bigideas

No Ontology Without Epistemology!

There’s been a bit of agnosticism in the air recently, and it reminded me of a popular argument against the existence of God. I think it’s a bad argument, and I’d like to try to set out why. For our purposes here, “God” can stand for any supernatural something at all — I’ll try to [...]

Align playlist

Robert and I finished the last walkthrough of Align yesterday, and the music is finalised (more or less — I reserve the right to tweak). So here, for the anoraks I know are among you, is the list of what I’ll be playing (bits of), not in order of appearance.

Two Types of New Age Counterfactual

I was looking at The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth by Heath and Michell this morning in connection with the upcoming Align performances (if you haven’t signed up, it’s not too late). In Michell’s section I noticed a couple of claims that are wrong, but in interestingly different ways.

Misquantification in Advertising

“Nice People Take Drugs“, said the ad on the side of buses.

Branded Grammar

As some of you may know, BigIdeas has recently jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Since Twitter seems to be reaching a Facebook-in-2007-like critical mass, all kinds of widgets have been added to it to make it more useful. Unlike Facebook, none of these seems to be about werewolves or fish, which is a Good Thing.

Align: London Psychogeography in July

This July, Robert Kingham and Rich Cochrane are presenting the first two performances of their multimedia psychogeographic lecture/performance Align.

Is Music a Universal Language?

As prep for last night’s event I wrote up some notes based on some rather ancient research work, largely to limber up and remind myself of some things. I’ve posted them below — be warned, this is a bit long and pretty sketchy, but at least those who were there might find it useful.

Is Rhetoric A Dirty Word?

The term rhetoric is most often levied as a term of abuse, deployed when someone’s empty words are not backed-up by their deeds. More often than not, that someone is usually a politician, spinning a yarn.

Music and Sound Poetry

I’ve been listening to a lot of sound poetry lately, and came across Dick Higgins’s short essay A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry on the estimable ubuweb. I was particularly interested in the boundary between this kind of poetry and music, and Higgins makes a useful suggestion that’s at least part of the story.

Having Fun with MPs’ Expenses

Aren’t we just loving the story about MPs’ expenses that the Telegraph cheerfully eked out to us over the course of last week? Yes we are! But why?

Calculated Cackhandedness

Charlie Brooker’s take on the BNP’s recent party political broadcast seemed to me to hit one particularly interesting nail on the head. Let’s borrow his hammer and see if we can drive it a bit further in.

If Things Carry On This Way…

The Mail today is reporting excitedly that “House sales hit 18-month high as prices rise for FOURTH month in a row“. And in other news, if temperatures keep going up at this rate we’ll all be dead by December.

TONIGHT: Is Music A Universal Language?

It’s Longfellow who’s usually credited with the claim that music is a universal language. He didn’t know much about music but plenty of people who do have expressed the same view, especially musicians themselves.

Dividing By Zero

On the TES forums and The Scotsman we’ve recently seen an outbreak of confusion about division by zero, which actually turns out to be an interesting topic. Here’s our cut-out-and-keep guide to this oft-debated topic.

WEDNESDAY 13TH MAY: Has New Media Won?

With newspapers struggling to stay afloat, and people skipping the licence fee and just using iPlayer, has the tradiational media had its day? And if it has, what has replaced it? Or is the old/new media divide a false one?

In the West End on Record Store Day

About this time last year I posted about what Big I webmaster Danny referred to as “the dematerialisation of music”, and suggested I was reconciled to it and everything was OK. Today, on Record Store Day, I’m feeling more ambivalent.

April 2009 Event: The Truth About Medical Ethics

On 28 April 2009, Miran Epstein offers to take us behind the scenes of moral philosophy.

July 2009 Event: Why Punish?

Ought justice be rendered to the victim, or in the name of society? If so, is there a balance to be struck between gaining retribution, deterring criminality and rehabilitating offenders? Are any of these objectives realistic in the first place?

May 2009 Event: Why Do We Gamble?

We expend much effort to reduce or avoid risks in our lives. So why are we so fond of gambling? Anthropologist Dr Rebecca Cassidy will introduce some of the myriad explanations for our appetite for risk from Freud to neuroscience, but suggest that finding answers requires an understanding of the context in which gambling takes [...]

June 2009 Event: How Much Privacy Should We Have?

Having a right to privacy seems to mean that we can keep things to ourselves. It means we can socialise only with people we choose to, and limits the demands others can make on us and we on them. But is privacy really valuable in a democratic society and, if so, why?
Should each person [...]

March 2009 Event: What’s The Point Of Regeneration

Urban regeneration may give us lots of plate glass, steel and Starbucks but at what cost? One person’s urban blight is another person’s home and community, and regeneration has been seen as being about destroying the old as much as creating something new. More recent development aims to be more sensitive, creating mixed-use environments and [...]

On the Liverpool University Closure

As you may already know, Liverpool University is considering closing a number of its departments, including Philosophy and Politics. This is a Bad Thing, and I think it exemplifies some of the muddled thinking that pervades current debates about education, especially in the Humanities.

Banned Words, Plain English and Old News

So, with much glee the British media report that the Local Government Association has published a list of “words and phrases that all public sector bodies should avoid when talking to people about the work they do and the services they provide”. Let’s have a look.

Latest Podcast: St Pancras International

The new Big Ideas Podcast is now available. St Pancras station and the Midland Grand Hotel is the topic.

New Podcast Available: Probability

The latest instalment of the Big Ideas Podcast is now available. This time we tackled the subject of probability.

Next Event: Who Am I When I’m Online?

Our February event will be presented by Dr Andrew Edgar from Cardiff University on the subject of online identity.

Next Event: Why Should We Do What We Should Do?

On January 27 2009, Big Ideas regular Andrew Medworth will kick off the new year with a discussion of one of the thorniest questions in ethical philosophy.

There’s Probably And Then There’s Probably

So, as you will no doubt know, telly writer and journalist Ariane Sherine has used her Comment Is Free blog to raise donations for an advertising campaign for atheism. One word in the ads has caused far more comment so far than the others.

Football, Loyalty and Identity on 25 November 2008

Join us upstairs at The Wheatsheaf at 8pm on 25 November 2008 for a discussion of Football, Loyalty and Identity.

The discussion will be introduced by Dave Boyle, Chief Executive of Supporters Direct. Among other things we’ll look at the history of the modern game and its relationship with its fans as well as the fact [...]

Podcast Out Now: Trafalgar Square

Danny Birchall and Nathan Charlton talk from Trafalgar Square in London about ideas of Britishness, and you can listen in by downloading the latest podcast.

Next Event: Is Europe A Place Or An Idea?

Our next event will be on Tuesday 28 October 2008 at 7.30pm, upstairs at The Wheatsheaf.

Most Europeans now share a red passport and a taste for city breaks in each other’s countries, but what else? Is to call something European simply an indication of location, or something deeper that draws on ideas and tradition spanning [...]

Is Being Rational The Same As Being Logical?

Here’s my write-up of last night’s event — please add comments where I’ve missed things, got things wrong etc. In particular, this is my recollection of what Wilfrid said and isn’t based on his notes, so apologies if I’ve mangled anything.

