2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Jonny S. on Atheism

Jonny Scaramanga has a wonderful new post:

• Who cares about atheism?

I guess that I like it, because it is very similar to my own view.  So I suggest that you read it.  And maybe browse through some of Jonny’s other posts while you are there.

 

Contrasting direct and representationalist (indirect) perception

In a discussion at another site, I am noticing some misunderstanding of what is meant by direct perception.  I’m seeing comments similar to “vision uses photons, so is indirect.”  Those who favor direct perception have never denied that vision uses photons, retinal receptors and neurons.  The usually prefer saying that visual perception is mediated by photons, neurons, etc.  What they disagree with, is the idea that first a representation is formed inside the head, and then we perceive that representation.

Apparently this distinction is confusing.  So I plan a short series of posts where I contrast direct perception and representationalist perception.  This post is the introduction to that series.  The subsequent posts in this series are:

• Representational measurement of temperature
• Direct measurement of temperature
• Direct vs. representational perception — the discussion

Illustrating with science

It is sometimes said that scientific discovery is learning written big, and scientific data acquisition is perception written big.  The problems that science must solve to acquire useful data are similar to the problems that a perceptual system must solve to gather information about the world.  I shall use that analogy between perception and science, to illustrate what is meant by direct perception.

My next post in this series will give a representationalist account of getting temperature data.  I’ll follow that with a post on a direct way of getting temperature data.  And then, in one more post, I will attempt to point out the important distinctions.

 

On Jerry Coyne on free will

Jerry Coyne has yet another post on the topic of free will, which he thinks we do not have.

• Does the average person believe in determinism, free will, and moral responsibility?

There are some points in that post that warrant a reply, so this will be my response.

Am I banned?

Normally, I would respond by posting a comment at Coyne’s site.  However, my last few attempts to comment there have failed.  It sure looks as if Coyne has banned me from commenting, though I have no idea why.  Yes, I have disagreed with Coyne in the past, but I have never been belligerent or excessively argumentative in that disagreement.  It is Coyne’s site, so within his rights to ban me.  But it seems surprising.

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

“What They Really Need. . .”

I’m reblogging this, because it is so eloquent. I’ll add a comment shortly.

Itinerant Lurker

I heard something in church the other day that’s been bothering me ever since.  That’s not exactly right actually, it’s something that’s always bothered me – even when I was a Christian – but this brought it to the forefront of my thoughts.

Yes, I’m an atheist who goes to church.  I’m even on a first name basis with my pastor.  I even call him “my pastor”.  It’s weird, but I have a family who are all of them Christians, so compromise is kind of the order of the day.  Typically I don’t mind – but this service was different.

There was a team talking about a missions trip they’d recently returned from (a “missions trip” is when a small group of people raise money from a church to go do some sort of mission work in another country for a few weeks) to South America.  They’d worked with families…

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Consciousness 3: Qualia

I don’t much like the word “qualia”.  I don’t find it useful.  People who use that word (and its singular form “quale”) hope to be able to discuss questions about conscious experience.  In this post, I’ll try to address those topics without the assumptions that seem to be built into use of “qualia.”

I’ll start with a review of earlier posts in this series.

• Experience: I have identified this with internal activity of homeostatic processes, such as are commonly found in biological systems.  In particular, I have identified “experience” (with the scare quotes) with internal event to which the system reacts, so can be said to be reactively aware.  How we become conscious, and not merely reactively aware, I take to be related to our ability to have thoughts.  I expect to discuss thought in a future post.
• Information: I have suggested that an organism acquires information about the world, and represents this information as internal events of which the organism is reactively aware.  This reactive awareness of represented information mediates the organisms awareness or consciousness of the external world.  Perhaps one could think of information as being represented by biochemical events or by neural events.  I prefer to not be that specific, because I am discussing principles rather than implementation details.  AI proponents will want to consider whether computational events could be used instead of neural events.

Consciousness is unexplained; therefore Intelligent Design

Of course I completely disagree with the claim that is suggested by my title line.  However, people are making that argument, so I want to comment.

Apparently, Thomas Nagel makes that kind of argument in his book “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False“, or at least that is what I have gleaned from a recent review.  I have not read Nagel’s book myself — I don’t think I have the patience.  His reasoning in “What is it like to be a bat?” was already hard to take.

I have not yet posted anything on Sandy Hook. This poem says it all, better than I could.

Rebecca Rose Poetry

The world was saddened and horrified by the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

The NRA’s response? Put more guns in schools.

—–

The Price of Safety

The NRA says lots of guns will help to keep us safe!
Fill our homes and church and school, and arm the office place!
To protect his family, fathers stockpile guns of every size,
And women fill their purses up with pistols, as is wise.
There are crazy people out there. You never know just who.
So all the neighbors hurry out, and they buy weapons, too.

And teachers carry rifles to defend the school hall;
And shoppers strap their pistols on ‘fore heading to the mall;
And waitresses wear handguns as they work at the café;
And parents pack revolvers to the soccer field each day;
Ministers give sermons proudly sporting guns on hips,
And rejoice to see…

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Agreed. And the rest of Western Europe needs to follow suit.

coelsblog

Here is a joke:

What’s the difference between Mark Bridger and Santa Claus?

You can work out the punchline from the fact that Santa comes in December.

Sick? Tasteless? Funny? Offensive? All of those? Or is it so bad that it is criminal — literally? (If you’re not aware of the context of the joke try here.)

The answer, according to magistrate Bill Hudson is that it is criminal, literally, and worthy of a 12-week jail sentence.

“The reason for the sentence is the seriousness of the offence, the public outrage that has been caused and we felt there was no other sentence this court could have passed which conveys to you the abhorrence that many in society feel this crime should receive.”

And the “crime”? It was someone posting the above joke (plus milder ones) on their own Facebook page, a page that “was available to a large…

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