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Young. black, male

The New York Times submits the following topic to discussion:

The news for young black men is not good: they are disproportionately singled out for discipline in school, they are more likely to be stopped and frisked by New York City police officers, and according to Michelle Alexander in her book, “The New Jim Crow,” nearly one-third of black men are likely to spend time in prison at some point in their lives.

Would pulling back on draconian drug laws or legalizing marijuana be enough to fix this imbalance? What else needs to be done.

Read the 9 different opinions (5 of which are by young black men). What do you think? Is this a a problem of education, discrimination, family, drug prohibition, wrong societal perceptions? Is it a single problem, or a mix of issues? Go ahead.

This post for comment will be closed next Monday @ 11pm.  

The fabric of the cosmos

I'd like you to take a look at this very interesting videos by NOVA featuring physicist Brian Greene, professor of Columbia University. They examine important topics of physics:

Quantum mechanics, with renowned professors from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc.

The Illusion of Time, a most see.

What is space?

Universe or multiverse? Which begins with a discussion of inflation. 
________________
 Keep in mind that our observable universe is very large, having a diameter of roughly 40 billion light years, and encompassing hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which may contain billions of stars.

The day may not be too far off when patients can control a prosthetic hand or leg just by thinking about it

In our last post for comment we discussed trans humanism. I found this in Science Daily:

The chip UF researchers are seeking to develop would be implanted directly into the brain tissue, where it could gather data from signals, decode them and stimulate the brain in a self-contained package without wires. In the interim, UF researchers are studying implantable devices in rats and are evaluating an intermediate form of the technology - placing electrodes on the surface of the brain - in people.

Phi 2010 Students Assistants

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Diego Pinzon
Dayron Miranda
Rebecca Soza

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Fritz Charles
Elvis Hatcher
Veroniza Quigg
Kathia Sylvain

Topics for Exam 3 (Chapter 4)

Numerical identity: Two objects are identical if they are one and the same.  
Qualitative Identity: Two objects are qualitatively identical if they share the same properties (qualities).
Accidental property:  a property a thing can lose without ceasing to exist (losing one's hair).
Essential property: A property a thing cannot lose without ceasing to exist (losing one's mind).

Is numerical identity a necessary condition for qualitative identity? Read p. 246.
The answer is  NO.

person_properties= a being with 1. reason, 2. sentience, 3. autonomy, 4. free will?

if so, then a human being (hb)  is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition for a person. a hb with severe hydrocephanlia may not be a person, a brain-dead hb is not a person. on the other hand, there are non-human persons, ex. dolphins, or aliens (aliens are causally possible persons).

Animalism: Identical persons are those with identical human bodies (i,e., "I'm my body").
Problems: two-in-one, (Hensel sisters), the transgender problem (trans people feel "trapped" in the wrong body.

C/E: Locke's tale of the prince and the cobbler (as the cobbler and the prince trade souls, their bodies become redundant).

2. Locke's Memory Theory of Personal Identity: (I am my memories and my memories are the result of my experiences). 

Problem: What if one forgets? Is that forgotten part still a part of my identity? Reid’s Tale of the Brave Officer reveals the following: Direct memory: A memory that a person can consciously recall. Indirect memory: A memory that an earlier stage of that person can consciously recall. 

Real memory: A memory of an event that was experienced by the person remembering it and that was caused by the event it records. Apparent memory: A memory of an event that either didn't happen or was not caused by the event it records.

C/E The main objection against Locke's memory theory is that Locke's Memory Theory is circular.  

Why? It defines memories in terms of the self and the self in terms of its memories.


Could Locke's theory be improved? Yes. But we need to define other kinds of memories. Here is when it comes the concept of quasi-memory.

What  is the difference between quasi-memory and real memory? Take a look at p. 275 (5th Ed) : 

A q-memory is an apparent memory caused in the right way by an actual experience. 
You can also see it as a memory that someone has and it's cause in the  right way by an actual experience.

In the end, all your real memories are quasi memories, but the "someone" happens to be you.

Now Locke's theory could be reformulated (he never did it) It would look that this:

You are your quasi memories. Many of your memories from 0-7 are q-memories. They are given to you by your parents, siblings. These are real memories they -NOT YOU- had. Then we have the concept of apparent memory.

An apparent memory is a memory of an event a) that either didn't happen, or b) was not caused by the event it records.

What this means is that the memory of your birth is a q-memory, given to you by your parents. But at the same time it's an apparent memory because it's not caused by your actual birthday but by your parents' memory of your birthday (the causal link is very important here). 

So we get the following susprising result: All real memories are quasi memories and all quasi memories are apparent memories. See it as three concentric circles. 