Policy Twizzler

Recent Big Ideas events have come back again and again to the (lack of) possibility for individuals to influence the society in which they live. Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners campaign was a bizarre case in point: was he a citizen who saw something wrong and successfully put it right, or was he an over-priviliged, ego-centric [...]

Next Event: Is Being Rational The Same As Being Logical?

Our next event will be on 30 September 2008 — click the link for details.

Last Night’s Event on Democracy

Last night Alasdair Mackenzie took us through some different models of democracy that supposedly connect the “people” with political decision-making more directly than the hoary old representative model that led Edmund Burke to warn his electors:
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he [...]

Next Big Ideas Event: How Much Democracy Is Too Much?

Our next Big Ideas event will be on Tuesday 26 August; as usual we’ll be upstairs at The Wheatsheaf. Doors open at about 7:30 and we’ll aim to kick off at 8.

Podcast Out Now: Are Political Parties Dead?

Four Big Ideas regulars attempted to answer this at the St Bride’s Tavern last week and you can listen in by downloading the latest podcast.

Newtonian Space-Time and Giddens’s Modernity

In the last Big Ideas we talked about Anthony Giddins’s view of modernity as involving, in part, an abstraction of space and time from our immediate environment. The railway timetable, for example, is able to refer to places and times distant from where we are, and perhaps places and times at which nothing particular happens. This, Giddins thinks, is something new.

What Does It Mean To Be Modern — Notes from the Event

The following is a rough write-up of my notes from the intro to our August 2008 event. We had a really interesting and wide-ranging discussion, which I haven’t attempted to summarise, so please feel free to add what you remember from the night in the comments.

Quantifying Education

A recent post at Good Math, Bad Math concerns a proposal for evaluating university courses that tries to measure outcomes. One relatively easy outcome to measure is salary; another is the qualification earned. But, like Mark CC, I started to feel surprisingly skeptical about the whole idea.

Next Event: What Does It Mean To Be Modern?

The next Big Ideas event will be on Tuesday 29 July 2008. As usual, we’ll meet in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub in central London (nearest tube Tottenham Court Road). Doors open at 7:30 and we’ll aim to kick off at 8.

Announcing our 2008 Schedule

Yes, we said we’d get organised this year, and so we have. The following is a preview of the Big Ideas schedule for the rest of 2008. We’re very excited about this — we have some really excellent speakers lined up and the whole programme will, we think, build into something really substantial.

Podcast: London Nationalism

On 9 June 2008, four Big Ideas regulars — Danny Birchall, Rich Cochrane, Nathan Charlton and Robert Kingham — gathered at the Crosse Keys pub in the ancient City of London to discuss London Nationalism. Does it make sense to talk about a city expressing a “nationalism” over and above its supposed “identity”?

Group Theory 5: Subgroups, Conjugacy and Normality

One of the things mathematicians soon learn to look for when they meet a new mathematical object is its “subobjects”, which are parts of the object that have the same type of structure as the whole thing. In our case those are “subgroups”, which are subsets of a group that are, themselves, groups.

When is something English?

What criteria apply to an institution or individual to make them English? Does it involve a love of tea and fair play, an general feeling that Scots’ grievances are largely baseless or just English parentage? Is it ever possible to nail this stuff down?

The 70th Philosophers’ Carnival

Welcome to the 70^th edition of the Philosophers’ Carnival, a fortnightly round-up of quality philosophical posts from the blogs of the world. It seems to have been a busy two weeks, so hopefully there’s something here for everyone; apologies to those who didn’t make it in.

Are Computer Games Art?

Columnist Charlie Brooker recently stirred up this familiar hornets’ nest by writing a piece about censorship of computer games, inspiring a slew of comments comparing the medium to films and novels. Are modern computer games a valid art form, and should Grand Theft Auto IV be treated just like a painting or a symphony?

Group Theory 4: Symmetries

In the previous instalment we saw some very “mathematical” examples of groups, but group theory also has an important geometrical aspect. We’ll take a look at that before we get into the more abstract material of group theory proper.

Big Ideas Event: What Can We Do About Vagueness?

If we study logic, we begin by learning that truth is a black or white matter. In particular we know that either a given claim is true or it isn’t; it can’t be both and it can’t be neither.

Supertasks, Paradox and Impossibility

I was reminded of supertasks the other day and thought they’re interesting enough for a post, particularly as an argument that they’re impossible uses a similar tactic to some arguments against time travel and other speculative activities.

We’re Hosting the 2 June Philosophers’ Carnival

As regular readers will know, we’re big fans of blog carnivals, which offer a convenient way to keep up with a broad spectrum of blogs on specialist subjects. The next Philosophers’ Carnival will be hosted here at Big Ideas.

iTunes, CoverFlow and the Myth of the Real

Many of you now know I’m a music geek, to the extent that my iPod is one of my favourite inorganic things. But I’ve had a vague sense that something was wrong ever since I embraced the MP3 medium some years ago. I think iTunes, of all things, finally showed me why.

How to Grasp Power: Notes From the Event

On 29 April 2008, Danny Rye led a Big Ideas event on the idea of “power”. These are his notes, with links to the books he referred to on the night.

Group Theory 3: Some Groups from Arithmetic

Now we have the formal definition of a group, we’ll look at some first examples and reveal their group structure. This will offer good practice in using the definition, so ideally you should read each example and try to prove for yourself that it has the required properties before moving on.

Big Ideas Event: May ‘68 Special

May’s Big Ideas event will be an anarchic May ‘68 special, invoking the spirit of Woodstock and the Sorbonne and casting aside our usual format for a looser, more open-ended approach in which we might cover anything: postmodernism, pop music, radicalism, art, libertarianism, situationism, psychogeography, deconstruction, the swinging sixties, skepticism, cynicism and the whole modern cultural and political landscape.

Group Theory 2: Definitions

OK, for many readers this is probably the painful part of any of our posts about mathematical subjects but it can’t be avoided: the definitions. The spirit of this mini-series is fairly informal, but we need to get a sense of what a group is before we can get anywhere at all.

How Not To Be Wrong About The Economy

Being a media pundit is a job that involves an odd relationship with data, the truth and, of course, most experts’ stock in trade: the future. In this world, it seems to me, being right is one thing and not being wrong is another.

Group Theory 1: First Examples

“Group theory” is the name of a rich and deep field of mathematics. Group theorists study objects called “groups” in the way zoologists study animals. Groups turn up in virtually all fields of mathematics and in many other disciplines, and in this mini-series we’ll introduce the basic ideas involved.

s/Garfield/ Heidegger/g

I just discovered Garfield Minus Garfield, a blog whose simple idea is to remove Garfield, and the things he says, from Garfield comic strips, leaving his owner, John Arbuckle, seeming to mutter disjointedly to himself. There’s a rich existential seam running through much of it, but this recent one is straight out of Heidegger..

Gender in the Music Classroom

I promised myself I wouldn’t cover another of these slow-news-day stories about gender differences for a while, but this one is a bit different in that it’s not coming from a sociobiologist’s perspective and actually appears to be a decent piece of research.

