example, that the baby would have green eyes as opposed to the blue that the parents wanted it to have, does that also mean this would be permitted?"

Perhaps their decision is frivolous? I'll have more to say about this below. However the first question we have to ask is why Mr Dlanga doesn't take the time to examine the question in the other direction? He's claims that edge cases like these lead us down a slippery slope to designer families. But what about the other slope? If we deny a woman the right to abort her pregnancy on the grounds that her reasons are frivolous "where do we draw the line" then? Who decides what counts as frivolous?

Well ... uh ... apparently ...

"This is the very reason I believe that States have the right to intervene."

Well, okay - but how can we guarantee that the state will make the kinds of choices that are in the best interest of the mother? How can we guarantee that the state wont use this kind of power to undermine the mother's right to determine what happens with and to her body? We can't, it's impossible. That is one of the the central problems. Furthermore, once we start careening down this other slippery slope, we open the floodgates to a boatload of problems that make so-called frivolous decisions to abort look tame by comparison.

Mr Dlanga goes on to say that

"What the parents have done raises a moral question; even amongst people who support abortion (even though I don't think anyone truly supports abortion because no one goes around bragging about their abortions)."

Supporting abortion - if by this he means being pro-choice - is not the same as heartily endorsing the act of abortion for fun and profit. Supporting abortion, as a pro-choicer, in no way commits one to the the notion that the act of aborting a foetus is a good thing, rather it commits one to the notion that a woman has the right to choose whether or not to see her pregnancy to term regardless of her reasons, frivolous or not.

We pro-choicers are pro-choice because we respect the rights of a woman to decide what happens with her own body as well as her right to determine her future prospects. We don't need to respect the woman who aborts her pregnancy because she (I'm hunting for a truly frivolous reason here) - say - would prefer to spend the time and money that she would have on raising a child to shop for shoes. We have to respect her right to make that choice, frivolous or not.

There is a very important parallel here between abortion and free speech - we don't need to respect what our critics say, what religious fundamentalists say, what "militant" atheists say - but we sure as hell have to respect their right to say it because we recognize that the alternative is far more dangerous.

Make sure you check out Tauriq Moosa's stellar reply to Dlanga.

Formal virtues

2011-01-10T04:55:00.001-08:00

It's been a while since I've had the pleasure of thinking about modality in terms of possible worlds; here in South Africa there aren't too many opportunities for an undergraduate or honours philosophy student to do a lot of logic - that seems to be left to the computer scientists for the most part.

So I was very excited when I started reading Taylor and Dennett's treatment of possibility, necessity, and causation in chapter 3 of the Dennett's Freedom Evolves - essentially they present a way of thinking about these concepts in terms of possible worlds in order to show that our ordinary understanding of the words are pretty much neutral with regards to determinism or indeterminism - it's an enlightening discussion that, at least for me, clears up some of the conceptual terrain.

I don't actually want to talk about the content, but rather make a quick note about the presentation.

In his book, Dennett mentions that the chapter is that its content is basically a "gentler" version of the argument they put forward in Taylor and Dennett (2001).

What's so interesting is that parts of Freedom Evolves are lifted almost verbatim from the 2001 paper, with the major changes being that Dennett softens the presentation by pretty much removing all of the formalization by rewriting in ordinary English.

So what, in the 2001 paper, was rendered as

There exists (within some set X) a possible world in which the sentence "x (x is Socrates x has red hair)" obtains

is rendered in Freedom Evolves as

There is (at least one) possible world f in which the sentence "There is something that is Socrates and he has red hair" is true

The really cool thing is that by reading these two versions of what is essentially the same thing, one can really see how valuable formalization can be in philosophy.
Reading through the 2001 paper I was struck by just how much clearer it was than the rendering in Freedom Evolves. The formal renderings (without getting into argument's about just how conditionals are supposed to work) are just much more precise and leave a lot less room for misinterpretation.

I don't believe that philosophy should be a discipline where papers are exclusively written in arcane symbols, but in reading these two versions next to one another my conviction that Formal logic is an essential element in any thinking person's "mental toolbox" has been greatly strengthened. The Formal-logically-type-of items in this toolbox should at minimum include a basic understanding first-order logic, and - perhaps - just enough modal logic to get along.

Dembski and McDowell misrepresent Dennett - is this a shock?

2010-12-23T22:05:00.000-08:00

A while back a colleague of my father's sent me a book on Intelligent Design - the title in question is Understanding intelligent design : everything you need to know in plain language by William A. Dembski and Sean McDowell.

Now, I'm not too concerned with the "debate" about evolutionary theory (it's not a real debate) - that something like modern evolutionary theory is right is pretty much a working certainty for me. I've read a few books on it, and it seems to me to be right - if it turned out that it was wrong, that is, if the scientific consensus was somehow shifted by new evidence or whatever, I'd probably have to rethink a lot of things, but that's about it.

So although I've had the book a while, I've had other things to read and haven't really had the time (or inclination) to skim it.

This morning I was looking through my books and I saw Dembski and McDowell's book lying on my shelf, so I thought I'd flip through the intro.

It's pretty standard creationist stuff, there were a few passages that were logically confused, but perhaps I could forgive that ... there were also some pretty provocative things insinuated about the morality of people who believe in evolution, this is par for the course with creationists too.

But then I came across a blatant lie. A shameless lie that, if it makes it's way into the popular mythology of the creationist crowd, paints atheists, agnostics, naturalists, humanists etc. as being as bad as the Satanists of their imagination (you know, the supposed hordes of evil doers who slay cats in nightclubs and sacrifice babies in the name of their Dark Lord? Those guys)

Here is the li(n)e -

"[I]n Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett suggests that religious believers who talk their children out of believing Darwinian evolution should be caged in zoos or quarantined because they pose a serious threat to the social order"
- Dembski & McDowell 2008 : 23

The only reason that they can get away with this is because their readers are almost certainly never going to read Dennett himself, and most of Dennett's readers will never (thankfully) come across this line because they'll never stoop so low (as I did) to read anything from these creationist nutjobs.

Dennett's Darwin book happens to be one of my all time favourite books - and so when I came across this line I was so angry I almost spat (if you can believe that). Anyone who knows/reads Dennett will know that he would never honestly say something like that. He is genuinely sensitive to human rights (as well as being a genuinely good human being). Secondly, the passage in which he mentions "zoos" he was explicitly speaking of preserving the cultural heritage of religion.

Let me quote from the passage in question -

"What, then, of all the glories of our religious traditions? They should certainly be preserved, as should the languages, the art, the costumes, the rituals, the monuments. Zoos are now more and more being seen as second-class havens for endangered species, but at least they are havens, and what they preserve is irreplaceable."
- Dennett 1995 : 519

The next mention of "zoos" comes on the following page

"What will happen, one may well wonder, if religion is preserved in cultural zoos, in libraries, in concerts and demonstrations? It is happening; the tourists flock to watch the Native American tribal dances, and for the onlookers it is folklore, a religious ceremony, certainly, to be treated with respect, but also an example of a meme complex on the verge of extinction"
- Dennett 1995 : 520

Having read those two passages, how is it possible to draw the conclusion the Dennett is talking about taking religious people and putting them in zoos?

It's not, without stretching the truth - and in this case the truth is stretched beyond the point of breaking - what we have here is the much spotted bald faced creationist lie.

Dennett does sound one warning to believers - and I think it's one worth repeating -

"If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children falsehoods - that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection - then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being - the well-being of all of us on the planet - depends on the education of our descendants."
-Dennett 1995 : 519

References

Dembski, William A. and McDowell, Sean, 2008. Understanding Intelligent Design : everything you need to know in plain language. Harvest House Publishers

Dennett, Daniel C., 1995. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Penguin Books

Power Balance Bollocks - The Stat attack

2010-12-23T03:37:00.000-08:00

a collaborative post by Bryan Gruneberg and Blaize Kaye.

Note : If you find this post useful, please consider doing a blog post of your own on some of the other athletes that have endorsed this product.

If you have seen any recent pictures of the infamous Shaquille O’Neal slamming, ramming, or generally ripping up the courts, you might notice that around his wrist he is sporting a shiny hologram powered energy regulation device. We’ll refer to this as the Power Balance Bracelet. Shaq, the 15-time NBA all star, has recently endorsed the Power Balance “Technology” behind the bracelet. The Shaq-Attack says that he “could feel something uncommon with the Power Balance wristband on” and when he took it off, “he just went back to normal.”
In 2010 SlamOnline reported that a number of NBA players have been using the Power Balance Bracelet. The players explicitly noted were Shaquille O’Neal, Lamar Odom, Trevor Ariza and Paul Pierce. Apparently Odom even doubles them up, wearing one on each wrist. Odom reportedly “feels a difference on the court when [he] wear[s] the wristbands... it gives [him] more energy and balance when [he is] on the court.”

Of course Shaq and the boys are respected athletes. If you can nab one of them as your two-a-side partner for a street ball game, you have significantly increased your chances of kicking ass. Similarly, if you find one of them on the opposing team, you might want to tap out early. However, this is no good reason to trust the Shaq-Attack-Brigade when it comes to the technology behind the Power Balance Bracelet.
According to PowerBalance.com, Power Balance Performance Technology is designed to work with your body’s natural energy fields. It supposedly does this by “optimizing the body’s natural energy flow”. The Power Balance technology is comprised of a hologram and some mechanism for keeping the hologram close to the body. It is the hologram in Power Balance that is “designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body.” Apparently the holding device is unimportant, as they seem to come in all shapes and forms ranging from silicon bracelets, to silver chains, to stickers for your surf board. Apparently water does not interfere with our “body’s natural energy flows”, but that is a topic for another post.
If the Power Balance Bracelet does in fact increase performance, as these athletes and the manufactures claim, then it is fair to expect that this performance increase should show in the players statistics. Now, one of the great virtues of US sports-fanaticism is that they are nuts about statistics. Their nuttiness is evidenced in the fact that Justin Kubatko started a site called Basket-Ball-Reference.com which provides in-depth statistics about leagues, seasons and, of course, the players themselves.

Good news for sports fans, bad news for unscrupulous manufacturers and peddlers of hokum and fakery.

So how about we take a look at the statistics for some of these players, and see if we can extract anything significant? We will use the “Free Throws” measure as our unit of analysis. We will do this for a number of reasons, but primarily because Mr O’Neal is now the oldest active player in the NBA and we don’t want to open ourselves to the criticism or counter claim that, because of his age the Power Balance Bracelet might be having some kind of effect, namely, countering the attenuation in athletic prowess that human beings naturally experience as they grow older.

This isn’t a problem with free throws. Mr Ted St. Martin currently holds the record for making the most consecutive free throws - 5221 in a row, it took him seven and a half hours - and was almost at retirement age when he broke the record for a fourth time in April of ‘96. The previous record holder, Thomas Amberry, was 72 when he broke St. Martin’s earlier record. Age doesn’t really seem to be a factor when it comes to free throws, in fact, one should probably get better over time due to practice effects.

But age issues aside, there are other reasons for using free throws as a standard. Unlike almost every other element of basketball play, the free throw doesn’t have an opposing team actively interfering with the player’s performance. Sure, there are the crowds trying to distract the players, but it’s about as close to a controlled environment as we’re going to get. Furthermore, if there was some advantage that the players were getting from the Power Balance Bracelet, it could be argued that the “edge” that any individual player might be getting could have been offset by the “edge” given to opposing players who might possibly have be wearing bracelets of their own.
Free throws it is.
As far as we’ve been able to ascertain, Shaq began wearing his Power Balance Bracelet a little before his transfer to the Cleavland Cavaliers - unfortunately we don’t have exact dates, but the press release for Shaq’s endorsement of the product tell us that he started wearing it some time during his stay with the Phoenix suns which was during the 2008-2009 season.
Shaq has a career average of 53% from the top of the key - that is, he’s made only 53% of the free throws that he’s taken. His career high came in the 2002-2003 season where, wearing his LA Laker’s vest, he was able to make 451 out of 725 baskets for a whopping 62.2%.
PowerBalance was only established in 2007 so, at the very least, we know that they had nothing to do with that bumper year.
So Shaq has been actively “using” (actually, just wearing) the Power Balance Bracelet for one season, his 2008-2009 stint with the Cavs - how did he fare now that his “energy balance” has been optimised? Well, not that well to be honest, in fact “O'Neal averaged career lows in almost every major statistical category”.
In terms of his free throw success rate, he managed to make a paltry 49.6% of his baskets - which is under his career average, let alone anywhere near his career high.