Granted, some apparent memories never happened. We called them "fake" memories. Examples are, a memory of a dream, a memory given to you during hypnosis, a dissociative memory, which your psyche creates in order to keep homeostatic balance (the memory of a trauma often becomes a fake memory in order for the psyche to cope with the trauma). 

3. Psychological Continuity Theory: Identical persons are those who are psychologically continuous to one another. That is to say, two people are psychologically continuous if they form part of an overlapping series of persons that quasi-remember and quasi desire the same things. 

See it as this longitudinal surface representing one's overlapping series of persons:

_____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

0___________/_/_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _0

                                                       past             now          future

A note about the relationship between q-memories and personal identity:
 
Can I have a memory of someone else's experience? The answer seems to be yes. 

Reciprocally, all real memories are q-memories but not all q-memories are real memories, because people can have q-memories of experiences they didn't actually have. Why is it so important that q-memories are caused in the right way? Because q-memories ground personal identity, though not every way of causing memories is identity preserving. Take hypnosis: the hypnotists may give you a memory that happened to someone else. That doesn't make you identical to that person.  

The same applies to desires, so, in the same way we have apparent desires, q-desires and actual desires: 

Problems with duplication:C/E:William’s Reincarnation of Guy Fawkes; Williams' Reduplication Argument. The conclusion from this experiment is that psychological continuity is one-to-many, not one-to-one. That is to say, one can be psychologically continuous to many people at once.

C/E Parfit Teletransporter Mind Experiment. Recall that in the second teleporter Po (on earth) and Pc (in Mars) are psychologically continuous, physically identical, but they cannot be the same person (it violates the principle of numeric identity: one person cannot be in two places at the same time). It also suggests that (as when Po dies of cardiac arrest, the Pc survives, which seems to suggest that identity is not necessary for survival.

5. Two different narratives of the self:

1- diachronic: The diachronic presents the different stages of the life as part of a continuous series. 2- episodic. The episodic sees the different stages as discontinuous series.

This doesn't mean that the episodic narrative cannot make sense of one's whole life. 

Take a look at the example of Robert and Frank (p. 246 5th Ed.). If Frank and Robert are different persons it would be wrong to punish a person for what another person did. Some in the class affirmed they are the same, but that's what we needed to prove. In any case, the Frank-Robert case points to the self as a process.

Lucifer and Satan case. Are Lucifer and Satan they the same? Qualitatively speaking no (one is good, the other evil), however, they are numerically identical. Plus, Satan has quasi-memories and quasi desires of Lucifer. So, it's possible that another person (let's call it "X") in the future of Satan could repent of Satan's sins. "X" could do it since "X" would be psychologically connected to both Satan and Lucifer.

The same way that a the mind is a property that emerges from a physical thing when it reaches a certain degree of complexity, similarly, the self can be seen as emerging from the mind when it reaches a certain degree of complexity. Not everything that has a mind has a self because not everything that is conscious is self-conscious. And not everything that is self-conscious is self-conscious to the same degree. So, Having a self is not an all-or-nothing affair.  

The self seems to be self-organizing. What does that mean? A self-generating process.

_________________________________________
6. Self as PROCESS.

Click here for Sartre's lemma. 

7. Relationship between identity and responsibility.

Is personal identity a necessary condition for responsibility? No. Why? 

Click here for the discussion of narrative as a necessary condition for moral agents.

8. What is character? Character is function of our beliefs, desires, values, etc. 

Can a person change his/ her character? Remember the differences between Frank and Robert. Though Frank and Robert are numerically identical, they don't have the same character (they are qualitatively different). Yes, they are numerically identical, but their degrees of responsibility have to be taken into consideration. This is the idea behind rehabilitation. Parole boards take into account that if the character of a person changes for the better, the individual's so-called righting the wrong. 

What matters for responsibility is character. Character being a function of our beliefs, desires, values, etc and our actions being a function of our character. So numeric identity seems to be neither a necessary condition nor sufficient condition for responsibility. What matters is sameness of character.  

 Click here for our discussion of character and moral responsibility.

What is character?

1- since it's observed behavior, character is public.
2- character can change, but it's more a persistent trait.
3- character is a negotiation between witnesses. 
4- character can change (slowly).

Click here for my notes on the identity of history.

how to strategize your philosophy paper

A philosophy paper is like a conversation, you need to make room for other opinions and for responding to that opinion. A paper requires that you include criticism of your own view and that you respond to that criticism. Always criticize yourself and your opponent fairly, don't misrepresent either opinion for the sake of a few paragraphs, i.e., don't provide criticisms that you yourself think are silly or not worth discussing.