The Abel Prize, and a New Mini-Series

It’s been a while, but to celebrate the awarding of the 2008 Abel Prize to John Thompson and Jacques Tits we’ve decided to run an introductory series on the theory of groups.

Where Meaning Is

We just learned, via the blog of the Berlin-based research institute Phlox, about an odd example due to logical positivist Moritz Schlick illustrating where meaning resides in a language.

To paraphrase, take a chair and define 26 different positions it can occupy in a room, including orientations (so which way it’s facing and which way up it is are significant). Assign each of these a latter of the alphabet…

Big Ideas Nominated Cool Math Site Of the Week

We’re honoured to have been the Canadian Mathematical Society’s “Cool Math Site of the Week” and added to their braid of links (the name, I’m thinking, is a pun on terms from category theory and topology).

Secularism, Absolutism and the Far Right

Terry Sanderson’s latest missive on the National Secular Society’s web site states that “‘Aggressive secularists’ must start to live up to their name”. It’s a brief piece but it makes a useful jumping-off point to discuss the current stance of self-styled “rationalist” groups.

Big Ideas Event: How To Grasp Power (A Brief Guide) on 29 April 2008

We hear and see the word power in a political and social context almost every day. Politicians come into power, hold power and lose it. People are seen as powerful by virtue of a perceived ability to get other people to do what they want. But what is power really and how does it work? Can it be identified and described? Or is it something altogether more hidden and nebulous?

So What Did Happen to Classical Music?

Here’s a write-up of my notes from our March 2008 event on classical music. I was particularly interested in a couple of things: firstly the standard narrative about how classical music changed in the mid-20th century, and secondly the general question of making value judgements about something like music.

Visual Methods - Solutions

Following my post about visual methods from a few weeks ago, here are some solutions to the puzzles. If you haven’t already, you might like to read the original post and try them for yourself before reading on.

Classical Music Timeline

To complement our upcoming event on classical music, we’ve created a timeline of classical music from the early Renaissance to the present.

Big Ideas Event: What Happened to Classical Music? on 25 March 2008

Everybody knows something about classical music, which was made by great composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. But are there any classical composers alive today? Are they as good as those famous names from past centuries, or do they just make obscure, incomprehensible sounds? Did the classical tradition end after the 19th century?

The Art and Science of Mathematics

A recent Big Ideas podcast asked whether mathematics is an art or a science. Here’s a write-up of some of my thoughts on the subject, including some things I’d have liked to say at the time but didn’t get around to.

Three Little Truth Value Paradoxes

The “truth value” of a proposition is just whether it’s true or not. The truth value of “2+2 is 4″ is true, and the truth value of “2+3 is 6″ is false. The truth value of “Hilary Clinton will be the 44th president of the United States” is currently unknown;

Mueller-Lyer and Inconsistent Beliefs

Regular readers may know that we enjoy optical illusions, and I think Roy Sorensen, whose Vagueness and Contradiction I’ve been enjoying lately, may have put his finger on why.

Visual Methods

A well-constructed drawing can help to understand or stimulate a mathematical idea. The following puzzles explore some of the visual techniques that can be employed.

Latest podcast - Mathematics: Art or Science?

Last Tuesday some Big Ideas regulars met at The Crosse Keys to discuss whether maths is an art or a science. It’s an intentionally awkward question

Topology 13: Connectedness

We continue our look at topological properties with an examination of connectedness. We’ll use this property to prove the most important theorem we’ve met so far.

Knowledge, Belief and Justification Closure

Johnny Dee has recently been writing about “justification closure“, which despite its technical-sounding name is a seemingly obvious thing that turns out to present problems (or seeming problems) under certain circumstances.

Have Your Say, Their Way

Recently strictlytrue made an observation about “interactivity” and the media. I think it’s particularly apposite in relation to the coverage of a recent speech by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams referring to the adoption of Sharia law in the UK.

Variants on the Wason Selection Task

The Wason Selection Task is a fairly well-known puzzle that tests whether or not you have an intuitive grasp of the thing logicians call the material conditional. It turns out that most people who aren’t logicians don’t. Here it is, along with some (so far as I know) original variants.

Popular Philosophy vs Popular Science

Reading a recent Leiter Report post on the kind of philosophy that gets media coverage might lead one to wonder what kind of popular philosophy we want, if any at all, and what good or harm popularisation does for a discipline.

History and National Identity

Recently the nature and practice of history, heritage and identity have all featured as Big Ideas topics of discussion. Jon E Wilson’s article in this month’s Prospect brings all of these themes together in an insightful piece on the attempt to find a British national story.

Heath Bunting: Mapping the System

Last Saturday a small group of Big I-related folks participated in Status Walk, a part of an ongoing project by artist Heath Bunting. The event gave us a glimpse into a large and ambitious project that asks questions about identity, the state and the function of art itself.

Big Ideas Event: Who Needs Copyright? on 26 February 2008

The next Big Ideas event will be on Tuesday 26th February in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub in Fitzrovia (nearest tube is Tottenham Court Road). Doors open at 7:30 and we’ll kick off at 8.

Topology 12: Triangulability and Orientability

For the remaining instalments of this mini-series, we turn our attention to some further properties of a space that are topological — that is, properties that don’t change under homeomorphisms.

The Cultural Memory Hole

It’s always a pleasure to explain to someone about Joey Deacon. Not only because you get to do that thing with your arms at the end like some Jupitus-a-like in a low-rent I love… clip show, but also because it seems astounding that a cultural experience

History and Heritage

Last night’s Big Ideas at the Wheatsheaf covered the question, “Is Heritage History?” In the fact the question was just a jumping-off point the practice of history, the value of the concept of heritage and how this all relates to identity.

ELQs, Funding and Narratives About Education

Government funding for ELQs — essentially, second degrees — is being redistributed. These cuts are likely to make “lifelong learning” even more difficult for most of us than it is already, but there’s no simple answer to how funding ought to be distributed.

Mr Kingham’s Marvellous Ackroydian Walking Tour

In March, Robert Kingham will be repeating his celebrated walking tour of (roughly) the Clerkenwell and Holborn areas of London. The tour is structured around readings from Peter Ackroyd’s London: the Biography and visits to many fine and interesting public houses.

Antisociality and the Ethics of the iPod

A recent post on Julian Baggini’s blog considers the ethics of the iPod, and comes close to asking whether being antisocial is unethical (that’s certainly one of the points the comments thread picks up). So, is it?

When One Thing Is Less Identical Than The Rest

Earlier today I pulled three socks out of my sock drawer. “They all look identical”, I thought, and was about to discard an arbitrary one when another thought crossed my mind. “No, wait, that one’s not as identical as the others”.

Big Ideas Event: Is Heritage History? on 22 January

Next Big Ideas event will be on Tuesday January 22nd. The location will be, as usual, the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub.

Mathematical Beauty and the K₄ Crystal

In geek news today we came across Toshikazu Sunada’s paper on something called the K₄ Crystal, and his claim that it “looks no less beautiful than the diamond”. In this Sunada is consciously following in a very long aesthetic tradition.