And given the current season’s stats (it’s still early in the season though - perhaps it takes a while for energy to become aligned) it looks like Shaq’s free throw percentage will fall somewhere between 50-60%, like it has for the last 18 or so years.

But perhaps we’re being unfair; It’s well known that Shaq has had trouble with free throws throughout his entire career. So let’s take a look at Lamar Odom, who - if you recall - likes to double up on his Power Balance bracelets. Can we expect the result to be doubly unimpressive?

Lamar Odom is a 6 foot 10 inch, 220 pound L.A. Lakers player. Looking over some of his on-court action shots, it is difficult to imagine that Odom’s “natural energy flows” (if there were such a thing) are in anything other than pristine working order.

Like with Shaq, it is difficult to establish exactly when Odom started wearing his double-whammy Power Balance Bracelets. Again, we know that Power Balance can’t have affected Odom’s pre 2007 statistics because the company was not formed until then. However, we do know that Odom openly endorses the product at the Power Balance site (http://www.powerbalance.com/athlete-lamar-odom). Odom claims that “playing at a championship level requires him to perform at his peak day in and day out” and that “the Power Balance silicon wristband helps him keep that balance” - but do the stats concur?

Odom’s career average is a nicely squared away 70%. This means that of the 3320 attempted free throws, he has sunk 2323. His career best year was in 2002 where he sunk 77% of his free throws. This was a comfortable 5 years before the Power Balance Bracelet was helping athletes out. Assuming that Odom started wearing the Power Balance Bracelets (yes - notice the plural) in 2009, it would be fair to expect that 2009 and 2010 would be record high years for him.

But alas, 2009 saw Odom only able to sink 69% of his 202 attempted free throws. That is 8% less than his career high, and a percentage point less than his career average. Unfortunately for both Odom and Power Balance, the 2010-2011 season is not yet shaping up to be much brighter, with Odom only achieving 67% of his attempted 107 free throws, leaving him 3% down on his career average and 11% down on his personal best.

Given the unambiguous claims made by Power Balance and the individual athletes that endorse them, we would expect that in 2009-2010 these pros would have bettered, or at least matched, their personal bests. In fact, neither of the players we have looked at here got close to their records. Both players actually performed quite averagely.

But what else could we expect from a little rubber band with a hologram attached? Thanks Power Balance.

References :

Tetris and the site-specific hypothesis

2010-12-10T08:44:00.000-08:00

Right, so I said I would post a little more about the fairly recent paper "MRI assessment of cortical thickness and functional activity changes in adolescent girls following three months of practice on a visual-spatial task" by Haier et. al.

If you do a quick Google search for "tetris and cortical thickness" you'll find a number of popular articles, blog posts, and news items detailing the findings from the lab of Haier and his colleagues - great, but it seems as though most of them have missed something important. Everyone is going on about brain thickness and efficiency (a concept that doesn't seem to be nearly as straightforward as the blogosphere makes it seems - more on this soon) and yet they almost all skip over one of the major findings as if it were an added extra.

I don't want to spend time going over the same ground as the hundreds of items you'll find online - but I do think that I can add something that seems to have been mostly overlooked.

take another look at the abstract :-

Neuro-imaging studies demonstrate plasticity of cortical gray matter before and after practice for some motor and cognitive tasks in adults. Other imaging studies show functional changes after practice, but there is not yet direct evidence of how structural and functional changes may be related. A fundamental question is whether they occur at the same cortical sites, adjacent sites, or sites in other parts of a network.

now carefully reread the last line and you'll see that they're not only interested in whether there are structural (thickening of the cortex) or functional (Haemodynamic response) changes, these facts had already been established in earlier studies but are interested in exploring what they call the site-specific hypothesis, the idea that when structural and functional changes occur in the brain, they'll tend to happen in roughly the same places.
Their investigations show that, in this case at least, the site-specific hypothesis doesn't seem to hold as there was almost no overlap between changes in BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) changes and increases of cortical thickness (there were also no measured decreases in cortical thickness).

This is a pretty cool fact.

Of course I'm not saying that the results that there were structural and functional changes aren't interesting in themselves - especially considering what they've revealed about the areas that were affected through tetris practice. It's just easy to overlook a fairly interesting and potentially significant fact in all the fuss being made over the fact that playing a computer game "can make your brain bigger and more efficient".

Why I am not not an atheist.

2010-12-08T11:47:00.000-08:00

I never had the experience religious people call a "loss of faith" - did I once believe in God? Yes. Would I consider that belief as having FAITH? No, not at all. As a child I had absorbed this kind of common ontology from my culture, from friends and family. There was the soul stuff that belonged to God forever, and it would always be happy. And there was the body-stuff that belonged to the Devil, and if you let him, he would grab onto your soul stuff by convincing you to do bad things (back then it was things like smoke, drink, talk back to your parents and what have you - later it would be sex and further unthinkable soul staining activities). If the Devil managed to get hold of your soul stuff he would take a perverse and, critically, inexplicable pleasure in torturing you for eternity. A strange pastime to be sure, but surely justified by the fact that the Devil is evil through and through? And what's more, God - the intelligence that created EVERYTHING in 6 days (remember, he rested on the 7th) - is, psychologically, as one dimensional as the Devil; being as good as the Enemy is bad.

But the story of God and the Devil wasn't a particularly important part of my background beliefs, it was quite like my belief that if I dropped something it would fall to the ground, or that my father would be able to protect me from any variety of hulking threats.

Nothing particularly special.

If anything, God was a drag because, occasionally, my mother would decide that her children needed some of that old time religion - so we would all dress up and spend a few hours kneeling and intoning prayers that we didn't know at all - reading out of prayer books and trying to follow along with the well practised cadence of the parishioners. If we were lucky they would serve biscuits and weak tea after the service.

When I was a little older and my friends started taking religion seriously, I would occasionally decide to take my religion "seriously" - so I would kneel at the foot of my bed and say my evening prayers. Bless me father ... no, don't know that one ... Hail Mary ... don't know that one either ... Please God could you make everyone in the world happy. Amen. And that would be it, I would be in bed dreaming of building a time machine or of one day kissing a girl. But these spurts of religious interest never lasted more than a day or two.

I was never really invested in God, and - despite protests from the pews - I never really got the sense that God was very much invested in me, and WHY that was so would become clear soon enough. I must have been about 20 when I finally realised the centrepiece of our common-onotology was nothing but a trick of the light.

God, it turned out, was made up.

This wasn't at all a violent realization. There was no anger in me, no feeling of betrayal, no regret at having grown up with a lie. For me it was like waking up. I couldn't remember just when it happened, but there I was awake, stretching, and happy to be alive.

Perhaps I was a little giddy, a little uncertain, as we are when we first swing ourselves out of bed, but I was fully conscious and ready to live - even if I was a little disappointed that "living" now meant something quite different to the endless, actually infinite, stretch of time I thought I had in front of me.

My realization that, perhaps, there was no god was not accompanied by anything other than a shrug and a shudder.

I think that this is where my experience may differ a little from some of my friends'. Having never been weighed down by religion, I never felt that "escaping" from it was any more significant than giving up any other false belief - crucially, I felt no accompanying sense of "freedom" from a morality that had been imposed from above. For my moral self, the day I gave up believing in god was like any other day - it was my epistemological self that had lost a little weight.

But why am I angry?

I don't want to be angry - I don't possess the kind of personality that's driven by conflict - conflict, I confess, makes me feel slightly nauseous. I honestly want to live my life as well as I can, as virtuously as I can. I love my wife, I love my family, I feel compassion for the Congolese (to mention a slightly less immediate and more abstract emotional and moral engagement with the world - this kind of example is easily multiplied though).

I don't want to be angry - I say it again because I truly mean it - but I have to be. I have to be because there are people who tell me that my non-belief in god means, almost necessarily, that I am morally deficient. There are people who tell me that my belief in evolution is merely a thinly veiled excuse for an ethical free-for-all, no accountability, no morality, no consequences. Atheism and the belief in evolution are, apparently, nothing but a soul in rebellion.

This is what I can't understand though - my experience (and I'm hardly the only one) manifestly attests to the fact that one can give up on religion without giving a moment's consideration to the morality of it all, for my religion fell from me with the merest shrugging of the shoulders. I felt no more or less moral after giving up my belief in god.

It's not even that I'm concerned with the ultimate-truth-of-the-matter - whether or not there is some kind of ultimate answer that is there to fill in the void left by god is irrelevant to me - like Borges I am interested in and distrustful of almost everything, if that makes me an ol' time sceptic, so be it (although I don't think I am).

What makes me angry is people telling lies. Anybody who has ever opened their mouth to foul up the air with the nonsense that without god there is no meaning, no value, is lying about me and about all my fellow atheists. Our lives, projects, concerns, and loves are no less meaningful than those whose lives are informed by religion. Our lives are no less moral than those whose set of beliefs include the dubious - and generally comfortably vague - belief in an all knowing, all powerful, shockingly one dimensional being that, somehow, created them and the world around them and then magically invested it with meaning, with value.

Without these lies I would not be an atheist, I would just be a guy who happens not to believe in one of the many gods who have met their demise at the hands of time - and so I am forced to either accept these falsehoods, or argue back with all my might. Showing that my life is meaningful, ethical, valuable in spite of my non-belief.

Updated African science, rationalism and skepticism blogroll

2010-12-07T04:44:00.000-08:00

Michael over at ionian enchantment has just posted up the latest "African science, rationalism, and skepticism" blogroll - I'm reposting it here to share the love (of science, rationalism, and skepticism - duh). Enjoy.

Reading about Tetris

2010-11-25T22:38:00.000-08:00

Tetris ... who would have thought that this simple, yet highly addictive, game would have spawned so much interesting research?

It makes sense though, the game has a number of properties that make it an interesting and useful research tool. Most importantly, in my opinion, it's fun to play (this is one of Kirsh and Maglio's observations) so actually getting the subjects to sit down and play the game for the required amounts of time is nowhere near as challenging as if, say, you were getting calculus naive subjects to sit down and learn differentiation.
That's obviously not all there is to it though - other than the pragmatic value in it being fun, some of the really interesting properties are that

It's simple - it has a very low barrier to entry (unlike the learning differential calculus example above)
It (potentially) engages a number of cognitive processes (like perception, planning, mental rotation, learning etc.)
The processes that are engaged are put under pressure because of the high speed of game play.

For the most part this general specification of the properties of Tetris more than suffice to justify it as a research tool.
I'm going to be blogging about any interesting papers / stories I find about Tetris in the next couple of months, but to illustrate how Tetris has been put to use, I'll give a quick gloss of two recent studies involving the game.

Tetris "inoculation" against Post-traumatic stress disorder

Of course one can not be literally "inoculated" against PTSD, but a recent study suggests a way of reducing the number of trauma related flashbacks using Tetris (or, presumably, something that has the same kinds of functional properties as Tetris).
The researchers had their subjects watch a distressing film in which people were injured and killed. They then randomly selected subjects to play Tetris for 10 minutes (after a shared 30 minute break). The subjects were then asked to record the number of times during the week in which they experienced flashbacks of the film. It turns out that the group of participants who engaged in the Tetris task experienced significantly fewer flashbacks.