Writing Tips: 

1- Don't think of the professor as the audience. Use your peers as your standard of understanding. Ask yourself if your roommate, or partner, or brother or sister -all of whom are not members of the class- could understand the paper.  Have you provided enough information so that they can follow your argument, understand your explanations, and evaluate your position?

2- Always define your terms. Any word that has special meaning for a text, i.e. "freedom, "human rights, etc, must be explained (preferably a reference must be given as to where in the text you found the definition). Sometimes it is easiest and most clear to quote the exact definition from the text.

3- Pay special attention to paragraphs. A paragraph should not be very long. There should be at least two or three paragraphs on every page. Pay special attention to how paragraphs relate to each other. Although paragraphs are in some ways self-contained, they must also relate to one another. Perhaps the best way of ensuring that one topic "follows from" another topic is by comparing the last line of the previous paragraph with the first line of the paragraph that immediately succeeds it. Make sure to include a transition sentence in the beginning of the new paragraph. You may use phrases such as "This brings us to...", or "At this point Aristotle changes his focus...".

4- Always edit on paper and read your versions aloud. Philosophy can be difficult to write, and students often write errors that they would never speak. Sometimes, we even forget the purpose of the sentence before we finish writing them and when the reader tries to follow our train of thought, they get confused by our lack of focus. It is therefore essential that we edit carefully. Always use the spell check and the grammar check on your word processor. They are very helpful. Never hand in any writing that you haven't edited on paper. We can see punctuation errors much better on paper. Periods, commas, and spelling mistakes get lost on the monitor. Third, always read your work out loud, and pay attention when you do. Reading aloud is probably the most helpful editing technique. I read absolutely everything I write out loud, and I have been writing this kind of stuff for years. -

Outline of A Paper: 

The key is to not get overwhelmed by the information. The outline below will help you stay on-track. You need not follow it exactly. Those of you who are more experienced at writing philosophy papers may find that they want to combine various sections, but for those of you who are less comfortable writing, this outline should help. - Keep in mind that some of these sections may be only one or two paragraphs in length and others may be pages long. - Also keep in mind that you should not "divide" these sections with headers or titles. The division will be made clear as the author reads your transition sentences. I.

I- Introduction

Explain the purpose of the paper.
Define all of the technical terms in the paper topic/question.

Explain the philosophical problem.
State your conclusion.

The introduction is important for setting the stage. Don't start out with biographical information about a philosopher, or with a definition from a dictionary (this is rarely helpful anywhere in the paper since the definition the philosopher gives is almost certainly different from the definition provided by the dictionary). Start out by discussing the main purpose of the paper.  You should try to state your conclusion in the introduction. A philosophy paper is not a mystery novel. The end should not be a surprise. The reader is interested in your arguments as much, if not more, than your conclusion and they can only follow the argument after they are aware of what your conclusion is going to be. If you do not know your conclusion when you start writing, you can always go back and add it when you have figure it out. Imagine a discussion between two position, yours and your opponent.

II- Body of the paper

1- Explanation of both positions. 2- Contrasting both positions. Defending both positions. 3- Winning the argument.  

1(a) - Explaining your position.

Summarize your position. 1. Define all terms. 2. Explain these terms and the basic position in your own words. 3. Include quotes. Offer an overview of your position in your words. This section can be difficult because it requires that you summarize a large text in a very short amount of time. It is hard to balance the details with the main idea. Therefore, it is helpful to provide the details in the main summary then end this section with a general narrative of the position in your own words. Try to tie- up all the loose pieces of the summary in this final paragraph.

1 (b) - Explanation of your opponent's position.

Summarize this position. 1. Define all terms. 2. Explain these terms and the basic position in your own words. 3. Include quotes. Offer an overview of the position in your words. This section is identical to the previous section but refers to your opponent's position. Now, the reader is able to see the similarities and the differences of the two positions.

2- Compare and Contrast the two positions.

Identify common themes. Point out stylistic or historical differences. Point out how conclusions differ and how they are the same.  How much to explain? Don't assume that the reader can see the differences you can see. Be explicit about how the two theories differ even if it seems obvious to you.

Defend your position. Remind the reader of the main idea behind your position. Explain why you have chosen this position.  Remember you must explain why you believe this is a better option. Provide examples. Show what details attracted you to the position. Provide evidence as to how history, current events, or your own experiences conform to this position.

Criticize your position (now from the perspective of your opponent). Remind the reader of your opponent's position (that is, assume the persona of your opponent and criticize your own defense). This section requires that you defend your opponent's position and show how your opponent would criticize your beliefs. Point out the weaknesses of your own defense! Explain how a different point of view may shed new light on your position that might make it less convincing.