Atomism, Reductionism and Fundamental Particles

A few weeks ago Bryan Norwood of Movement of Existence put his finger on something that’s been bothering me for a while: the metaphysical assumption that little things are better than than big things.

Thanks To All Of You…

…who made 2007 such a lot of fun. You know who you are.

How Much Do You Love Me?

There are some questions that ask for a quantitative answer — an amount — even though no precise answer is possible even in principle. The question of the title invites responses such as “a lot”, “somewhat”, “hardly at all” and even “twice as much as my husband” (ahem).

Sam Shuster’s Hormonal Unicycling Hack

In other news today, a “study” by unicycling Professor Sam Shuster that argues that men are agressive and funny while women are nurturing. It’s about their hormones, you see? Now that’s proper science.

Harriet Harman on Paying For It

So, yesterday Labour MP Harriet Harman announced she’d like to make paying for sex a criminal act as a way to combat people trafficking. This is of course a fantastic idea.

Should Ethics Be Concerned With Intentions?

We ask because Show Me The Argument has recently had a thread about ethically evaluating intentions. Imagine two people could act in exactly the same way, but one with a bad intention and the other a good one; the difficulty is in saying that the former person did wrong while the latter didn’t.

Leibniz’s Law in Max Black’s Two-Sphere Universe

I came across the following quasi-logical puzzle the other day while looking for something else. It’s about identity and, specifically, the rule about the “identity of indiscernibles” known as Leibniz’s Law.

Christmas Social Reminder

Just a reminder that we’ll be hosting the 2007 Big Ideas Christmas Social at the Wheatsheaf on Tuesday night. All welcome. See here for the details.

Two Daft But Amusing Kant Videos

Two! Count ‘em!

Topology 11: Connected Sums and Polygonal Presentations

In the previous instalment we saw how to make surfaces using quotient maps that identify the edges of a square. In this one we’ll expand our repertoire by considering “connected sums” of surfaces, and we’ll see how to manipulate polygonal presentations to prove non-obvious facts about the surfaces they represent.

Choosing Freely and Free Will

Peter at On Philosophy recently posted some thoughts on choice-making in a way that might make an interesting and, I think, quite novel argument against the idea of free will.

At The World Question Centre

Two-culture-uniting organisation Edge has been posing a simple question every two years since 1998 and receiving answers and comments from a battery of eminent people. Of course, the real fun is coming up with your own answers.

Karlheinz Stockhausen Dies

Today German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died at the age of 79. In a half-century of revisionism in the classical music world, Stockhausen remained a joyful experimenter in sound whose infectious excitement seemed to make accessible the most superficially “difficult” of music.

Oblique Strategies, Stumbleupon and Certain Philosophers

I just stumbled upon one of the numerous online implementations of Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, and realised that there are certain writers whose work I put to use in much the way that some people use those (relatively) famous cards.

Topology 10: Surfaces By Identification

In this instalment of our topological mini-series, we look at how the idea of a quotient map can create a number of familiar and unfamiliar surfaces from nothing more than a simple patch of the plane. Besides offering a little light relief, these surfaces and their relatives will be important to us later.

Irrational Numbers And Measurement

I’ve been meaning to post an explanation of the irrationality of the square root of 2 for a while, but Meep has just done it in the seventh of her series Meep’s Math Matters. But what is an irrational number? Do they really exist?

The Value Of A Philosophical Education

Quite a few blogs have picked up on “news” that a philosophy degree may not make you unemployable, suggesting that — phew — it might not be a “worthless” qualification after all. But what is the value of a philosophy education, and how is it perceived in the commercial job market?

An Optical Illusion

After reading a lot of unpleasant BNP material for the previous post, I needed some light relief. Long-standing readers will know we like a good optical illusion, and it turns out that an excellent example in the duck-rabbit mould is currently doing the rounds.

Irving And Griffin At Oxford Prompt Another Freedom Of Speech Row

So, today holocaust denier David Irving and leader of the far-right British National Party Nick Griffin are to address the Oxford Union, causing the media and the blogosphere to pick up the free speech debate right where the fuss over James Watson’s remark last month left off.

Topology 9: Quotient Spaces

In the previous couple of instalments we’ve looked at ways to make new topological spaces out of existing ones. This one is no different, except arguably the spaces that emerge from quotient maps, which we’ll introduce here, are among the more important in topology.

The Simple Truth

There’s a general preference for theories to be neat, clean and simple. The problem is, fundamentally, that the world isn’t any of those things. Cliffshill outlines a claim that simplicity makes a physical theory less, not more, likely to be true.

Inferring Antecedents from Consequents: Goodman on “Expressive Direction”

On reading Nelson Goodman’s essay “Fact, Fiction and Forecast”, I noticed an interesting linguistic quirk he points out about counterfactuals of the form “if x was y, then…”. I’m not sure it’s philosophically terribly significant, but it got my attention.

Is There Such A Thing As A Classical Music Album?

This weekend the Guardian newspaper started a new five-part series entitled “1000 Albums To Hear Before You Die“, the first instalment covering the letters A to C. There were many good things in it, but not a single classical recording of any description.

Literary Inconsistency and Paraconsistent Logic

A while ago Philosophiocal Pontifications posted about dialetheism, the notion that certain contradictions are OK and our logic should be able to handle them. More recently Robert Seddon of The Face of the Moon and I have been thinking about “fictional facts“. I suspect there’s a connection here.

Topology 8: Product Spaces

Having seen how to use the subspace topology to create new, smaller topological spaces from ones we already have, in this instalment we’ll see how to use the product topology to create some larger ones.

The Big Ideas Christmas Social: 18 December 2007

Put it in your diary this instant: we’ll be getting together at The Wheatsheaf on the 18th of December (the Tuesday before Christmas) for a few beers and general sociability.

Life Is But A Dream: G E Moore Against The Solipsists

Solipsism is the belief that only the person espousing it exists; everything else is an illusion. It has an epistemological implication, which is that you might simply be dreaming everything you think you know about the universe. G E Moore had a rather cunning argument against it.

Unknown Truths and Fitch’s Paradox

Most people think there are true facts that we don’t know — we’re not omniscient. And most people think that all true facts are, in principle, things we could know — nothing’s unknowable. Fitch’s Paradox makes the surprising claim that these two positions are actually contradictory.

Platini, Football Clubs and Identity

Michel Platini, former French football player, manager and now administrator, was on Newsnight last night decrying the influence of money and foreigners (and both, in the form of rich Americans) on English football.

Literary Worlds and Fictional Facts

In ordinary life we’re used to the idea that something is either true or false, and looking hard enough will resolve the matter. One problem with fictional narratives, on the other hand, is that they’re underdetermined.

You Clever People, Or: Anyone Need A Cash Advance?

Oh dear me…

Topology 7: The Subspace Topology

Now we have the notion of a homeomorphism under our belts, and the idea that homeomorphic spaces are topologically equivalent, we’re in a position to decide whether certain properties of Euclidean spaces are or aren’t topological.

The Gnosall Suicides: Curse or Clustering?

Free London newspaper The Metro is reporting today that the village of Gnosall in Staffordshire has seen a spike in suicide rates; a MIND spokesman blames inadequate mental health care in the area, but I wonder whether it has more to do with the nature of randomness.