The basic idea behind the study is nicely summarised by the authors - this is taken from the abstract

Our theory is based on two key findings: 1) Cognitive science suggests that the brain has selective resources with limited capacity; 2) The neurobiology of memory suggests a 6-hr window to disrupt memory consolidation. The rationale for a ‘cognitive vaccine’ approach is as follows: Trauma flashbacks are sensory-perceptual, visuospatial mental images. Visuospatial cognitive tasks selectively compete for resources required to generate mental images. Thus, a visuospatial computer game (e.g. “Tetris”) will interfere with flashbacks.

You can read the paper here

(thanks to Michael Meadon for drawing my attention to this study)

Tetris increases cortical thickness and changes brain functioning

Another recent study comes from Richard Haier, Karama, Leyba, and Jung who took a group of adolescent girls and had them play Tetris a few hours a week for three months. They also obtained structural and functional data on the girl's brains before and after the Tetris training.

What they found was doubly interesting - firstly, they found that there was increased cortical thickness (structural change) as well as functional changes in the brains of the girls who had been playing Tetris compared to the control group who hadn't. Something along these lines were expected, however, there was another interesting result, and that was that the location of the thickening of the cortext and the functional changes were in different places in the brain.

The paper, in all it's gory detail, can be found online here

I'm going to hold off discussing this paper in any depth though - it links up with a number of other interesting things that I think deserve a little more attention. So give it a read, and we can get into it next time.

NaNoWriMo - look Ma, I wrote a book!

2010-11-17T00:13:00.000-08:00

Right, so every year when November rolls around it's time for National Novel Writing Month (despite the name it's very much an international affair).

NaNoWriMo is a challenge to anyone who has ever wished they could write a novel (and most of us who love books have, at one stage or another, dreamt that they could write one of their own). The challenge is to do just that, write your damn book!

You are challenged to put aside the things that usually distract you, those things that usually absorb all of your free time, and concentrate on simply putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to knock out 1667 words per day for 30 days.

This is the first year in a long time that I've actually had a little free time (no exams, no assignments - bliss) and I had desperately wanted to do it in 2009 when I'd first heard about it - so I decided that I would give it a shot.

I don't want to give a blow by blow account, but it was surprisingly easy to write a coherent story of at least 50000 words (the, disputed, minimum length of a novel).
The trick for me was to switch off my inner censor and just write, regardless of whether I thought I was pushing out absolute tripe. Having the minimum word count (and a fancy graph that let's you know if you've fallen behind) was something that I found seriously motivating.

Although my novel is really only good enough for kindling, I learnt a lot along the way. First off, I learnt that writing something of novel length is not nearly as intimidating as it seems at first (although writing something of quality at novel length is a slightly different story). Secondly, I learnt a lot about pacing something that's longer than a few pages - I learnt that I can slow things down a little, take my time to develop ideas and scenes. Pushing through this first NaNovel was an invaluable lesson in writing, worth way more to me than final product.

I can't recommend NaNoWriMo enough, it was a fantastic experience. If you've ever wanted to write a novel, but have never managed to get past the first few pages, consider tackling NaNoWriMo next year.

Intelligent machinery

2010-11-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

Anyone with an interest in AI will know of Alan Turing - he, along with a handful of other mathematical geniuses with a penchant for the pragmatic, lay down the foundations of modern computer science.

Turing is known primarily for the contributions that bear his name - that is, Turing machines, and the Turing test (although just what the Turing test is supposed to be testing, and whether it can actually discern what it's supposed to be testing for, is an issue that has never quite been resolved to anyone's satisfaction).

These two ideas were laid out in two supremely famous papers - the Turing test is described in Turing's, much read, paper Computing machinery and intelligence (although Turing called it the "imitation game"), and his Turing machine is described in the much less widely read (there are far clearer and accessible treatments than his original paper - but I don't think that's why people don't read it) On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

However, there is a third paper that deserves to be equally well known - that is his remarkable paper "Intelligent machinery" (not to be confused with the similarly named "Intelligent Machinery, a heretical theory" - I would guess that it is generally unknown because Turing never actually published it which is a real shame. In B. Jack Copeland's words the paper

is a wide-ranging and strikingly original survey of the prospects for Artificial Intelligence. In it Turing brilliantly introduced many of the concepts that were later to become central in the field (Copeland 2004 : 401)

These concepts included brief treatments of genetic algorithms, logic based programming, and an early description of the Turing test - however

"[t]he major part ... consists of an exquisite discussion of machine learning, in which Turing anticipated the modern approach to AI known as connectionism" (Copeland 2004 : 401)

If you're at all interested in the history of AI, Turing, or the ideas that have shaped our last century - you can (and should) read this document, available in Copeland's collection The essential Turing

References :
Copeland, B. J. (ed) 2004. The essential Turing. Oxford : Oxford University Press

CompSci resources

2010-10-20T00:25:00.000-07:00

Just a couple of quick Computer Science resources.

Aho and Ullman's great introductory text on CS has been taken out of print, so they've put it up online here - well worth checking out.

Also, I just found the draft of Arora and Barak's Computational Complexity : A modern approach another great free resource.

Ahh, free stuff rules :)

Thinking about intuition - some short notes

2010-09-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

Reading about man and other apes

I recently read De Waal's Tanner lecture "Morality and the social instincts : continuity with other primates". It seems a fairly useful introduction to to the notion that our emotions are the product of evolutionary processes, and not only the "nasty" emotions like jealousy, shame, fear, guilt, disgust etc. but also - and in particular - those nice emotions that help us get along with others are, too, products of a process that isn't particularly "nice" - in de Waal's own words

The ... error is to think that, since natural selection is a cruel, pitiless process of elimination, it can only have produced cruel and pitiless creatures

while the lecture itself is rather thin on technical detail - it contains, primarily, results from de Waals own work - its great virtue is as a source for new intuitions. I've not read much else of de Waal's but I imagine that if it is anything like this paper / lecture it can be an extremely useful tool in bridging the gap that exists within our imagination between us and our closest animal relatives.

Dennett notes, quite rightly, in his introduction to his book Darwin's dangerous idea is that people are seldomly swayed by arguments. Following him, I would guess that those of us who believe that evolution explains the origin of species were not knocked down by the clean logic of it (and it is a beautiful logic) but, when first presented with the idea most likely found that it fit our intuitions about the way things were,
"yes, that seems to ring true, it kind of fits, doesn't it?"

No doubt our eyes grew wider and wider with shock and awe as we came to realise the full implications of evolutionary theory, about just how much it explains, but on first contact with it we most likely had an intuition that there was something right about it. We had, with some luck, been prepared to receive this startling insight by a lucky confluence of reading, observation, thinking ("my cat has eyes and ears just like mine"), and our parents (and, failing that, hopefully teachers and friends), so that when the day came, we recognised that this was something worth closer attention, and, for some of us, further study.

De Waal's work helps us develop new intuitions about our relationship with animals by showing us the ways in which his non-human primate friends engage in behaviour that is remarkably close to the kinds of behaviour that we see as being essentially human. Consider his discussion of "consolation behaviour"

Consolation is defined as reassurance and friendly contact directed by an uninvolved bystander to one of the combatants in a preceding aggressive incident. For example, a third party goes over to the loser of a fight and gently puts an arm around her shoulders. Consolation is not to be confused with reconciliation, which seems mostly self-interested, such as by the imperative to restore a disturbed social relationship. The advantages of consolation for the actor remain unclear. The actor could probably walk away from the scene without any negative consequences.

What could be more "human" than walking over to someone who has just been handed their ass, putting one's arm around their shoulder's and telling them that everything is going to be alright?
The more we're exposed to this kind of story, the more difficult we find it to see there being an unbridgable gap between human and animal.

This is the kind of thing I have in mind when I speak about it being a source of new intuitions, in this case, intuitions about the - false - absolute human/animal distinction.

Most of us are in desperate need of new intuitions, because the ones that come standard aren't that great.

Against naive intuition

A while back I had the distinct displeasure of watching Ray Comfort on Pat Robinson's show.

One thing you'll notice about Ray Comfort is that whenever he argues against atheism, or evolutionary theory, he appeals to our "common sense" intuitions about how things work.

For example, his appeal to the design argument for the existence of a god - sure, when we're faced with some complex artifact, like a computer or a car, we intuit that said artifact would have been designed and built by some reasonably intelligent person (or, at least, something possessed of active intelligence). So it's natural, when faced with something as complex at a cat or a cow, for us to have the same kind of intuition - "Of course it was designed, look how complicated it all is, that could never come about by chance".

The problem is, though, that in a lot of cases, our intuitions, our common sense about how things hang together is just plain wrong. If we take a look at some of the most important scientific discoveries, we see the extent to which our intuitions fail to correspond to the way things are. Things like space(-time) being curved or the strange ways that subatomic particles go about their daily routines. For anything other than our experience world of "medium sized dry goods" - operating at a time scale of minutes, days, hours, years, decades, even centuries - our intuitions begin falling apart.

And in the case of complex living beings needing a creator, our intuitions are, again, dead wrong regardless of how right our intuitions feel.

Smarter intuitions

This brings us back to my first point - our naive intuitions stand in need of some serious straightening out - we need to find good sources of new intuitions.

In a perfect world we would all get a good few years of quality science education under our belts before we are unleashed on a world that is, no doubt, sick of our misunderstanding the way it hangs together (like me, with my constant personification).

Failing that, we turn to our best popularizers of science.

Now, an intuition isn't just "knowing a fact", it's more about that fact having taken hold of you, and structuring the way you see things. In this way, educating our intuitions is a lot more difficult than preparing ourselves for an exam.

And it is at this task where the best science writers shine.

The finest example of intuition education that I have ever come across is to be found in the first few chapters of Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker.
In it he describes a computer program that allows one to build up "creatures" - biomorphs - through selection. You start with a simple critter and are presented with a few variations of this "parent" biomorph. You can then select which "child" will survive to become the next parent of the next generation of biomorphs (each of which will vary in their own way from their parent). With this process of random variation and selection in place (is this beginning to sound familiar?) one can actually force the development of these creatures down a certain path of development. One can select biomorphs to look like, for example, crabs - at every generation one would just need to select the biomorph that most looks like a crab, and after a few generations you have what can reasonably pass for a graphical representation of said crustacean.

Why not give it a go yourself?

The point is that through this process of playing around with biomorphs, one gets a kind of wax-on-wax-off education of our intuitions. And when one is presented with the fact of evolution, it just doesn't run up against one's common sense, because you've already got a feel for how something complex could be built up in little steps. It feels more plausible because your intuitions have been well prepared for it.

I don't want to use this post to speculate on how well or badly our naive intuitions affect high level decision making policy, but one can only guess - but one thing is certain, if we are making decisions that are informed by misleading "common sense" intuitions, we have a duty to reeducate our intuitions.

MIT OCW Modal logic

2010-08-01T22:05:00.001-07:00

Just a quick one,

I just spent a couple minutes looking through one of the newer offerings from MIT's OpenCourseWare, and their Modal logic course looks quite good. They've got some neat exercises / problem sets (with solutions) and the lecture notes and handouts have a little more meat on them than the typical OCW module.

Click here to check it out.

Only problem is that one needs to purchase a textbook (or not, depending on how you feel about piracy) ...

Be sure to also check out OCW's Logic 1 and Logic 2 - both are really excellent resources and you can get away without any text book purchases because the lecture notes are the readings.

Now, go do some logic.

Carnival of the Africans #15

2010-07-31T13:12:00.000-07:00

Right, time for rounding up the best African scientific and skeptical blogging from the last couple of months - we haven't had a Carnival for a while, so while foraging for posts I decided to consider stuff written in June and July only, so that the posts would be relatively fresh.

Angela, the Skeptic Detective, has managed to cover the whole spectrum of woo-craziness, from its most air-headed and harmless, to its most grave and seriously shocking. In the former category she's given us a great series of posts of psychics and the Soccer World Cup. In the latter category, she's written what has to be one of the darkest blog posts I've read in a long while in which she deals with practice of "magic" and the associated "muti" killings which are a consequence of this system of beliefs. If you read only one of the blog posts in this Carnival, I suggest that it be this one.