3- Now, time to re-defend your original position in light of the new criticism. As the writer of the paper, you get "last licks". This means that you can now reevaluate and criticize the critique (the defense of your opponent) that you wrote of your own position. Explain why you still agree with your original position and explain why the criticism of your original position need not be convincing.

This is the last component of the discussion between you and your opponent. You want it to be as successful as possible. Make sure that this second defense is addressing the criticism and not simply reasserting your original position.

III- Conclusion.

Briefly restate the purpose of your paper. Restate your position. And wrap up any loose end and end with a future goal. The conclusion cannot contain any new information. It can only restate or reorganize that which has already been said. It is still useful because it reminds the reader or that which they read and of that which you concluded.

Don't underestimate the importance of the conclusion, but, at the same time, keep it short. A couple of paragraphs should do fine. Your last paragraph should identify a future problem. Are there any unresolved issues that you have not solved? Are there any dangling questions that are essential to deal with in the future? You need not answer all these questions, but you must acknowledge them.

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What's in a brain?

Don't miss the Brain Museum, the information is quite interesting. 

Where are your emotions? Cortex! Cortex!

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Is same sex marriage unconstitutional?

Same sex marriage is in the news again!

A federal appeals court panel ruled on Tuesday that a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California violated the Constitution, all but ensuring that the case will proceed to the United States Supreme Court.*

What's the ruling? Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote:

Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different people differently.

There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted. All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same sex-couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation ‘marriage,'the judge wrote, adding: "Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gay men and lesbians in California."

Bill O'Reilly thinks the ruling is "judicial activism" (i.e., unconstitutional)**

Let's take a closer look:

1. By majority vote, Prop 8 restricts marriage to the union of a man and a woman. 
2. But an individual has the right to marry the person of his or her choice.

So, there is a clash between peoples' rights and individual rights here.

Who wins? Well, inalienable rights seem to have priority (over majority rights) and should not be removed by any agency or government (including majority vote). Mind you, this is a libertarian view point (what I mean, closer to the right than you may think). Unless you're a moral conservative and think that the rights of the people in this case overturn the rights of the individual.

Philosophically speaking this is a fight between Locke on one side and Rousseau (and Burke) on the other. But same sex marriage is more contentious because of its religious connotation.     

The truth is that the majority of Americans seem to view homosexuality as morally wrong.  A  recent study of 25 years of the General Social Survey indicates shifting attitudes about the perceived immorality of homosexuality, with growing negativity in the early 1990s and increasing liberalism more recently.** Despite this liberalization in attitudes about some civil rights, only one third of the American public feel gay marriages should be recognized by law. Thus, we are at an unique moment of public ambivalence about attitudes toward the rights of gay men and lesbians to marry.

Yet, same-sex couples enjoy legal recognition in many countries outside the United States. They can marry in Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and South Africa. They can register as partners in at least fourteen other countries, achieving many, most, or all of the benefits and obligations accorded married couples. Among Western countries, the United States stands largely alone in maintaining an inflexible line between married couples and everyone else. 

Some sociologists suggest a growing ambivalence in attitudes, with Americans demonstrating relatively high hostility, negativity, and disapproval about gay marriage, but more positive attitudes toward other gay civil liberties, arises from some basic conflicts over core values. People are conflicted over their core values surrounding the perceived sanctity of family and marriage and their own rising individualism and efforts to tailor their life experiences to their personal choice.

Those who feel more threatened by the perceived "cultural weakening of heterosexual marriage" are more likely to oppose gay marriage. Those who have a greater personal stake in the institution of marriage perhaps feel a greater need to "protect" marriage from "the threat" of gay marriage.

It's a very complex issue depending on ideology, religion, prejudice and plain ignorance.

What are your thought on the subject?
___________
* There is precedent, in 1996, a Hawaii court held the state's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. The Hawaii Supreme Court was expected to affirm that decision until the state constitution was amended by referendum in November, 1998. Such a decision would have forced the rest of the states to confront a variety of issues, not the least of which would have been whether their own prohibitions violate state or federal constitutional guarantees. In order for a same-sex marriage ban to be constitutional, there must be legitimate reasons supporting such a statute rather than, for example, a mere desire to disadvantage a disfavored group. **Under this presumption, courts supply any conceivable facts necessary to satisfy judicially created constitutional tests. The Supreme Court has given three reasons for this presumption: to show due respect to legislative conclusions that their enactments are constitutional, to promote republican principles by preventing courts from interfering with legislative decisions, and to recognize the legislature's institutional superiority over the courts at making factual determinations. *** Courts and commentators who discuss why same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry suggest that the interest of the state in the creation and care of the next generation can only be served if the children are produced "through the union" of the couple. But that is not the state's interest, as is clear from the state's policies on adoption, foster care, etc.