Antimatter Mereology

Poppies, Identity Politics and Charity

Jon Snow made a few headlines yesterday for refusing to wear a poppy while reading the news, which highlights for me not only a fairly minor point about semiotics but also a wider point about charity in general.

Chatting with iGod

This is silly, but has been going on here, here and here so we thought we’d get in on the action. Here’s a snippet of our recent chat with iGod, the latest in a long line of pieces of software that attempt to hold a conversation with you:

Heideggerian “Equipment”

One of the things that struck me most forcefully when, a long time ago, I made a (mostly successful) attempt to read Heidegger’s Being and Time was the idea of “equipment” — Das Zeug — as a picture of our relationship with the mundane world.

Topology 6: Homeomorphisms

We ended the previous instalment with the idea that a topological space is a metric space with the metric “thrown away” (not quite, but in a manner of speaking) and we suggested that this was no coincidence.

First Big Ideas Podcast: Psychogeography

A few days ago we got four people together in a pub in the City of London to talk about psychogeography, a modern phenomenon with roots stretching back into the avant gardes of the middle of the last century.

Some Places to Start with Spinoza

Spinoza is one of those very interesting figures in philosophy; he’s influenced all sorts of odd people despite his own views not being particularly well-known. We’ve collected together a few online resources that give you some idea of what those ideas were.

An Alternative Construction of Mereology

Topology 5: Topological Spaces

We’ve spent most of our time so far in metric spaces, which might seem odd for a series about topology. In this instalment we show how a metric space can be turned into a topological space, and how the idea generalises far beyond metric spaces.

Free Stuff! Fill your Boots!

A quick note (with a hat-tip to here) that Stanford University has put some splendid e-texts online for nowt, including some really good logic books.

How Much Ethical Force Does “Distress” Have?

Show Me The Argument has an interesting post about the ethical force of “distress”. The general idea is that if someone causes distress to someone else, that’s bad, but the problems start when we’re not convinced the other person had any right to be distressed.

Degrees of Belief and Fuzzy Connectives

Enigmania had a very nice observation recently about the rules for combining “degrees of belief”. Such degrees come about when we’re not 100% certain about some proposition, but we’re 50% sure, or 95%, say.

Topology 4: Mappings of Metric Spaces

In this instalment of our mini-series on topology we ask what makes a mapping between metric spaces continuous. The reason for asking this question is straightforward: topology is motivated by efforts to understand continuity in unfamiliar spaces, and to understand which properties can’t be changed by continuous mappings.

Is Dumbledore’s Sexuality a Fact?

Yes, yes, the blogosphere and the traditional media are afire with the not-earth-shattering news that author J K Rowling has declared that one of her characters “is gay”. Now, we apologise for adding to the 3,990,000 pages returned by a Google search for “dumbledore gay”, but there’s an interesting philosophical point hiding in here.

Guy Debord Online

In preparation for the recording of a panel discussion on psychogeography next week (of which more later) we went looking for some situationist resources online and esperienced an embarrass de richesse. Here are some of the choicest pickings.

Topology 3: Open Sets in Metric Spaces

We continue our introduction to topology with a look at some of the properties of the metric spaces we defined in the previous instalment. We’re particularly interested in defining a special kind of subset of a metric space that we’ll need constantly later.

Featured Blog: Metaphysical Values

Our latest featured blog is Metaphysical Values, run by the Centre for Metaphysics and Mind at Leeds University. In recent times it’s given us cause to think about particle physics and exotic fusions, among other things.

Topology 2: Metric Spaces and Euclidean n-Space

We won’t begin with the basic definitions of topology, but rather by considering a subclass of topological spaces known as “metric spaces”. We’re doing this because all metric spaces are in fact topological spaces, and they’re also “well-behaved” spaces that are more or less like the one we live in.

Can Justice Be Done Statistically?

“Affirmative action” is a generic term for offering preferential treatment to certain classes of people who have experienced detrimental treatment in the past. It’s a controversial and emotive area, but there’s an interesting philosophical question in amongst the heat and light.

Topology 1: Introduction

Time for another mini-series on a mathematical topic, and this time we’re going to tackle the basics of topology. We’ll take a geometric approach in this series; I’d like to get up to the definition of the fundamental group but let’s see how we get on.

Force, Energy, Power: New Age Terminology Everyone Should Understand

This blog doesn’t go in much for the popular sport of making fun of New Age beliefs. There are, however, some scientific terms that are used frequently by New Agers, and it’s worth knowing what they mean.

Quotient Mereologies

What’s the Universe Really Like?

A few weeks ago Colin McGinn raised an interesting question about the universe, but a deceptively simple one: What’s it really like?

Self-Interest, Bad Debt and Bail-Outs

For the last couple of years, comment has increasingly been made that household debt in the UK is at an unsustainable level. The favoured metaphor used to be of a “time bomb”, but these days it seems many commentators think the bomb is in the process of exploding.

On the Appeals of Monism

One of the things I used to like about Deleuze was that he was a sort of monist — I liked Heraclitus, from the opposite end of the philosophical tradition, for the same reason. Monists deny that certain things are many, arguing that their apparent diversity masks an underlying unity.

Heyting Mereology, or: When is a Sum not a Fusion?

“Philosophy Of Life” vs Philosophy

If you search for “philosophy” on the internet, what do you find? Sure, you find lots of stuff about Plato, predication and paradoxes. But much of what you find is something else.

Creationism In The Classroom: Is Ignoring It Worse?

There are reports this morning that Michael Reiss of the Institute of Education is suggesting that for biology teachers to ignore or dismiss pupils’ creationist beliefs may be damaging. Instead, he argues, it’s the job of science teachers to help pupils to “manage” contradictory beliefs.

Causality and Free Will: Are They Connected?

A curious question occurred to me, and I’m not sure whether or not it’s been much discussed: is whether or not free will exists anything to do with whether the structure of the universe is causal? Usually people assume it is, but I can think of one reason to be sceptical about that.

Dumb and Dumber: A Case of Dual Semantics

The word “dumb” can be used in two distinct ways. First, it’s used to divide the population into two halves; those who are dumb and those who aren’t. Second, it’s used to order people by dumbness; Joe is dumber than Susan, and so on.

Quick Primer: Quotients

Quotients are a basic mathematical construction that appear in many different applications. We’ll introduce them briefly here, because we have a post queued up that will go easier with this background in place. And anyway, quotients are inherently interesting.

Featured Blog: Enigmania

The “featured blogs” idea is intended to put the spotlight on blogs that feature accessible, broadly philosophical content, giving you something fresh for your feed reader (or your favourites, or however you keep track of these things). Our first featured blog is Enigmania.

Meta-Debunking the Empirical Rationalists

There’s a touch of quis custodiet ipsos custodes over at Mark F. Sharlow’s web site, whose purpose is to skeptically debunk common arguments put forward by self-styled skeptics.

Lyotard on Barnett Newmann: Are There Instants?

The American abstract expressionist Barnett Newman was especially famous for paintings that contained, or just were, narrow vertical lines, like the Vir Heroicus Sublimis (you can see more examples here, although you really do need to see them in the flesh to get the point of them).