Over at ionian-enchantment, Michael has been doing some interesting work. Firstly, he's posted about a commentary that he and his supervisor have just had published in Behavioral and Brain sciences (go Michael!). The target of their commentary is an article that points to a potentially significant problem in the behavioral sciences, which is that for the most part the subjects of their studies are WEIRD (that is, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and thus not representative of human beings in general. The problem being analogous to trying to say something about human fitness in general through studying professional athletes, or trying to draw conclusions about the average state of human livers through studying people who abuse alcohol - you just don't know if what you find can be legitimately generalized. Michael and Prof. Spurrett take this one step further, pointing out the fact that, if the subjects of these studies are WEIRD, then the researchers undertaking these subjects are extremely WEIRD, and that this fact itself has far reaching implications that have themselves been overlooked. Check out Mike's post summarizing the target article and his commentary, as well as a follow up post on the target articles authors' response to the commentary.

Be sure to also check out his post on the ASA and the Rock solid church of "miracles" (how did those shudder-quotes slip in there?)

At 01 and the Universe Owen defends SETI against some spurious, skeptical objections. He does a really great job of taking SETI's detractors to task, but I think that a little more can be said about the very first objection raised against them in his piece - I'm sure Owen wont mind if I add a little to his defense.

The point I have in mind is that "SETI is 'almost science', which [Massimo Pigliucci] justified by saying that although SETI is employing scientific methods in their endeavor, their hypothesis (that extra-terrestrial intelligence exists) is virtually unfalsifiable".

From the tone of his reply to this point, I think Owen would agree with me that this is an unsatisfactory objection to SETI's project. It's unsatisfactoriness can be demonstrated by a very unsatisfactory response, one that nevertheless meets this formal objection head on. Lets assume that the biggest worry is that SETI's working hypothesis, namely that "aliens exist" is unfalsifiable. Would SETI, without changing their day to day activities one iota, be rendered "scientifically acceptable" by adopting the eminently falsifiable "working hypothesis" of "Extra-terrestrial intelligence doesn't exist" - a hypothesis that can be easily falsified at the very first instance of prime numbers encoded in a signal from Vega? A hypothesis that is corroborated every single time they boot up their radio-telescopes and find nothing?

Somehow I don't think that SETI's critics would be satisfied with this response, but - without spending too much more time on this point - I think the fact that we can fudge the hypothesis to meet their formal requirement so easily speaks to the fact that there isn't much substance to their objection (at least, this simple version of it) in the first place. The point needs to be seriously developed before we should take it ... well ... seriously.

Sticking with space, at Communicating Science, the African way there is an interesting (if a little short) piece that asks whether Africans should care about space exploration. Also well worth checking out is the piece about whether we should be worrying about whether cell phones cause cancer - this latter question is particularly interesting because cell-phone technology has penetrated almost every level of African society. This is certainly not only a "first world" concern.

A few other notable highlights I found while looking for posts are Jacques Rousseau's article To ask for evidence is not (necessarily) scientism and Fluxosaurus' Cnidarian ecstasy. Both well worth a look.

And if you've not yet exhausted your enthusiasm on all this great writing above, feel free to take a squizz at my humble offerings on the reactive emotions, and Shame.

Okay - that about sums it up for this month - if I've missed anyone's awesome blog posts, I apologize, but - then again - shame on you for not submitting it. The only way you can make amends for not submitting is by hosting this very carnival on your own blog in the following months. If you're interested, browse over to this page, where you'll find all the relevant details.

Carnival of the Africans : call for submissions

2010-07-28T01:46:00.000-07:00

Although it's a last minute arrangement - I'm going to be hosting this month's Carnival of the Africans; the South African Scientific and Skeptical extravaganza - so if you have anything you'd like to be considered for inclusion, mail through the URL and a short description to blaize{dot}kaye{at}gmail{dot}com.

You can find the guidelines for the Carnival here.

A brief note regarding Oatley's brief history of emotions

2010-07-27T06:29:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading Oatley's "Emotions : a brief history".

He's a wonderful writer, and the book's methodological eclecticism - dipping into evolutionary psychology, literature, philosophy, and neuroscience - is something that I heartily endorse in investigations of the emotions.

In his first chapter, Oatley gives a useful taxonomy of broad emotional types.

We have reactive emotions, those emotions that have a sudden onset in response to some immediate environmental stimulus, say, the way that anger overcomes you when you're cut off while driving.

We have moods, which unlike the ephemeral reactive emotions typically last for a few hours or days. They're also distinguished by the fact that they need not have an intentional object, they're often not directed at anything in particular.

We then have sentiments, which last longer still. These do have an object, typically a person. Love, hate, and distrust are examples of sentiments.

Finally, Oatley lists preference as part of our emotional types, he says that we should "think of it as a silent emotion waiting for an opportunity to express itself in a choice we make".

Oatley then turns to the "workings of emotions" - and here is where I take issue. In his discussion of how reactive emotions are "triggered" he says the following.

Reactive emotions occur when the appearance of the world as we assume it to be is pierced by reality. In our assumed world, objects and people take on the colors of our understandings, of our hopes, of our desires, of our likes and dislikes. A reactive emotion occurs with the unexpected; it is a meeting of what we assumed with what we did not assume ...
We know from dreams that our brains have the machinery to make scenes that we experience. So eyes are not windows that let in aspects of the world. Instead they pick up clues to enable us to construct the world as we experience it. the clues are used, along with our assumed and implicit knowledge of the way the world works, to construct what we perceive.
Reactive emotions are caused when something in the assumed world unexpectedly affects a concern. Sometimes the unexpected is delightful, and we have the sense of new possibilities. Sometimes the unexpected is painful : in anger, for instance, the world narrows to plans of how we might confront the offender with the offense.

I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt and would especially like to see the idea developed further; perhaps there is more to it than what can be expected to be delivered in this non-technical introduction to emotions?

But I don't think that this provides us with anything like a satisfactory account of how and why our emotions are "triggered".

As a simple counterexample let us consider anger. Anger is a paradigm case of the reactive emotions but I don't think that it's necessary for me to have my expectations frustrated in order to experience anger, far from it. I may experience anger even in cases where what I expect is exactly what plays out in reality.

Suppose there is some individual in my office is an apartheid-era-style white South African blockhead who can't go for an hour without uttering some racist remark. It's thus part of my "assumed world" that this idiot will regularly vomit up some disgusting hateful comment. Not only that, but I expect myself to get angry! I know beforehand that this is what's going to happen but I still get angry when it does happen.

This is not to say that surprise, or the unexpected, doesn't play a role in triggering emotions - think about surprise itself - but it seems to me that in order to make this workable, we'd need to either restrict the domain of reactive emotions to those emotions that are essentially characterized in terms of this relationship between the "real" world and our "assumed" world, or we need to drop the whole notion as defining of reactive emotions in general.

I have a feeling that the problem may well run in another direction as well. We experience our expectations coming up short the whole time without an accompanying emotional experience. For example, I thought my wife was sitting in the living room and when I get there I see that she isn't, she's outside. Unless there is something seriously wrong with me I don't think that we can expect me to feel anything at all. I make the appropriate adjustments to my beliefs and move on.

In this case there is still something "extra" that needs to be added into the mix to get an emotional response, the fact of there being a difference between my "assumed" world and reality isn't a sufficient condition for an emotional response at all.

And if we do, in fact, require another "extra" something to pick out emotions from non-emotional reactions, why even bother with this notion at all?

Gödel without tears

2010-07-21T21:57:00.000-07:00

While being nice and technical - Peter Smith's truly excellent textbook An introduction to Gödel's theorems (it's not just about the completeness and incompleteness theorems btw) can be a challenging to the uninitiated. Smith has made available a great supplementary resource, a set of lecture notes he calls Gödel without (too many) tears.

If you're at all interested in these things, I suggest you check it out.

On Shame

2010-07-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years I've become increasingly interested in the philosophy of emotion. In particular, I'm interested in Shame. As an emotion, Shame seems to have everything one could want, and can be approached from numerous directions. It's distinctive qualitative feel means we can look at it through a phenomenological lens, it's intentional content means that it's amenable to conceptual analysis, and it's role in socialization (among other things) opens it up to some interesting studies in terms of evolution. Finally, as one of the so-called "emotions of self-evaluation", it opens up a new way of investigation our notions of self and our conceptions of what a "self" is.

Plus, if one spends their time studying Shame rather than, say, Love - there is the added bonus of sounding like a tortured existentialist. But that's just more to impress people in coffee shops ... now, where did I put my beret?

I recently read Michael L. Morgan's little book "On Shame". What I imagined I had ordered was a popular book that would give a useful synthesis or review of the literature on Shame, but what it turned out to be was - on one hand - rather more interesting than all that, but - on the other - a little less satisfying than what I had hoped for.

In his book Morgan wants to put Shame into action, he want to use it as a force for moral change. In doing this he is making use of the fact that part of Shame's intentional content is a self-reflexive judgement. Barring edge cases - and in the study of emotion there are always edge cases - Shame tends to signal that we have found ourselves to have fallen short of some standard that we've internalized.

Shame tends to be holistic in its condemnation of the self - it is the whole self that has failed, that isn't worthy etc.

There are a few typical reactions to this kind of negative self-evaluation. The first is to hide one's self - we avert our eyes from the Other, we withdraw into ourselves, and in extreme cases we may wish the self extinguished, to dissapear completely.

The second reaction is the desire to change the Self - to become other than what one is (or at least, other than one is presented as being in the judgement at the heart of Shame).

In essence these kinds of responses involve the same kind of reaction - doing something with or to the self - the only difference is that the second kind of reaction is positive - Shame, in the second instance, is used as a vehicle for change.

Philosophers tend to be divided on the utility of Shame. Those philosophers who doubt that Shame is a useful moral emotion tend to emphasize the first type of reaction, while those who champion Shame tend to focus on it as a source of motivation for change. While I don't want to get into this question now, I just wanted to point out that Morgan falls squarely in the camp of the pro-shamers. He thinks that Shame's power to motivate deep change in our selves makes it an extremely useful emotion.

Morgan's endorsement of Shame isn't at all interesting or exceptional in itself, it's a fairly common position. However, where his book gets interesting is in his endorsement of Shame as a collective emotion, and in particular, as a collective emotion in response to us living in a "world of genocide". His book is an attempt to work on the consciences of it's readers, to get us to actively invoke Shame in ourselves for the existence and persistence of genocide in our world.

It is in these respects that his book is most provocative. Collective emotions, and especially Shame, have long been neglected in the philosophy of emotions - most theories tend to explore individual instances of emotions and leave it there. But we cannot ignore the existence of collective emotions. Collective Guilt and collective Shame are serious players in our emotional repertoire and we miss the point if we merely reduce them to collections of coordinated individual emotional episodes.

Furthermore, his suggestion that we employ Shame as an active emotional strategy for change challenges the (by no means universally held) notion that emotions are passive, that they are - in a sense - beyond conscious control.

These two points alone take us deep into the heart of the philosophy of emotion. And this is where, for me at least, the book dissapoints.

Morgan introduces a novel and potentially illuminating approach to Shame, and yet does hardly any work to back it up.

My complaint isn't that he gets his account of Shame wrong but rather that he doesn't give us enough to tell if he gets it wrong. There just isn't enough theoretical detail to evaluate his argument.

As I mentioned earlier, the point of the book is to galvanize the reader to change his or her self. Responding to genocide is serious business, and perhaps theoretical issues can be put on hold by the exigencies of the mass slaughter of fellow human beings. The problem is, though, that a book like this sits uncomfortably between a philosophical investigation of a problem, and a manifesto for change, and although I can't really say whether it hits it's mark as a manifesto, it fails to satisfy philosophically.

