Rational-Empirical Babies

Psychologist Alison Gopnik wrote a book called The Philosophical Baby. It's loaded with cool insights on the rationalism-empiricism debate. Here's an interview with Gopnik about the book, and here's a review. Below is her appearance on The Colbert Report.

My Identity is Personal

Two cartoons on personal identity:

1. Does physical or psychological continuity matter? Let's think about teletransportation...
2. Perhaps our identity is all in the way we're arranged:

Kantian Links

Here are some links related to Immanuel Kant's theory of ethics:

• An intermediate overview of Kant's theory of ethics.
• An advanced overview of Kant's ethics.
• Kant's theory is deontological (which is a fancy word that basically means morality is about more than just the consequences of an action). Here's an advanced overview of deontological ethics.
• Some harsh criticisms of Kant's ethical judgments. My favorite excerpt: "Kant's philosophical moral reasoning appears mainly to have confirmed his prejudices and the ideas inherited from his culture. Therefore, we should be nervous about expecting more from the philosophical moral reasoning of people less philosophically capable than Kant."
• A 3-minute video on Kant's ethics is below:

The Psychology of Happiness

Since utilitarianism focuses so much on happiness, I thought I'd share some links on the cool new psychological research on happiness popping up lately.

• Here's a great overview of the psychology of happiness. And here is another, and another.
• Recent studies suggest that our baseline level of happiness doesn't change much throughout our life. So, even if we won the lottery, we wouldn't wind up that much happier. This is potentially very depressing news, although some say there's room for some optimism, and others think the research is wrong.
• There's an insightful, accessible book by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert called Stumbling on Happiness. One of his big points is that we often don't know what makes us happy. Here's Gilbert's appearance on The Colbert Report:
• And here's Gilbert giving an awesome TED talk on his research:
  
  

Utilitarios!

Here are some links on the theory of utilitarianism:

• A neat little biography of know-it-all John Stuart Mill
• An advanced encyclopedia article on utilitarianism and other theories that focus on consequences of an action.
• The trolley problem gets brought up a lot when evaluating utilitarianism. A short video intro on it is below. Also, there's some new research on the psychology of the trolley problem.

Suffer-iness

Here's Stephen Colbert's take on evil:

Design in the Mind's Eye

Here's an interesting approach to explaining the seeming complexity, order, and functionality of the universe: maybe it's all in our mind.

Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that we see intentional design and patterns too much... including in things that are actually random. So things that seem so fine-tuned and unlikely from our perspective might not actually be. Here's a video dialogue on this topic:




Bloom has two great books (Descartes' Baby and How Children Learn the Meaning of Words) on how our minds develop from early childhood on.

Blind Watchmaking

Here are some more critical links on the design argument for God's existence.

• Here is an audio interview on Hume's criticisms of the design arg.
• One philosophers' take on the debate between evolution and intelligent design.
• Is our universe fine-tuned for life? Maybe not.
• Wait, can science even judge religious claims, or are they talking about different things? Maybe an inference to the best explanation can help us...
• What about all the "design flaws" in nature? Are they evidence against a supreme designer?
• In the video below, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson points to all kinds of "design flaws" in the universe.

Why Is Anything Anything?

The website Closer to Truth has a ton of short interviews with modern-day philosophers (and other smart people) on their thoughts about god. For instance, there's an entire episode on the cosmological argument titled "Did Our Universe Have a Beginning?" and an entire section titled "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" Here are some related videos:

• Theist John Leslie says God best explains why there is something.
• Theist Peter van Inwagen believes in God, but doesn't like this arg.
• Atheist Colin McGinn thinks it's a meaningless question.
• Physicist Steven Weisberg says we should wait for science's answer.
• Apatheist Master Shake uses it as an excuse to be lazy.

Speaking of silly jokes, here's one of my favorite responses to the cosmological argument (from Gerald Dworkin's list of philosophy quips:)

When a philosopher announced that the title of his talk was “Why is there Something rather than Nothing?” Sydney Morgenbesser said to the man sitting next to him, “If there was Nothing he would still complain.”

And here's a video on the relationship between philosophy and religion:

• Does Philosophy Illuminate Religion?

Hey, where's the interview with an agnostic? Oh, here it is!

• Nick Bostrom (the author of "Do We Live in a Computer Simulation?") argues for agnosticism

McGurk

Here's a neat video on an optical illusion called the McGurk effect:

My favorite illusions are the ones that still work even after you realize they're just illusions.

Do I Annoy Because I'm a Jerk, Or Am I a Jerk Because I Annoy You?

Socrates has a reputation of being a bit of a jerk. The following robot reenactment of one of his dialogues does little to dispel this reputation:

An Expert for Every Cause

Looking for links on arguments from authority? This is your post! First, here's an interesting article on a great question: How are those of us who aren't experts supposed to figure out the truth about stuff that requires expertise?

Not all alleged experts are actual experts. Here's a method to tell which experts are phonies (this article was originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education).

We should judge experts who are into making predictions on how accurate their predictions turn out.  Well, most experts are really bad at predicting, and have the same biases as non-experts.

It's important to check whether the person making an appeal to authority really knows who the authority is. That's why we should beware of claims that begin with "Studies show..."

And here's a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Christopher Walken completely flunks the competence test.

Penguin Digestion Experts? You Bet!

So you didn't believe me when I said that there are experts on the subject of penguin digestion? Oh, you did? Fine, well, I'll prove it to you, anyway. Here are some academic articles on the topic:

• Adjustments of gastric pH, motility and temperature during long-term preservation of stomach contents in free-ranging incubating king penguins from a 2004 issue of Journal of Experimental Biology
  
• Feeding Behavior of Free-Ranging King Penguins (Aptenodytes Patagonicus) from a 1994 issue of Ecology

Of course, no list would be complete without the often-cited, groundbreaking 1985 Ornis Scandinavica article:

• Differential Digestion of Fish and Squid in Jackass Penguins Spheniscus demersus

Perhaps my favorite, though, is the following:

• Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation from a 2003 issue of Polar Biology
  

If any of these articles are above your head (I think they're all above mine!), you might like this, uh, simpler video demonstration of penguin digestion.

Arguments by Example

Here are a few dumb things about arguments by example (also called inductive arguments, talked about in the book chapter titled "Generalizations"). First, a video of comedian Lewis Black describing his failure to learn from experience every year around Halloween:


Next, this stick figure comic offers a pretty bad argument. Why is it bad? (Let us know in the comments!)

That Beyoncé Video WAS Great...

Why doesn't Kanye give a toast to the tools?

Howard Sure Is a Duck

Howard the Duck is my favorite synecdoche for the 80's:

Philosophy: The Annoying 3-Year-Old

Here's comedian Louis CK's take on the broad, fundamental questions kids ask.

Louis CK - Why?