Social Darwinist Sex Wars, Again

A couple of UK newspapers (predictably, the right-wing ones) are reporting this morning that intelligence is distributed more widely among men than women. That means there are more men in the top and bottom 2% of the intelligence range than there are women.

Quantifying Over Events (Or Choosing Not To)

Rationcination has a nice post about being ontologically committed to “events”. The idea is that the commitment comes from having to quantify over them in statements like “something happened the other day that really got me thinking”.

Big Ideas Featured in the Sapere Newsletter

There’s a two-page spread on Big I in the current newsletter of Sapere; it isn’t available online yet but back issues are and contain some interesting stuff about philosophy outside the university walls.

First Philosophy and Rhizomatic Mathematics

One of the things that came up during the last Big Ideas event was the idea that academic disciplines need “foundations” that somehow guarantee them. These are usually thought of as simple, fundamental ideas from which the rest of the discipline can be extrapolated.

On Wikitruth

A while ago, some colleagues and I invented the notion of “wikitruth”. It was in the context of the kinds of water-cooler arguments in which nobody really knows what they’re talking about and the truth of the matter really isn’t all that important.

The New Cult of Incentives

Recent policy talk from UK Conservatives has frequently been couched in terms of “incentives”, and a market-driven economics that sees these as alternatives to state controls. This isn’t a new idea, of course, but it sounds like a new emphasis.

Logic, Sets and Probability 5: Propositional Logic as a Lattice

Last time we presented a slightly non-standard syntax for predicate logic, and a perfectly standard semantics. In this post, we’ll tie this up with what we’ve previously said about lattices and sigma algebras.

Three Age System and Human Nature

When theories are justified with axiomatic statements about “nature” I feel I’m entitled to get suspicious. The distinction between how the universe would be if it were left alone to its own devices, and the universe as it because of a perceived intervention (from human activity or something similar) is an odd one

Epistemic Indifference, Aesthetics and Faith

Let’s say a “theory” is a set of consistent descriptions that are intended to explain some empirical evidence. The theory must be consistent with itself and with all the evidence. But what if there are two competing theories that seem equally good?

…we’re doing a bit of DIY this weekend

You may notice short periods of abnormal behaviour on Big I this weekend. We’re upgrading WordPress and working on some other changes, so please bear with us if (a) it looks weird, (b) something that was here isn’t, or (c) the whole site seems to have vanished. Whatever it is, it’s a temporary problem.

Logic, Sets and Probability 4: The Syntax and Semantics of Propositional Logic

We’ve defined lattices and shown that all sigma-algebras form a lattice. We’ve also shown how probability can be constructed from sigma-algebras, meaning that probability is, at root, a lattice. In this post we give a definition of classical propositional logic.

Film Studies

Tuesday night’s Big Ideas event brought new faces but the same potent mix of lively conversation and alcohol.

Cutting Edge 2007 Programme Now Available

Every year the BMIC runs a series of new music events called Cutting Edge at The Warehouse, near Waterloo station in London. They typically involve young performers playing freshly-minted compositions, many of them world premieres.

Metaphysics, Particle Physics and the Ship of Theseus

Over at Metaphysical Values there’s a new post mounting a defence of mereological nihilism: the thesis that nothing really exists except fundamental particles. The mereological nihilist believes only in, say, quarks and leptons, not in chairs and tables.

Reminder — Next Big Ideas Event is Tomorrow!

Click here for all the details. Turn up! Drink beer! Talk loudly! It’s free!
[Update: Yes, we know there's a tube strike. Come anyway. The rush hour will be horrible in any case.]

Logic, Sets and Probability 3: Probability

We’ve shown that every sigma-algebra can be represented as a lattice, which you might have greeted with an unimpressed shrug. In this post we build the basic foundation of probability theory using a sigma-algebra. The upshot of this is that probability is really just lattice theory in disguise.

Being Philosophical means not Being Decisive (to an Extent)

XKCD more or less says it — if you want to get something done, don’t ask someone philosophically-inclined.

This is fair comment up to a point. Whenever we make a decision, we cut off our chain of reasoning at some point. We decide to take certain things as read or, put another way, we define certain [...]

Panic in the Face of Modern Classical Music

Not sure how I missed the fact that Harrison Birtwistle’s piece Panic was played at the proms a few weeks ago. It’s over a decade since it was premiered there, in what turned out to be the most high-profile classical premier in very many years.

Gender, Race and Taboo Knowledge

Most people think scientific knowledge is ethically neutral, but then occasionally a bit of research raises doubts, aside from whether the science itself is any good or not, over whether the knowledge it gives us is worth having, or is in fact too dangerous.

Logic, Sets and Probability 2: Sigma Algebras

OK, so take everything we said about lattices in Part 1 and put it to one side, like a joint of beef when it first comes out of the oven. Today we’re going to talk about something called a “sigma algebra”.

Times, Dates, Open Regions and Fiat Boundaries

This post was prompted by, of all things, a conversation on Facebook. Here’s the original, flippant question: What time is it at the North Pole?
OK, now of course there’s a proper answer to this, so let’s imagine a simplified version of the problem.

Reductionism and the Free Will Debate

A good while ago, a couple of us were at Kant’s Cave listening to a paper on the ancient philosophical question of whether people have free will or their actions are predetermined. One view that seems to lead to determinism is a reduction to physical cause-and-effect.

Logic, Sets and Probability 1: Partial Orders and Lattices

Something rather magical happens when you look at set theory, logic and probability in a certain way; they turn out to be more or less the same thing. I’d like to do a handful of posts over the next few weeks explaining why, and we’ll start with a look at lattices.

What do we Own?

A recent post at Show Me The Argument reminds us that the idea of “ownership” isn’t at all straightforward. It’s also an idea we use all the time, in dozens of different ways, without thinking there might be any problems with it.

Bootstrapping the Artworld

There’s an inherent problem with defining what counts as “art” and what doesn’t, and furthermore what counts as “good art” compared with the rest. For instance, it’s not clear what makes one set of sounds music while another are non-music, especially since the collapse of any illusion of common practice in music theory.

Who’s Afraid of an Infinite Regress?

Recently this blog found itself, not for the first time, in an infinite regress. Infinite regresses are usually taken to be a Bad Thing; if your explanation involves one then, surely, it must be wrong or at best unhelpful. I disagree. I like them. Here’s why.

An Unusual Metonymic Fallacy from A N Wilson

Everybody’s familiar with the fallacy of composition, which is the mistake of confusing a part with the whole thing. But in today’s Telegraph A N Wilson commits an interesting variation on it.

Quick Primer: Set Theory

This is a rather lengthy post, but I hope it’s useful. We’ve found ourselves referring to “sets” a few times in recent posts so I thought a single page that explains the basics would be beneficial.

Probability, Degree of Belief and a Proposed Pragmatic Principal Principle

Anti-Meta has an interesting post about the “Principal Principle” that got me thinking about probability, something I’ve been doing lately in connection with ley lines, of all things.

Fuzziness and Existence — A Case of Analytic Non-Vagueness?