I hope that what we're seeing here is the first salvo in a longer philosophical project dealing with Shame by Morgan (although, it must be pointed out that his work seems to have always had Shame on it's periphery). The brief sketch that he provides in this book is barely enough to whet the appetite, but what he does provide is enough to make me pay attention.

Thought on metaphor, God, Jesus, and the Bible

2010-04-26T02:11:00.000-07:00

I've been giving a little thought to hermeneutics and the Bible - and, how the fundamentalist strategy for biblical interpretation seems to be just to read the bible as literally as is possible - here we can understand "literal" to mean something like, not as metaphor, as what actually happened.

I don't want this to become another discussion about contradictions in the bible, that's not my concern. What I want to know is how people who adopt a literalist interpretive strategy manage to reconcile their way of reading with the existence of Jesus' parables.

If you accept that

1 - Jesus was/is god
2 - The word of god is to be understood/read literally (therefore the bible should be understood literally)

Then you have a bit of a problem with the status of parables as extended metaphorical narratives. We know that Jesus taught with parables, and so in order to remain consistent (remember, I'm only concerned with their hermeneutic strategy - I'm not gunning for anything more here) one would have to deny either that Jesus was/is god, deny that parables were metaphorical, or give up the literalist interpretive strategy.

It seems that anyone of the literalist mindset would never give up the idea that Jesus was/is god. So let's take that off the table.

Does it make sense to bite the bullet and say that the parables aren't metaphorical? Maybe it does - especially for literalists - they've bitten bigger bullets in their time. However, if we try and read - for example - the parable of the mustard seed, wherein the kindom of God is compared to a mustard seed ... we get some strange results (granted, it's a simile, but still ... to me it does seem to show, pretty conclusively, that God isn't above using figurative language)

It seems to me that unless you're willing to bite some pretty big bullets, you need to allow for the fact that God has used figurative language, and that some of the stuff that he's said was not meant to be taken literally (only if you believe Jesus was/is god). So you need to give up interpreting everything in the bible literally.

If there is anyone out there reading this who has any idea about how these two things are reconciled in fundamentalist/literalist readings of the bible I'd love to hear from you - I honestly don't know where to begin looking.

The negative effects of religious thinking.

2010-02-14T03:57:00.000-08:00

Of course I'm interested in the climate change debate. I do worry about the future of humanity, and - barring the occasional slide into deep cynicism where I think that global extinction may be the only real option - I hope that the future of humanity is better and brighter for the majority of those future people than it is for the majority of people living today. I hope for a more enlightened, more humane world where the kind of things that precipitate my cynical slides don't happen.

I'm no expert on the climate change debate, and so I'll refrain from engaging with this heated (no pun intended) issue at this point. All I will say is that on an issue like this it seems rational to me for us to err on the side of caution - the nightmare scenario isn't just that we'll not have to all use public transport in 50 years, the nightmare scenario is that we might not actually be around in 50 years, or, if we are, the only kind of life we can hope for is going to be characterised by war, famine, disease. Pretty much hell on earth. If there is a fair chance of this happening without change, even if all the evidence isn't in just yet, or is contentious, it still seems a serious enough threat to human life to warrant a move towards prevention.

Some people don't think this way though. And not because they don't believe that the evidence points to the conclusion that global warming is a real phenomenon, not because they don't believe in the peak oil scenario, or because they aren't aware of the water crisis.

They could be entirely convinced of any of these and yet choose to do absolutely nothing about them.

These individuals choose inaction not because they are in any sense evil, they choose this kind of inaction because of a particularly pernicious religious logic which finds it's foundations in a reading of the last book in the Christian Bible, the book of Revelation.

I'm sure most people are aware that there are some people who interpret Revelation as the history of the future. When I was younger I remember of being terrified of "end times", I thought of it as a kind of horror story, one that I was always assured was just around the corner. I was lucky that I grew up in an a-religious family, I can only imagine the nightmares of children whose parents are fond of end-times-mongering.

But the nightmares of children is the least worrying aspect of this reading of Revelation. There are potentially dire political, economic, and environmental consequences to thinking

Richard Holloway, in his book "How to read the Bible", warns us about the implications of this kind of thinking in a discussion of Jerry Fallwell's views on the depletion of the planet's resources. Fallwell was of the opinion that we might as well use up what resources we have because of Jesus' imminent return. Fallwell was not just some isolated crackpot hillbilly, but someone with real political clout. And even if the views of someone like Fallwell don't affect policy directly, he has (or had, at least) hundred's of thousands of followers - it encourages inaction against these potentially devastating threats to humanity.

Another recent example stupidity of similarly biblical proportions, is to be found in last week's issue of "The Economist" where "Lexinton", while discussing a new carbon capping bill proposed by Maria Cantwell, mentions the Illinoisan congressman John Shimkus who believes that there is no reason to worry about global warming because when the water's had retreated, and Noah's watery excursion came to it's happy end, God had promised to never "curse the ground because of man ... And never again will [he] destroy all living creatures". There it is, in black and white, Man can't cause the destruction of life on Earth, God said so. So relax.

This kind of "negative" effect of religious thinking is not nearly highlighted enough in debates about religion and their public role. It seems to me that the kind of inaction encouraged by this logic can be devastating, in the long run. Religion doesn't only have to affect political, economic, and ecological policy directly, but can be just as (in)-effective in formation of policy by the kinds of things that they discourage. Irrationality, even if it is private irrationality, will almost always have negative consequences.

"Carnival of the Africans - the Phoenix edition" @ The Skeptic detective

2010-01-28T19:18:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Angela, the skeptic detective, for hosting the CotAs this month - and I'm in total agreement with her, James' post on the odds of winning the national lottery is insanely great.

check it out at :

http://skepticdetective.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/the-carnival-of-the-africans-the-phoenix-edition/

South African science / skepticism blogroll - January

2010-01-27T20:42:00.000-08:00

Following hot on the heels of my last post - be sure to check out some of these fantastic African blogs and bloggers doing their bit to foster rational thinking on the continent.

Bomoko and other nonsense words

Bullshit Fatigue

Communicating Science, the African Way

Defollyant's AntiBlog

Effortless Incitement

Ewan’s Corner

Geekery

Grumpy Old Man

Hello Universe, This is Nessie

Ionian Enchantment

Irreverence

Limbic Nutrition

Lenny Says

McBrolloks

Nathan Bond's TART Remarks

Stop Danie Krügel

Subtle Shift in Emphasis

Synapses

Tauriq Moosa

The Science Of Sport

The Skeptic Black Sheep

The Skeptic Detective

Turn 2 Reason

Word of the Blog

Reading Hountondji

2010-01-26T09:56:00.000-08:00

Paulin Hountondji's "African philosophy : myth and reality" was his first, and most controversial, book - and to a large extent it's still definitive of his philosophical project.

In it he defends the idea that there can be a genuine African philosophy, but without resorting to the hysterical myth-mongering of the so called "Afrocentricist" scholars. I don't deny that there may be something to their claims, and there certainly is some evidence that classicists have "white washed" the early history of Greek philosophy - and hence philosophy in general. The debate around the early history of philosophy is very emotional, but we can expect it to become less so as more classicists and philosophical historians do decent scholarly work in this direction. This is a topic for a different time. There is, however, no question that Africans have contributed to the history of Western philosophy, and not only in the 20th and 21st centuries. Two important, and immediately recognizable, historical Africans being St. Augustine, and Anton Wilhelm Amo (Amo's story itself is fascinating, taken from Ghana as a child, given a top notch European education, eventually rising to become a respected professor of philosophy - there is a chapter dedicated to Amo in Hountondji's book).

The question of African philosophy

One of the most central (though now moribund) questions of African philosophy for at least the last sixty or seventy years, has been whether, and to what extent, African philosophy exists. This isn't as paradoxical as it may fist seem - or, perhaps more accurately - this isn't as unusual as it may seem. Western philosophy routinely questions it's own essence and it's own existence - as Roger Scruton likes to point out, the question "what is philosophy?" seems to be one of the most important questions in philosophy. Philosophers are often puzzled about the exact nature of their business, and on more than one occasion some philosopher has predicted that philosophy is on it's way out or, in fact, died a long time ago. We shouldn't be too surprised, then, that African philosophy should take up the question of whether or not it exists as a central concern.

This is what Hountondji addresses in his book - the question of whether African philosophy exists. His answer is, in short, "yes it does, but not where you thought it did".

In order to understand his answer we need a little historical context. When Hountondji first took up his pen, "African philosophy" was supposedly explored and explicated in a vast ethnological literature initiated, more or less, by the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels' book "Bantu philosophy". This ethological literature and style of inquiry - which Hountondji calls "ethnophilosophy" - is based on the premise that there is a unanimous, static, generally unarticulated, "philosophy" underlying and animating African thought and Action, and the goal of these ethnological studies to to make explict what was implicit in folk tales, idiomatic expression, art, and so on.

This conception of philosophy is the "myth" of Hountondji's title - he flatly rejects ethnophilosophy as being philosophy in any serious sense. Even without the theoretical framework Hountondji develops throughout his book, one can understand his indignation. To compare what is at best a "folk philosophy" to the highly technical, theoretical disciple that is Western philosophy is condescending, to say the least. Less condescending would have been to flat out deny that philosophy per se had not developed as a discipline in Africa at all (this, however, would not be entirely true - a quick look at the history of Islamic philosophy in Africa should be enough to at least suggest this claim's falsity).

Briefly, Hountondji believes that ethnophilosophy's dual appeal to both Western scholars and African nationalists was because of it's tendency to emphasise the idiosyncratic aspects of African thought and culture. He says :

"Everybody was happy: not only the conventional nationalists (and their accomplices, the 'progressive' European anthropologists or intellectuals), for whom cultural authenticity coincided with an exclusive revaluation of the past, but also the traditional ethnologists, who were quite prepared to trade the word 'mentality' for the word 'philosophy' as long as the adjective 'primitive' remained and the structure was regarded as immutable, ahistorical, and inert"

The problem with ethnophilosophy

Hountondji sums up his argument against ethnophilosophy in the maxim "philosophy is a history, not a system". This is meant to capture some important aspects of the practice of philosophy as he sees it. Hountondji is not denying that there are important systematic elements to the practice of philosophy - that goes hand in hand with his generally professionalized view of the practice. What he is denying here is the claim made for African "philosophy" by the ethnophilosophers - namely, that there is a systematic structure that can be captured and explicated in precise, quasi-philosophical, language and that expresses all there is to be said about "African philosophy". This leads into his defining Philosophy structurally as history - as an ever changing dialogical process that can never be captured and finally defined. This is something that will ring true with anyone who knows even a little bit of the history of Western philosophy - every generation someone comes along who thinks that they have said all that there is to be said about philosophy, that their system of thought is the pinnacle, that it encompasses anything of worth in it's historical predecessors' systems, and that it it speaks in advance, as it were, for any future philosophies. Then comes along the next guy who puts the former champ in his place and erects his own system on the smouldering foundations.

Wittgenstein is a wonderful example of this process at work. When he came back to philosophy after spending a little time building houses and generally mucking about, he took on himself and set to work to demolish the philosophy that he developed in his youth.

If we're comfortable with defining philosophy as such, then the African philosophy posited by the ethnophilosophers is not "philosophy".

If African philosophy isn't to be found in the various manifestations of traditional African culture - where the ethnophilosophers seem to be getting "African philosophy" - where is it to be found? Hountondji sees it as being made up of the very ethnophilosophical works that he sees as being so wrong-headed and misguided - He reads the ethnophilosophical literature written by Africans as products of original philosophical thinking on the part of the authors, not as explications of pre-existing philosophical systems.

To what end?

