Posts

Showing posts from May, 2011

I am a strange loop Commentary, preliminaries

     I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, is a much bigger, deeper, and altogether more involved book than The Moral Landscape.  It has 24 chapters and an epilogue, it deals with difficult issues that Harris would likely dismiss as "boring".   He sweeps across a wide range of very complex ideas including Incompleteness, Turing Machine, Neurobiology, Artificial Intelligence, and causality, not to mention brushing against many maddening ideas in contemporary Philosophy of Mind.  I suspect I will sometimes need more than one entry for some of the chapters.       It has been pointed out that what I'm starting here can't really be called a "book review", rather, it is a commentary.  For starters, I suggest glancing at the Wikipedia articles for some of the following if you are not familiar with these subjects: Philosophical Zombie, Qualia, and Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem.   Finally, and rather idiosyncratically on my part, read the wikipedia artic

I Am a Strange Loop book report/review/notes

I am going to start reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter.  I will start writing my notes with my next post.

The moral smart phone app -- Thoughts on Chapter 5 of The Moral Landscape

      In Chapter 5 Harris talks more about the "science" of happiness.  The idea that morality is based on happiness is based in the brain leads him to optimism: "...the belief that morality is a genuine sphere of human inquiry, and not a mere product of culture, suggests that progress is possible.  If moral truths transcend the contingencies of culture, human beings should eventually converge in their moral judgments." (Harris pp. 163-164) Perhaps one day moral judgments will be an app on my smart phone!  Once we become suitably sophisticated in our moral calculus, I see no reason we couldn't enter fields nto a moral judger app and have it tell us what the right thing to do in a given situation. Hmm.... I suppose malware attacking moral apps really would be "mal"ware as they would lead to evil judgments?  But  I digress.      I agree that scientists, similarly educated, would likely agree on brain states that are associated with happiness.  I ag

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris-- Thoughts on Chapter 4

     One thing that Harris does not comment on in his usual diatribe against religion is that it provides social connections and belonging that many find preferable to other forms.  Rodney Stark asserts that many religious groups provide important services for their members.  He points to this as the reason why some religions that seem to require more from congregants seem to be growing faster than more reforned groups that may require less.  Stark points out that the Latter Day Saints, while demanding tithes and very strict rules, is one of the fastest growing religions. Stark believes the popularity of such groups actually is a rational decision based on what the religious group actually provides for its members.  See Stark's book, Discovering God.      In raw economic terms, if Stark isn't right, if religion isn't doing something for its followers, then why does it still attract so many people, especially groups that are more demanding?  Some luxuries provided  by the

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris -- thoughts on Chapter 3

     Chapter 3 is, so far, the most interesting of the book.  Here we get some pay-off for Harris's new doctorate in neuroscience.  In this chapter he talks about belief.  This is the first time I have ever read a scientist document that the same areas of the brain are activated when we believe mathematical kinds of statements and moral ones; he uses this to futher explode the fact/value distinction:           "This finding of content-independence challenges the fact/value distinction very             directly; for if, from the point of view of the brain, believing "the sun is a star"             is importantly similar to believing "cruelty is wrong," how can we say that             scientific and ethical judgments have nothing in common?"(Harris pg 113, Nookbook)       His statement that true statements are usable ones reminds me of philosophers like Heidegger and his notion of "equipment".  For Heidegger, experience is, borrowing the

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris -- thoughts on Chapter 2

     In the second chapter of The Moral Landscape , Sam Harris begins with evolutionary evidence regarding cooperation.  I want to inject a little Nietzsche into all this.  Nietzsche was afraid that evolution, rather than leading to the "survival of the fittest", would lead to the survival of nervous, rapidly reproducing little tribbles -- he didn't put it just that way, but you get the idea.  He was also concerned that Utilitarianism, maximizing happiness etc... is the royal road to the universal couch potato.  That is, when society gets all this worked out, what we will end up with is a bunch of overly-entertained, and thoroughly reprehensible, bourgeois slugs whose idea of excitement is playing virtual parchisi on their wii.      The question is, can Harris's viewpoint satisfy the existential view that, in fact, we don't want happiness, we want freedom?  Well maybe, maybe not.  Can we take this all into account when we are looking at the brain and create a so

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris -- thoughts on Chapter 1

For an excellent introduction to this book and some of the reaction, first check out the wikipedia page for The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values       Sam Harris takes on all of academic philosophy in The Moral Landscape .   He claims that we can eventually have a developed science of the good life.  He starts innocently enough, rejecting the fact/value distinction, but then he goes in an unusual direction.  Rather than using this to undermine the legitimacy of scientific claims to truth by assaulting them as "value laden", he says that moral claims can have the same status as most scientific ones.  All we have to do is not obsess over typical is/ought dichotomy arguments.      He wants to think of "well-being"(the fundamental value in Harris's scheme) the same way we think about "health": if we can do medicine without constantly arguing over philosophical arcana about health why can't we develop a scientific approach to
Image
Image
Image
Image
Image

Wavelets and Continued Fractions paper

http://www.ams.org/journals/proc/2004-132-05/S0002-9939-03-07064-3/S0002-9939-03-07064-3.pdf

Random Walks paper

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~clancy/docs/lraw-milcom08.pdf

Protocol Paper

http://www.netlab.tkk.fi/chants-2007/papers/2-1.pdf
Image