Enigmania recently posted some interesting thoughts about vagueness and quantification. They led me to wonder whether vagueness isn’t more prevalent than even I’d considered before.

Quick Primer: Quantification and Domains of Discourse

Continuing our “quick primer” series, this post gives a basic introduction to the idea of quantification in formal languages.

Really Large Numbers

Should we ever ask ourselves how many whole (counting) numbers there are — the ones that start 1, 2, 3 and so on — we’d probably just shrug and say “infinitely many”, which is comforting because it means we’re not likely to run out of them. But it also means that the numbers we use [...]

Big Ideas Annex: Ley Lines and Probability on 14 August

Like me, you may only know ley lines as some notion of lines of magical “energy” that are supposed to criss-cross the British countryside, and like me you’re probably sceptical about that sort of thing.

What does Mereological Immoderation Cost?

Logical Connective Naughtiness in the Daily Mail

The Daily Mail is reporting today that “4 out of 10 children left primary school this summer without mastering the basics of reading, writing and maths”. Someone called Barbara AC comments: “Labour government on education is FAILURE, FAILURE, FAILURE. They are complete clots, unable to get anything right!”. Such a strong reaction is justified, I think, on one reading of the “and” in the Mail’s leading sentence, but that would be the wrong one.

Next Big Ideas Event — Film Studies on 4 September

The next Big Ideas event will be on 4 September in the same place as last time: the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub in Fitzrovia. Put it in your diary this instant [...]

Drugs in Sport

Cycling is, of course, the latest sport to be shaken up by accusations of widespread drug abuse. But why not allow drug use in sport? I don’t mean illegal drugs of course; those are illegal, and I’m not suggesting we make an exception for athletes. So let’s put that aside; given that a drug is [...]

Fractals and the Idea of “Dimension”

I recently picked up a copy of Benoit Mandelbrot’s book The Fractal geometry of Nature. It’s easy to see why it was so inspirational for a generation of physicists and mathematicians, what with its erudition, it unstructured nature and the elusive sense that it contains important ideas so new they aren’t quite fully-formed.
The best-known “fact” [...]

Intention, Flirtation and Definition

Carrie Jenkins has recently written a light but rather interesting piece about flirting for The Philosopher’s Magazine that’s garnered some press attention. It throws up more issues than you might think, and it’s certainly no mere publicity stunt.

Value Epistemology

Recently we’ve had some posts about epistemology, in particular the Gettier and Paderewski problems. The core of those problems is the question fo whether “knowledge” means the same as (or is equivalent to) “justified true belief”.

Thought Experiments, Intuition Pumps and Qualia

Reading this interesting post by Matt Brown at Weitermachen, I was reminded that the things philosophers call “thought experiments” are actually as interesting to think about in general as they are in particular. It happened to coincide with some reading I’ve been doing about “intuition pumps”.

Gabriel Prokofiev, Classical Crossover and some YouTube Treats

A recent and largely futile thread over at Philosophy Forums reminded me how unhelpful musical genre-labels (like “pop”, “rock”, “jazz” and so on) are, and how attached people are to them.

A Call for the Abolition of Happiness

There’s a nice post by Julian Baggini at Talking Philosophy proposing a puzzle about happiness. Even those of us who aren’t utilitarians generally think it would be good if our lives were happy, and that life is better the happier it is. But does it matter when you’re happy?

Cannabis, Psychosis and Risk

So, The Lancet has a metastudy showing that, in the words of virtually every news source this morning, “smoking pot makes people more prone to psychosis“. The big number is that “smoking just one cannabis joint raises danger of mental illness by 40%“.

Rorty in the New York Times

There was an essay on Richard Rorty in the New York Times on Sunday (hat tip to gonepublic). What’s interesting here, I think, is the way Rorty’s demeanour is linked with his philosophical skepticism.

Biconditionals: “if and only if”

In philosophy, and sometimes in maths, you often see the phrase “if and only if”, as in “the dog is hungry if and only if it’s barking”. The “if” and the “only if” express different things.

Possible Worlds

The idea of “possible worlds” is a sort of metaphor for talking about modality. The modality of a statement is to do with whether it’s possible for the statement to have been wrong. Given some statement x like “grass is green”, modal logic deals with statements like “x, but only by accident” and “it’s necessarily [...]

Philosophy For Children

We recently found out, vie the Liverpool-basedPhilosophy in Pubs, about SAPERE, a charity based in Westminster whose purpose is to co-ordinate and promote the study of philosophy by children. The core of philosophy is critical thinking; logic, skepticism and abstract system-building all play parts in all flavours of the discipline, whether logical positivist, pragmatic, postmodern [...]

Mereology and Exotic Fusions

Optical Illusions and Perception

Dale Purves has some amazing optical illusions that appear to illustrate the old epistemological gap between our perception of reality and reality itself

Quick Primer: Maps and Predicates

In the second of what might be an occasional series, I’d like to introduce the idea of a map and show that a predicate is a special type of map. I’ll do this with a very vaguely catergory-theoretic flavour because, well, it makes a change from banging on about Cartesian products as I did last [...]

The Paderewski Problem and Ludlow’s Dynamic Lexicon

The truth of some sentences can be dependent, in quite subtle ways, on the context in which they’re uttered. Think of Paderewski, my next-door neighbour who, so far as I know, isn’t a concert pianist. When we’re talking about what my neighbourhood is like, I hold both these statements to be true:

1. Paderewski is my [...]

Gettier Problems

The standard definition of “knowledge” was, for a while, “justified true belief”. Say I claim to know that my cat is sitting on the mat (to use a hoary old example). First, I must actually believe it; I can’t know something but simultaneously hold it false. Second, what I know must be true; it really [...]

Tricky Rational Choices in Two Dimensions

This paper by Alex Voorhoeve (hat tip to the invaluable OPP) presents an interesting paradox and attempts to resolve it. The paradox concerns choosing between several different scenarios and ranking them in order by saying one is “better than” another. What makes it go is the fact that the choice has two “dimensions” that change [...]

Marriage Incentives and Causality

It’s an attractive idea that big problems have simple causes. So Iain Duncan-Smith’s report Breakdown Britain has made a splash this morning with a proposal to create economic incentives in favour of marriage as a way to fight crime. (I note without comment that it appears that an earlier version of this report was released [...]

Quick Primer on Relations, Transitivity and Equivalence

I wanted to post on this topic for three reasons. First, it’s connected with relative identity, which I posted about here a while ago. Second, it’s relevant to something I’m chewing over from Davidson over here. Third, it’s maths, and maths is cool.
There are three ideas I want to explain in this post are relation, [...]

Conceptual Schemes, Relativism and Translatability

Donald Davidson has an interesting argument against strong conceptual relativism. This is the position that people who speak very different languages from ours may do so because they have different conceptual “schemes”, or maps of what the world is made of and how it fits together. This is most famously articulated in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis [...]

Humour and Subjectivity

Ever since I started using WordPress, I CAN HAS CHEEZEBURGER? has been their number one blog. This site deals in the form of humour known as lolcats, which entertained the usually erudite folks over at Language Log for a while.
I don’t get lolcats. That is, in a sense I do get them. I’m very fond [...]