His metaphilosophical ruminations lead him into some dodgy territory - for example, following his teacher Althusser, Hountondji sees all great philosophical revolutions as in some sense being a function of scientific revolutions. This is a reflection of Hountondji's notion of philosophy as being primarily an activity whose aim is to reflect on science. This seems to be a rather arbitrary truncation of philosophy in general, at the very least unfairly relegating Ethical and Aesthetic reflection to the philosophical sidelines. Hountondji attempts to explain the cause of philosophical revolutions through his strong linking of philosophy and science - In his view scientific revolution explains the periodic irruption into the history of philosophy of new philosophical insights and positions. But this link with science is not the only way of explaining this kind of irruption - for instance, one could appeal to the, admittedly deeply unfashionable, notion of "genius", or - a more contemporary version of the same idea - Bloom's notion of the "Strong poet". Hountondji's makes no real attempt to cash out his claim about the deep links between scientific and philosophical progress. Without any hard evidence, how are we to decide between his Althusserian thesis and the notion of genius or "strong poet"?

Hountondji's linking of philosophy with science is motivated by a pragmatic bent to his thought, and this does, to some extent, shed some light on some of the oddities in his metaphilosophy. He wants to see progress in Africa, and he sees the way to progress is through science. He wants to see a flourishing scientific community in Africa that is not dependent on the North, but which engages the North on Equal footing, as equal partners in the universal scientific dialogue. The problem is that this aspect of his thought bubbles up to inform his definition of philosophy per se. This isn't something I'd ordinarily have a problem with, except that he doesn't acknowledge that he's structured his entire metaphilosophy to "promote" scientific growth - I doubt that he's unaware of this bottom-up influence, he's way too self-conscious in general to miss that. Regardless, once one is aware of this progressivist dimension, some of the difficulties in his position start clicking into place and making sense. But the fact that it isn't explicitly acknowledged means that his ruminations on the history of philosophy straddle uneasily between prescription and description.

To this end

"African philosophy : myth and reality" is a gem of a book, and an especially important book for Africa and Africans. In my remarks above I don't think I've stressed it's primary virtue nearly enough.

This book is a testament to rational thinking and questioning.

The issues that Hountondji raised with his book have made him deeply unpopular in some African philosophical circles. Regardless he pressed, and presses, on undeterred. His primary aim is progress in Africa, and progress for Hountondji isn't about reclaiming the "spiritual power" of Africa - it's about people having enough to eat, having governments that don't slaughter their citizenry, medicine, research centrers, and access to education. Hountondji sees these the only way to solve these problems to stop bothering ourselves with pseudoproblems and start getting something done. This is the sense one gets reading Hountondji, a desperate sense that something must be done now, and - in Africa - it's a breath of fresh air.

"Spirituality and medicine" - some thoughts (and an anecdote for good measure)

2009-11-23T04:11:00.000-08:00

Recently, a group called the "World Christian Doctors Network" (WCDN) organised what seems to have been a pretty "serious" event attended by over 500 medical professionals - the 6th "International medical conference" (this can't actually only be the 6th medical conference ever ... but anyway ...) in order to discuss "Spirituality and medicine". The point of the event seems to have been to allow Christian doctors to get together and "share" anecdotes about instances of "divine healing" of their patients.
Perhaps they wouldn't put it exactly that way (i.e. my scare quotes) themselves - in their idiom, the aim of the conference was to give Christian doctors a platform where they could "objectively confirm and examine instances of 'healing by the power of God'".
(Note : the WCDN looks shady, but the stated aim of their conference is as good an example as any for my purposes here)

Now, I have absolutely no problem with a doctor being religious. Really, as long as she or he is competent within the context of the doctor patient relationship, that's all good with me. However, as soon as a doctor (and I mean real medical professionals here, not homeopaths and chiropractors) starts attributing spontaneous recovery to the power of God, then it's another story altogether.

The problem is that it almost certainly wasn't God's intervention that "healed" the patient. For every single one of these "miracle" cases we can be sure that there is some rational, scientific explanation for it. But isn't this is some scientistic hand waving on my part, I hear you say? I don't think so, and I'm actually making a stronger claim than this anyway, so lets assume, for the sake of argument that there is no possible way that we could ever explain a patients spontaneous recovery, surely this must count as a miracle?

Not at all, it should never be an option - for a doctor, at least - to declare a recovery a "miracle", even if the explanation lies beyond the reach of our current best, or even future best, scientific theories and methods. A doctor declaring a patients recovery a "miracle" is always a profound failure on their part as a doctor.
This is because even if it were the case that we would never find a reasonable explanation for the patients recovery, the notion that all diseases and cures are, ultimately, amenable to scientific explanation should be a regulative ideal of the medical profession.
To abandon this regulative ideal by crying "miracle" is to simultaneously abandon one's identity as a scientist, and - in my opinion - as a doctor. A doctor, in the moment that he or she declares something a miracle, is not being a doctor.

Since everyone seems so keen on anecdotes, let me present one of my own - and try to imagine what the outcome would have been if the doctor involved had merely thrown up his hands and declared this a miracle (The following, long, quote is taken from Robert Klee's "Introduction to the philosophy of science : cutting nature at its seams")

In 1956 in a Massachusetts hospital a man 51 years old was released and sent home to die. A large cancerous tumor had been removed from him, but a number of other malignant tumors had been found--all inoperable. The surgeons had sewed him up in dejected resignation and his case had been filed away. Twelve years later, incredibly, the same man, now 63 years old, showed up in the emergency room of the same hospital with an inflamed gallbladder. Some doctors might have concluded that the original diagnosis 12 years earlier had been in error and think no more of it, but a young surgical resident at the hospital named Steven Rosenberg was not like some other doctors. Rosenberg made a determined search of hospital records, even going so far as to get a current hospital pathologist to pull the original tissue slides of the patient's removed tumor out of storage and reexamine them. The slides showed that an aggressively malignant tumor had been removed from the man twelve years earlier (so it was a sure bet that the inoperable ones had been of the same aggressively malignant type). During the subsequent operation to remove the patient's gallbladder Rosenberg did a bit of exploring in the man's abdomen to see if the inoperable tumors from twelve years earlier had stopped growing. The man had no tumorsat all in the places his record from twelve years earlier located them.

To Rosenberg, the man whose gallbladder he had removed presented an absorbing mystery. How had a patient with multiple inoperable cancerous tumor survived for twelve years in the apparent absence of any therapy whatsoever?
Such "spontaneous remissions" were not unknown in medicine--they have long been a central obsession of trendy occultists and other kinds of miracle mongers--but Rosenberg wanted to know the detailed why of it. He wanted an explanation of it in perfectly natural terms. He wanted to know how the everyday physiological processes of the human body--in this case, the immune system of the human body--could produce such a remission. Where less curious persons might have shrugged their shoulders in amazement and thought no more about it, Rosenberg instead proceeded on the supposition that there had to be some structural physiological basis behind the patient's remission and survival for twelve years, a structural physiological basis that was consistent with the otherwise ordinary causal operations of the human body. Rosenberg wanted to know the causal details of that structural physiological basis. If he could find out those details, especially if they were quantitative details, then the possibility opened up of being able to manipulate the physiology of cancer patients so as to destroy their cancer.

It would take Rosenberg a number of years to come up with a detailed account of that basis, but come up with it he did. Not only did he find an explanation in perfectly natural terms for the original patient's spontaneous remission, but using the theoretical account of immunological processes associated with that explanation he was able to design a complicated therapy that involves artificially growing cancer-killing immune cells outside the body. These cancer-killing immune cells, called LAK (lymphokine activated killer) cells, are injected back into the patient's body in an attempt to intervene and manipulate the patient's immune response to the cancer. Rosenberg and his colleagues have had a considerable degree of success at producing remissions with this therapy but only for specific kinds of cancer--particularly, kidney cancer and skin cancer. Apparently, knowledge of further structural detail is needed in order to be able to designLAK cells that are effective in other kinds of solid-tumor cancers.

The skeptical Buddhist - enlightenment and rationality

2009-11-19T00:59:00.000-08:00

Let me start by saying that I don't, in any way, intend this to be an apology for Buddhism.
However, I do have a soft spot for Buddhism in general. And I have a much better grasp of the principles of Buddhism than I do of any other religion, so it makes sense that I use Buddhism as a kind of case study.

Buddhism's public image is of a rational, moral, and open system of thought, the principle aim of which is to eliminate the suffering of sentient beings. And so we have the Dalai Lama engaging with neuroscientists, cosmologists, and high ranking political figures. We have FGS building temples across the globe (including a beautiful example here in South Africa). We have people like Guy Newland publishing books that are very much what we expect from philosophy, not religion. And we have a practice, namely meditation (particularly in it's secular forms), that seems to be pretty beneficial, and not require very much from us in the way of belief.

It looks to have all the benefits of religion - moral teachings, consolation, community etc. while having none of the downsides of the kind of religious systems we know here in the West. A lot of Westerners are attracted to Buddhism because of this image.

And, at it's best Buddhism is just like this.

The problem is, though, Buddhism at it's best seems to only actually exists in books.

By this I mean two things.

On the one hand, if one reads Stephen Batchelor (which I highly recommend), or D.T. Suzuki's books on Buddhism, one necessarily gets a lopsided view of what Buddhism is about, you're going to be getting large doses of Buddhist philosophy. And like philosophy as we understand it in the West, the philosophical practices within Buddhism are - for the most part - rational. But this philosophical aspect of Buddhism is only a tiny part of it, and anyone who shows up at a Dharma centre looking for long stretches of meditation punctuated by Socratic dialog is going to be sorely disappointed. Much of the day to day life of Buddhists are characterised by the same kind of supernatural woowoo rituals that characterise any other religious tradition. I know when I heard of one of my Buddhist friends burning little bits of paper every morning to "clear his Karma" (or something), I was horrified - this could not be a part of a rational religion.

On the other hand, Buddhists themselves tend to be exactly the same kind of petty, politicking, perverted, impolite people as we all are. Anyone who has spent any time with anyone involved in a Sangha (Buddhist community) of more than one person knows this. And this is what we should all expect, given the fact that they're just human. And, in fact, Buddhists themselves never really make the claim that they're perfect. It's just, once again, the "public image" that sets up this expectation. Most practicing Buddhists will admit their fallibility and imperfections readily and, usually, with a cheerfulness that's unthinkable for a Christian.

The first point is relatively benign, we can certainly live with it - at least, I could, especially if it was a genuine path to world peace, a healthy environment, and a three day work week. For these things I would happily spend my life prostrating and burning paper in front of Statues.

The second point is more problematic.

By and large, one of the big motivations for new Buddhists to practice is the "enlightenment" idea. Now, if any one's interested, I can go into this a little deeper in some posts later on, but from the outsider's perspective, "enlightenment" tends to look like something very mystical, and very important. Something very different from our mundane experience of life. "Enlightenment" is seen as something to be achieved (and, indeed, in some schools of Buddhism enlightenment is seen as being something that's only achievable over thousands of lifetimes - but Reincarnation and Karma is some nonsense I don't have time to get into right now).
However one conceives "enlightenment", Westerners coming to Buddhism are going to see it as a goal to be achieved. They are going to think of it as an endpoint for their practice. No matter how much someone like Seung Sahn stressed that "wanting enlightenment is a big mistake", Westerners are going to want enlightenment.
How do we seek/get enlightenment - well, generally through a teacher (who may or may not be enlightened him/herself).

Can you see what the problem is?

The teacher/lama/guru/Roshi/Shifu in Buddhism is an authority figure that is given an immense amount of power over their students for reasons that are, almost by definition, not accessible to the student. The teacher can ask things of the student without reason, and their will will be accepted because the student cannot (yet) understand the workings of the enlightened mind. I have personally seen the fierce devotion that a teacher can elicit from their students. And one need only do a little search online (for opinions on Michael Roach, for example) to see how heated the debates over teachers can be.