I am closing this post next Monday & 11pm.

Aporia!

The Philosophy Circle is posting. The energy is flowing, the thinking is growing. Get involved!

Why is philosophy in Brazil a mandatory subject for children? It builds citizenship!

Nine million teenagers now take philosophy classes for three years. Read this interesting article about Almira Ribeiro, a philosophy teacher in the state of Bahia, Brazil: 

"But seeing things as they really are isn’t enough," Ribeiro insists. As in Plato’s parable in The Republic, the students must go back to the cave and apply what they’ve learned. Their lives give them rich opportunities for such application. The contrast between the new luxury hotels along the beach and Itapuã’s overcrowded streets gives rise to questions about equality and justice. Children kicking around a can introduce a discussion about democracy: football is one of the few truly democratic practices here; success depends on merit, not class privilege. Moving between philosophy and practice, the students can revise their views in light of what Plato, Hobbes, or Locke had to say about equality, justice, and democracy and discuss their own roles as political agents.

What's the use of philosophy?

Take a look at this article in The Stone section of the NYT by Gary Gutting.

Even though basic beliefs on ethics, politics and religion do not require prior philosophical justification, they do need what we might call “intellectual maintenance,” which itself typically involves philosophical thinking.

I find the idea very interesting. Think of a car, or any industrial device and the need for maintenance. What is maintenance in this sense?

1. The act of maintaining or the state of being maintained.

2. The work of keeping something in proper condition; upkeep.

I take this metaphor of maintenance as thinking outside the box. And that¡s generally what the best thinking is about. 

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Kill a second?

Read here, time is constantly being adjusted, even killed(?)

Unlike the better-known leap year, which adds a day to February in a familiar four-year cycle, the leap second is tacked on once every few years to synchronize atomic clocks — the world’s scientific timekeepers — with Earth’s rotational cycle, which, sadly, does not run quite like clockwork. The next one is scheduled for June 30 (do not bother to adjust your watch).

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Cheap food? High price

We keep talking about good food in class!

There's a way of problematizing our received idea of what good food is. Let's call it nutri/conomics, the intersection between nutrition habits and the profits of the food industry.*

 Check out this revealing article in TIME MAGAZINE about the kind of food we eat. It boils down to a thought experiment: Is it worth spending so many resources to raise animals for food, when doing so is more detrimental in the long run?

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Through advertising, the BIG COMPANIES brainwash our appetite into consuming cheap food (by cheap I mean BAD). Can we do something about it? Modifying eating habits: improving our diets, making choices as to what and what not to eat, teaching our children the simple fact that a hamburger with fries and soda at McDonalds cannot become our lunch staple.
_____________
*By nutrition I mean the balance between our food habits and the environment. "Good nutrition" cannot transparently imply getting animal protein - as factory farming CEO's would like you to believe- above the environmental degradation of other fauna in the sea, land and rivers.   

I am closing this post next Thursday Jan. 19, @ 11pm.

How "heavy" is your baggage?

This is what I mean by "boulder."

Philosophical provocations

*human existence questions (nature of.., meaning of…, value of ….) how the world be without me?
*the mind (nature of thought, consciousness, ….) is my mind mine alone?
*religion (theism, mysticism, supernaturalism, biblical study and criticism) ---> mortality (what's the meaning of death?) if God exists, am I God?
*nature and function of the natural sciences (human vs. natural sciences) if humans do the thinking, what's natural, what's human?
*nature of mathematics (quantity, structure, space, change) if numbers can sequence to infinity, where is the sequence?
*metaphysics: the study of being and the world:  
*scope of human knowledge (Epistemology, Psychology): is knowledge finite, and if so what's the limit? (the idea being we don't produce more knowledge, merely recycle it).
*truth vs. reality (if all that's real is true, is there something false?)
*logic, linguistic clarity, metaphor and the uses of language: what's the difference between "logical" and "illogical"?
*importance of evolutionary sciences: biology, anthropology, psychology. once we accept the possibility of evolution, into what are we evolving?
*relevance of theories in contemporary physics and cosmology (physics is the discipline that studies matter and its motion through space-time). when does a theory get old?
*moral values and behavior (also called Ethics): if something is right in the present, is it right forever?
*noösphere: culture, politics, history, economics, governmental policies, etc. what does culture do to human beings?