Logic, Law and Fuzzy Classes

A while ago I posted something vague here about the
Charities Commission’s definition of a religion. It struck me as interesting because they didn’t take the approach you might expect them to.
A lot of people think that when laws are framed, they’re done in much the same way that your lawyer might draw up a contract [...]

Physical Blogging vs Second Life

I was talking the other day with a Big Ideas co-conspirator about what we were doing with Big I, and what else it’s like. We came up with the term “physical blogging” to describe it. By “physical blogging” I mean doing something you like to do online, but IRL, as we used to say in [...]

Zombies and Other Minds

This week we enjoyed a splendid Big Ideas session on consciousness, and particularly on the question of whether consciousness can be evoked by software. I have no background at all in the philosophy of mind, so this really got me thinking.
By instinct I’m a sort of physical reductionist about lots of things, including the [...]

Can Consciousness be Evoked Computationally?

Phil began a discussion of consciousness and computation based on some of the ideas put forward by Roger Penrose in his various books. By computation we mean “anything that a Turing Machine can do”, or, indeed, anything that a modern computer can do. We initially sidestepped a discussion of what we really meant by consciousness (or indeed awareness, understanding or intelligence) and accepted that it was probably “something” of which we had some intuitive knowledge.

Privatising the BBC, Bernard Manning and Rortian Relativism

The Telegraph newspaper yesterday carried the kind of batty comment piece only it can produce. This one is by Simon Heffer, and he sets out from the familiar charge that the BBC has a Left-wing bias. The evidence he presents for this is that everybody knows it’s true. Let’s entertain him in this, because it’s [...]

Relative Identity

“Identity” is one of those ideas that causes trouble almost as soon as you start thinking about it. By “identity” philosophers mean “the relationship something has with itself and nothing else”. You need some concept of identity to be able to say things like “I ate the plumbs you bought”, because I mean “the plums [...]

Stereographic Projection

I found the following video at this site, a charming topological “advent calendar” created by Oliver Labs, Hans-Christian Graf von Bothmer and some of Bothmer’s students. Most of the topics require some foreknowledge, but I thought I’d try to explain one of them in layman’s terms, just for fun.
Here’s the video; watch it before [...]

Adversarial or Co-Operative Philosophy?

A couple of us went to a philosophy seminar the other night. We might post about the content of the seminar at a later date, but we were both struck by the format of it, and of most such events.
In academic circles, philosophy is generally done in two ways. First, alone, by reading books, thinking [...]

Neurological Aesthetics of Music

Last Saturday’s Guardian newspaper included this article by Daniel J Levitin, which concerns the scientific (specifically, neurological) evidence for the hypothesis that everyone loves the Beatles. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. As someone who positively can’t stand the Beatles, I always find these things troublesome, as they seem to imply there’s something wrong with my poor brain, additional to the things I already know are wrong with it.

Risk, Scandal and Making Excuses

Today the Daily Mail, bless it, is running this story about “problem drinkers”. It’s based on this DoH report. The Mail’s story is startling; over 8 million Britons — 1 in 7.5 men, women and children — is a “problem drinker”. Unsurprisingly, the Telegraph ran exactly the same story.
Go ahead, take the test, which is [...]

Brenda Almond on Gay Adoption

In the current Philosophy Now there’s an article on gay adoption by Prof Brenda Almond. Now, from what I can gather Prof Almond is something of a social conservative and a proponent of what might be termed “traditional family values”, and in particular (for our purposes) the idea that the nuclear family — two parents, [...]

Lies, Deception, Self-Deception and Mistakenness

This characteristically level-headed post from Let’s Be Sensible got me thinking. The post points out a false distinction between people who have been told and honestly believe something we don’t believe to be true — they’re mistaken — and the people who taught them those things, who told them deliberate lies. It points out that [...]

New Recommended Reading Amazon Page

Bowing to popular demand, we’ve set up an Amazon Associates store at http://astore.amazon.co.uk/bigide-21 containing some books that are relevant to topics we’ve discussed at BI events, or might in the future. Enjoy!

Consciousness and Computation on 26 June 2007

The next Big Ideas event will be on 26 June in the upstairs room of the Wheatsheaf pub in Fitzrovia.

Legal Definitions

Like everyone else in the UK I watched Jon Sweeney’s Panorama TV documentary on the Church of Scientology. It was a pretty rum affair all round, but an offhand comment sent me scurrying to look up the Charities’ Commission’s definition of a religion.

Newcomb Redux

A while ago we talked about Newcomb’s Paradox down the pub. In the end I came up with this slightly lengthy response to it, which I think defuses the paradox, although it has a slightly odd characteristic.

Ideology vs Pragmatism

I was reminded of our Evidence-Based Policy session this weekend when I read and fisked in tedious detail a speech by Oliver Letwin (for what it means to fisk, see here — it isn’t as rude as it sounds).

Letwin’s Double Paradigm Shift

Earlier this week Oliver Letwin gave a “big ideas” speech about something called “Cameron Conservatism”. Since he’s a senior figure in the party and a key driver of policy, and since the Tories might win the next general election, I thought it was worth looking at. The full text is here. I’ll preserve much, but [...]

Only human

I wonder what it means to claim to be human. Is it a redundant clasification: speciesism, as prejudiced a distinction as race? Or is it still a rallying cry to a common cause?

Collapses in the Arts

The March edition of Prospect magazine included a long and emphatic piece by Norman Lebrecht on the demise of the classical recording, and hence something like the death of the music itself.

Evidence-Based Policy on 27th March 2007

Evidence-Based Policy is the practice of using scientific evidence to formulate public policy. Our expert Steve Morris is going to give an overview of EBP: what it is, what it claims to do and the current debate around its use.

A Pub Philosophy Manifesto

Not all problems in life are of the same kind. Physicists and engineers go to the maths department with problems and take away the solutions. Like a sausage factory, the maths department takes in problems and produces solutions, and it’s not usually important for an outsider to know how the sausage was made; indeed, as [...]

Newcomb’s Paradox

Phil presented Newcomb’s Paradox to us last night. I’ll summarise the paradox:
There are two boxes: Box A and Box B. Box A always contains $1,000. Box B either contains $1,000,000 or nothing. You can either choose to open and keep the contents of both boxes or of just Box B.
� It might seem that opening [...]

Apologies

Tony Blair apologised for the slave trade not very long ago. Many people noted that, since he had nothing personally to do with the whole unpleasant business, he really had no need to apologise for it. If you do something bad to someone and I apologise, in what sense has my apology made any difference? [...]

Pub/public debate

Politicians often float potentially unpopular policy ideas in the media by talking about “starting a national debate”.� I’ll try not to be too cynical about politicians, but I have never seen a politician follow this through with any meaningful form of debate - draw your own conclusion about whether they ever intend one. However, [...]

Necessarily True or False Beliefs

Imagine, if you can, that I believe something; call it P. Well, if P is actually true, we say my belief is correct; likewise, it’s incorrect if P is false. In fact, if there’s no way that P could ever have been true, we might be inclined to say my belief was in something impossible, [...]