The point is not that all Buddhist teachers are corrupt - the Buddhist teachers who I have met have all been very kind, very intelligent, and very humble people. The point is that the student/teacher relationship in Buddhism is liable to be abused - and it has been abused. (read these for examples). Furthermore, this relationship is open to abuse insofar as (the particular brand of) Buddhism requires us to believe something that can't be verified. Sure, we can eventually get enlightened, but it may take several kulpas. This is irrationality at its best, and this irrationality opens up the possibility for abuse. I'm not saying that this is in any way the general case - just like it's not the case that every Catholic priest is a child molester.

This leads to a more general point I'd like to make about the role I see Buddhism playing in the future of humanity and the west in particular. Having spent a lot of time reading about Buddhism the last ten years or so, I don't think that - as a religion - it has very much to offer us - that is, I don't think there would be much to gain by us all taking refuge. I think that certain meditation techniques that come out of the tradition have some potential therapeutic applications. I also think that the Buddhist philosophical tradition may have some useful insights - as an example, Fredrick Copleston suggests we read Dogen as a kind of proto-phenomenologist, and in doing so we may learn from his explorations of the ordinary mind. But the appropriate attidude towards the philosophical aspects of Buddhism should be the same kind of attitude we take towards Hellenistic philosophy, that is, being sympathetic to their aims, but deeply skeptical about their conclusions.

If you want rationality, if you want profundity, you needn't look any further than your own back yard (or local library). Read some moral philosophy. Read some books on science and mathematics. Read Proust, James, and Nabokov. If you want to meditate, get hold of Jon Kabat-Zinn's books and spend some time on your living-room floor. You certainly don't need to seek out a teacher with a funny name to meditate (although Kabat-Zinn's name is pretty funny).

Way safer is to become a well-read, meditating atheist than becoming a Buddhist. At least you wont need to give an inch of rationality for some vaguely defined, but impressive sounding word.

Carnival of the Africans #12

2009-11-06T00:20:00.000-08:00

In case you didn't know (and I realize I'm a little late on this) the latest 'Carnival of the Africans' is up at ionian-enchantment

Some notable entries - for me, at least - are Simon Halliday's post (one in a series that looks like it's going to be great) on Gender and Risk aversion , Doctor Spurt's discussion of whether music produced by computers has any value, and Michael Meadon's smackdown of Gene Callahan's opinion of Evolutionary psychology.

Some useful reading in and around Moral psychology

2009-11-05T23:24:00.000-08:00

I hope to finish up a fairly detailed post on some issues in Moral psychology in the next week or so.
So, in leading up to that I thought I'd do some lazy linking to some important resources you can find online.

First - two papers from Jon Haidt
The emotional dog and it's rational tail - this is the paper in which Haidt first sketched out his Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment.
Morality - a review of Moral psychology, a valuable resource for anyone coming to the field for the first time.

you may also want to take a look at MoralFoundations.org and, for those of you with the bandwidth (unlike myself, who is struggling over iBurst at the moment), you might find Haidt's presentation at TED interesting.

Next, to get an idea of the different theoretical perspectives on emotion in general by taking a squizz at de Sousa's excellent entry on emotion at the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.

Finally, if you think you might be interested in my future blogs on moral psychology, you might want a little background on the so-called "emotions of self assessment", like Shame and embarrassment - a useful discussion, from a psychological perspective (to which I hope to add a more "philosophical" perspective) can be found in Tagney, Stuewig, and Mashek's Moral emotions and moral behaviour.

Happy reading.

wtf?

2009-10-31T22:05:00.001-07:00

And if I look at the mutual friend I know that this is probably legit ...

Computational thinking

2009-10-30T08:44:00.000-07:00

I just read a little article from CMU's Jeannette Wing where she discusses "computational thinking" as a basic skill that everyone should have, and that should be taught in much the same way as a skill like critical thinking is at universities.

The idea is that computational thinking is collection of mental tools, approaches, and metaphors, more or less drawn from computer science, that we can bring to everyday problems. This would include things like useful abstraction, suppressing detail and complexity, optimisation of solutions, formulation of algorithms and so on. Computational thinking also has one up on straight up "mathematical thinking" (which has all these goodies I've just listed), in that it requires one to wear the engineers' boots while wearing the mathematician's hat, bringing a vital pragmatic element into the mix that might be well be missed amongst the glorious abstractions of a purer mathematical environment.

The article itself is pretty interesting, and could usefully be summed up by saying that she'd like to see everyone learn to embrace their hacker nature.

By the way, the points that she makes about education, about teaching people outside of computer science and engineering departments about programming is exactly the kind of thing that Felleisen, Findler, Flatt, and Krishnamurthi are trying to accomplish with their wonderful book How to design programs which is in fact the very text that a course called "Ways to think like a computer scientist" should be based on.

Rudiments : Exploding logics

2009-10-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

Rudiments : Exploding logics

A while back I was sitting in a pub with a mathematician, a psychologist, and a philosopher. And while this certainly sounds like I'm getting ready to tell some corny joke, the truth is that we were actually just trying to get a philosophy of mind discussion group off the ground, so it wasn't as strange as all that.
Anyway, at one point, the philosopher turned to the mathematician and asked him if he could explain something that he, the philosopher, had either learned in an elementary logic course, or had come across somewhere in his (admittedly vast, and very deep) reading.

He asked the mathematician to explain just how it was that if we have a contradiction in a formal system, we can derive any conclusion we want?

I was a little surprised at the question - the guy who was asking is super smart - but was even more surprised when the mathematician couldn't answer it (not his field, apparently)!

So it seems to me that one can go pretty far in one's education without learning about the "principle of explosion", or - if you like your Latin - ex falso quodlibet, ex falso sequitur quodlibet, that is, "from a contradiction, follows anything you like" (or something like that - You'll see I'm playing as fast and loose with my Latin as I am with my logic in what follows, so please forgive me)

A little groundwork

I'm going to give something of a semi-informal proof so that it can be understood by anyone who hasn't really done any formal logic. But since we're speaking about formal logic, there are a couple of things that one should know.

When one is starting out, a useful way of thinking about Formal logic is to consider it a study of valid forms of reasoning. So when we're doing formal logic we're less concerned about what we're reasoning about than we are about than we are about the structure of arguments in general.
As a way of abstracting away from the details, logicians will do things like use symbols to represent basic units of meaning, rather than actual sentences in a natural language.
So instead of saying "the sky is blue", a logician will use the symbol (A). Symbols like (A), (B), (C) and so on are sometimes called primitives. We can think of these primitives as being able to represent very simple facts about the world (although they don't have to), and we can assign primitives some value, usually true or false. The advantage to using these kinds of symbols rather than actual sentences is that these symbols could stand for anything. So we know that what we discover about the shape of an argument is going to be true for any argument whatsoever because we can substitute pretty much anything we like for our symbols (as long as what we're substituting can be given a value of true or false).

Logicians also use another set of symbols to combine these basic truth bearing entities, these are called connectives. The basic vocabulary will consist of, at least (AND) and (OR) allow us to build up sentences from propositions in such a way that at each step, truth is preserved. We also need negation (~), which "flips the truth value" of a primitive - so if (A) means "the sky is blue", we can think of it's negation (~A) as meaning "the sky is not blue".

Since this post isn't a primer on sentential logic though - I'll point you to a page that is. But with a little common sense you should be able to follow most of it, but the problem is that the formal proof that we can get anything from a contradiction relies on some "moves" that are a little too slippery for common sense.

Let's say we have some proposition (A), what true sentences can we derive from this?
Well, we can get (~~A) without a problem, since double negations cancel themselves out.
We can also get something like (A AND A), which, if we substituted "the sky is blue" into our sentence we would get "the sky is blue AND the sky is blue" - and this, other than being redundant, is true. A sentence of the form (E AND F) will be true just in case that (E) and (F) are true.

But here is something odd - we can, for free, tag anything we want onto the end of our sentence using a move called disjunction introduction.
Let's say we have the primitive (C) which can stand for anything, including "cats can fly"
We can use disjunction introduction to derive the sentence (A OR C) - which when translated says "the sky is blue OR cats can fly", and this move would be - in the simple kind of logic we're dealing with here - truth preserving. We say that (A OR C) is true, because the only thing that's required for truth over disjunction (OR) is that ONE of the primitives is true.
(A) is true, and so (A OR C) is also true.

An interesting aside here - can you see how, because of disjunction introduction, for any system we can derive an infinite number of true sentences?
If we know that (A) is true, we can just keep adding more "stuff" onto it using disjunction introduction forever and ever. We could derive long sentences like (A OR B OR C OR D OR E OR F OR G ... OR Z) and it would be true because we know that (A) is true, so all of the sentences we generate using this rule will be true as well.
As I said, it's a little odd, but that's the thing, while it's useful to think of AND and OR being like "and" and "or" in natural language, they don't entirely match up.

The other thing we need to lean on is the disjunctive syllogism. Now, we can actually give a proof for this in sentential logic, but it's easier to understand in plain language, because we reason this way the whole time. The disjunctive syllogism is a way of reasoning from something like (A OR B) to either (A) or (B) by itself.
Let's say that I know that (A OR B), but, on top of that, I also know that (~A). Well, that makes it pretty obvious which of (A) or (B) is true, we know that (A) isn't true, so (B) must be true the term that's true, so we can confidently add (B) to our collection of things we know to be true.

The proof

Well, lets say that we've got a contradiction, and from this contradiction we want to prove (C) - how do we go about that?

Let's say our contradiction is

(A & ~A)

Which, using our examples for substitution would say something like "the sky is blue AND the sky is not blue"
This means that we can infer both (A) and (~A) by themselves.
Okay, now, remember our rule about disjunction introduction - we can take any of our theorems and, for free, paste anything we want onto the end of a sentence (even if the sentence is a simple primitive)
So we're interested in (C), so let's introduce that by pasting it on to our (A) using our rule for disjunction introduction.

(A OR C) - by disjunction introduction

Now, this wouldn't pose any problem for us, except for the fact that we actually HAVE (~A) as somthing we know. Why is this a problem?
Well, remember our disjunctive syllogism? Well, if you agree that the disjunctive syllogism is indeed a truth preserving move, then we're in the awkward position that we can use that move to infer (C) from our theorem ((A) OR (C)).

That's really it - easy huh?
There are actually a couple of ways of proving that we can derive anything from a contradiction and they give three different derivations over on the wikipedia page about the priciple of explosion. Check it out if you want to see what a full formal proof of the principle looks like - they also give a semantic proof as well (I hope to cover some stuff from formal semantics properly in some other posts).

Does any of this sound dodgy to you though? Well, if it does, you're not the only one. If you find you don't like your logics to be of the exploding variety, mosey on down to wikipedia and check out paraconsistent logics - these may be more your taste.

What does this tell us?

To sum up, I want to discuss one of the real problems with being able to infer anything from a contradiction.

We can intuitively think of the true sentences that we derive as being a way of eliminating possible ways things can be.
For example, lets say that I don't know whether or not it's raining in London - let's agree to represent the basic fact "it's raining in London" with the symbol (L).
Before we check the weather online, we only really know (L OR ~L) - which translates to something like, "it's either raining in London, or it's not".
These are, for us who don't yet know the facts of the matter, the two possible ways that the world might be.
When we do hop online and see that it is in fact raining in London, that is, the fact that (L) is true, we've effectively reduced the number of possible ways the world could be given what we know.
If we wanted to, we could think about the amount of information that a sentence carries as being equivalent to the number of ways-the-world-can-be that are eliminated by us coming to know a fact.

You should be able to see where I'm going with this. If we hit a contradiction, and the principle of explosion holds, we find that our system gives us absolutely no information at all, because ~~being able to derive whatever we want means that anything is possible~~ we can't use our system of logic to deduce any particular way the world could be, all states are possible for us, given what we "know".

Contradiction = knowing absolutely nothing.

Yeah, it gives me the chills too :)

Labuschagne - applied logic and Rudiments

2009-10-27T02:04:00.000-07:00

Dr W. Labuschagne (Otago, formally UNISA) and Prof. Heidema (UNISA) are apparently writing a book on applied logic together, parts of which are available online at Labuschagne's website here

I'd suggest that anyone who is interested in learning about formal semantics, non-monotonic logics, philosophy of formal logic etc. takes a look at it, working through the exercises will give you a good sense of the field and some of it's applications. If it's anything like his other books, you'll either love or hate Dr Labuschagne's sense of humor - and you'll become intimately acquainted with the infamous light-fan system.

It seems to be a continuation of the old UNISA philosophy/3rd year course in formal semantics and applied logic, and it's something that I'm personally quite passionate about, but haven't had much time to look into, or do any work, in since finishing up with logic a couple of years ago.
So part of these posts that I'm going to be doing will make up a series of "rudiments", used in the same sense and spirit that our drummery friends use it - I see these as being basic ideas and topics in philosophy of information, philosophy of mind, computer science, logic, psychology and so on, that one needs to have a grip on to understand higher levels of the discipline. This will also give me a chance to brush up on my basics as well.

Random links - stats and machine learning

2009-10-25T23:34:00.000-07:00

There have been a few discussions of statistics, probability and machine learning on some of the feeds that I follow - here are some of the best suggested resources to come out of those discussions.

Andrew Ng's course on machine learning up at Standford's "engineering everywhere" page is amazing. The notes for the course are pretty much a textbook on machine learning themselves.

For those of you who haven't yet downloaded Hastie,Tibshirani, and Friedman's Elements of statistical learning, I'd suggest you take a look at it as soon as possible. Very comprehensive.

Another useful, and free, resource is McKay's Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms

Finally, be sure to check out videolectures.net - another top notch resource for, well, pretty much anything.

Formal introductions

2009-10-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, Michael over at ionian-enchantment suggested I start blogging seriously as a kind of intellectual exercise - or something like it.

So instead of going ahead and launching something new, I thought I'd start posting more regularly here, and with more focus. As such, I've cleared away the more diary-like entries.

I'd imagine that this blog will become more focused in terms of the kind of content that I post as we go along, but what can be expected for the moment will be posts dealing with topics in psychology, philosophy, and computer science.

As for myself. I'm a software developer at a small company called Thinkopen - we develop most of our software using PHP and the Zend Framework, sometimes do work in Drupal, and - very occasionally, when we have absolutely no other choice - we work with Microsoft Products (mainly C#/ASP.net apps). That isn't to say I don't like MS - I couldn't care less about the beef people have with them - I taught courses on their products for several years and am a fan of SQL server, especially now that Management studio has intellisense. It's just not our prefered development platform.

I've got a BA in classics, philosophy and logic from the University of South Africa (UNISA) - a correspondence institution, and the largest university in South Africa. I've also completed a qualification called the National Certificate in Datametrics, which allows one to take courses in Computer science at Undergrad level without having to complete an entire degree.
I'm finishing up my honours at the moment, and will be starting my MA in cognitive science at UKZN mid-2010.

First Fractals

2009-08-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with Fractals lately. It's not particularly impressive, but it's not anything I've done before, and it's quite a lot of fun actually - so I thought I'd post my first results.

First up is the Sierpinski triangle. I generated it with a crash happy PHP app using some dodgy recursive function (hence the "crash happy" ...) - but I thought it was cool because (believe it of not) it was the first time I've generated dynamic graphics from PHP - so that was pretty cool

Then we have the ever popular Mandelbrot set - This was really cool to do because, looking at it you would think that it would take some serious maths to generate something so complex. Turns out the maths isn't very hardcore at all, and writing up an algorithm to generate the set is super easy. But it looks pretty.

I'll post anything else I do up soon.
Graphics programming is always cool because the payoff can be impressive - if you're doing something like a search or sorting algorithm it's like - "oh, yay, the list is in the right order" - but when something comes right with graphics it's always way more satisfying.

GEB lectures for highschoolers

2009-06-05T01:45:00.000-07:00

As promised, I'll try put stuff relevant to my Hofstadter presentation whenever it's worthwhile.

Here is a link to an MIT OCW series of video lectures on GEB designed for highschoolers - there might be some interesting stuff in it, so I'll work through 'em the next week or so.

Here is the link http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/geb/VideoLectures/

Knights of faith - question on Fear and Trembling

2009-02-16T03:46:00.000-08:00

The feed from forums.philosophyforums.com popped up with a discussion that has seemed to go nowhere the last few weeks.
I've started writing in answer to this question about three or four times and each time I get stuck somewhere, so I thought I'd try and work it out here.

The thread can be found at http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/kierkegaards-knight-of-faith-33082.html.

Cadmus asks :

I've recently finished Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and was continually asking myself, 'Though Abraham, as a Knight of Faith, was asked to kill; he did not kill. And insofar as he did not kill, how was he acting unethically toward the universal? He did not commit the unethical deed, but only considered committing the unethical deed. Therefore God, nor Abraham, were acting unethically.

Okay, so here is where I've been going with the posts I almost put up.
The thing I've been trying to say in my many abortive attempts at replying to this question, is that Kierkegaard turns almost all the the usual categories that Cadmus is using on their heads - in a very interesting way.

In the beginning of Problema 1, Kierkegaard says that 'The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which can be put from another point of view by saying that it applies at every moment' - okay, so the universal and the ethical are somehow the same - note that he could have said that the ethical is that which is legislated by God, this is pretty important in answering Cadmus' question because it already gives us a clue - if God was the universal legislator of all ethical principles, God's command for Abraham to sacrifice Issac would have simply been the ethical course of action, no problem.
Kierkegaard's way of dealing with the ethical is stronger than the God-as-legislator solution in that it 'applies to everyone ..[and] at every moment' but also less ... umm ... absolute because it seems to me that the ethical/universal isn't somehow supposed to be built into the fabric of the cosmos (as it would be, I presume, if the ethical was just what God commands).
Okay, so what exactly is the ethical in that case?
This is the interesting part - the ethical/universal is that which makes our actions intelligible to others and to our-selves. Now I'm not really too clued up in the philosophy of action, but as I understand it for it to be said that we have done something willfully, performed some action, that action stands in relation to things like our intention in performing that action, the reasons we would put forward for justifying that action and so on. Now these things like intending, providing reasons and so on can only really make sense when embedded inside of a culture. We can only really understand ourselves as agents, or as selves, acting intentionally (as opposed to just running on instinct - something Kierkegaard refers to as 'lower immediacy', a term lifted from Hegel) if we have this kind of cultural/linguistic background against which we can act and which makes our actions intelligible to ourselves and others. This is not me saying that 'truth is relative to culture' or some other such paradigm relativist stuff, it's just to say we need a language and culture for our actions to make sense (think about it this way, if there was no language and culture, would we be worried - of even be able to be worried - about our actions making sense? Let me ask my cat ....)
The textual evidence for all this culture stuff can be pulled from his discussion of whether there are any examples where someone sacrifices one they love for some 'higher universal' and Kierkegaard points to the examples of 'Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus' - regardless of what pain was caused by their killings, their actions were understandable in their culture.
Kierkegaard says that in Abraham's culture the call to kill Issac and his willingness to do it (although this is a really weak way of saying it, rather read F&T) was totally unintelligible.

This brings us to the question of sin - how are we to understand someone sinning in Kierkegaard's scheme - well, sin is somehow 'falling from the universal'.
Now this is the part I had trouble with (but the book is all about absurdity and paradox, so it's okay to not understand a lot of it I guess) - because we can actually understand sin, right? I mean, the actions of thieves are just as understandable as the next mook's aren't they? But we will skip over this, and I'll read some of F&T again when I've got a moment to see if I can figure it out (if anyone has any answers, please tell me).
Right, well - regardless of this difficulty we can see how it is that Abraham was sinning even though he didn't actually do anything - first, even though he was called to do something 'by God' Kierkegaard is absolutely certain that he here falls out of the universal, he says that

'Abraham cannot be mediated, which can also be put by saying he cannot speak. The moment I speak I express the universal, and when I do not no one can understand me. So the moment Abraham wants to express himself in the universal, he has to say that his situation is one of temptation, for he has no higher expression of the universal that overrides the universal he transgresses'

Check it - 'he cannot speak' - i.e. there is no ways to make his actions intelligible, and every time he tries to explain what he is doing (namely, taking Issac off to sacrifice) he has to admit to those with whom he speaks that he is sinning, even though he knows - non-cognitively perhaps - that what he is doing is somehow not a sin. That is, to everyone else he is sinning, and even if he had to put what he is doing into words (that is, even to think it) he would have to say that he was sinning - but somehow was he was up to wasn't a sin.
Okay, so here we have a contradiction - it is a sin and it's not a sin - so how is it resolved? This is where God comes in (I think) as a kind of field of possibilities that allows such contradictions. I'm really fuzzy on that though and need to give it a whole load more thought and read a lot more Kierkegaard - this is the part where my attempts at answering that question usually come to a halt, because although I've shown (I hope) that Kierkegaard uses the notions of Ethical,Universal, and God in very special ways, I'm not a Kierkegaard scholar, or even someone whose read his stuff or, in fact, any secondary literature on the guy.

I think the best thing to do would have probably just have been to quote the summary that Kierkegaard gives us at the end of Problema 1 - and that's what I'll do here -

But now I return to Abraham. In the time before the outcome either Abraham was a murderer every minute or we stay with the paradox which is higher than all mediation.
So Abraham's story contains a teleological suspension of the ethical. He has, as the single individual, become higher than the universal. This is the paradox which cannot be mediated. How he got into it is just as inexplicable as how he stayed in it. If this is not how it is with Abraham, then he is not even a tragic hero but a murderer. To want to go on calling him the father of faith, to talk of this to those who are only concerned with words, is thoughtless. A tragic hero can become a human being by his own strength, but not the knight of faith. When a person sets out on the tragic hero's admittedly hard path there are many who could lend him advice; but he who walks the narrow path of faith no one can advise, no one understand. Faith is a marvel and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.

Bomoko and other nonsense words

Stats Saturday 1 - MySQL and R

Mental Rotation 1 - Introduction and Discovery

Restatement of a small part of "Is necrophilia wrong?" by Tauriq Moosa

Introduction to the next few posts.

First stab at Maze Generation

UKZN/Meraka KRR MAIS '11

The "end of philosophy"

1st semester in review

Should we be surprised? X-phi meta-survey results

Fear of Knowledge

Does defending intuitions against restrictionism require more Experimental work?

Experimental philosophy - themes and methods

*edit* Infrequent posting

UKZN, epistemology and Logic

Follow up on my last post on Dlanga

A quick response to Khaya Dlanga's latest

Formal virtues

Dembski and McDowell misrepresent Dennett - is this a shock?

Power Balance Bollocks - The Stat attack

Tetris and the site-specific hypothesis

Why I am not not an atheist.

Updated African science, rationalism and skepticism blogroll

Reading about Tetris

NaNoWriMo - look Ma, I wrote a book!

Intelligent machinery

CompSci resources

Thinking about intuition - some short notes

MIT OCW Modal logic

Carnival of the Africans #15

Carnival of the Africans : call for submissions

A brief note regarding Oatley's brief history of emotions

Gödel without tears

On Shame

Thought on metaphor, God, Jesus, and the Bible

The negative effects of religious thinking.

"Carnival of the Africans - the Phoenix edition" @ The Skeptic detective

South African science / skepticism blogroll - January

Reading Hountondji

The question of African philosophy

To what end?

To this end

"Spirituality and medicine" - some thoughts (and an anecdote for good measure)

The skeptical Buddhist - enlightenment and rationality

Carnival of the Africans #12

Some useful reading in and around Moral psychology

wtf?

Computational thinking

Rudiments : Exploding logics

Rudiments : Exploding logics

Labuschagne - applied logic and Rudiments

Random links - stats and machine learning

Formal introductions

First Fractals

GEB lectures for highschoolers

Knights of faith - question on Fear and Trembling

edit Infrequent posting