The e. coli made me do it. “A lot of public and scientific attention has been paid recently to the idea that the microbiome—the collection of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microbes that share our bodies, outnumbering our own cells ten to one—can cause diseases widely conceptualized as non-communicable. According to well-designed, peer-reviewed studies on rodents and humans, the microbiome appears to be a major contributor to obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, malnutrition, hypertension, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, colon cancer, ulcers, inflammatory bowel disease, lymphoma, liver cancer, psoriasis, and even ear wax. We are, in many ways, a result of the organisms that live inside us. … [Now a] number of elegant studies … suggest that the microbiome may have as many implications for our brains and behavior as it does for more easily defined diseases.”
Month: November 2013
The Onion deploys Nietzsche for satire
Kidnapped teen freed, though freedom is its own kind of prison, is is not? But who or what is the target of the satire? Nietzsche, scholars who write about him, the press … surely not philosophy professors?
Does it matter whether you think you have free will?
Does non-belief in free will make us better or worse? The question of whether we are free to choose is not just an interesting academic question. “Studies have shown that people who believe things happen randomly and not through our own choice often behave much worse than those who believe the opposite.”
Walking, getting mugged, and the mind-body problem
How the way we walk can increase risk of being mugged. The mind-body problem in the real world? “There is school of thought that the brain only exists to control movement. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that how we move can give a lot away. It’s also not surprising that other people are able to read our movements, whether it is in judging whether we will win a music competition, or whether we are bluffing at poker. You see how someone moves before you can see their expression, hear what they are saying or smell them. Movements are the first signs of others’ thoughts, so we’ve evolved to be good (and quick) at reading them.”
The problem with moral psychology
You can’t learn about morality from brain scans. Thomas Nagel’s review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes. Many interesting issues in the review: human rights v. the greatest happiness of the greatest number, trolleyology, moral instinct, and others.
Nagel says of Greene: “Greene wants to persuade us that moral psychology is more fundamental than moral philosophy. Most moral philosophies, he maintains, are misguided attempts to interpret our moral intuitions in particular cases as apprehensions of the truth about how we ought to live and what we ought to do, with the aim of discovering the underlying principles that determine that truth. In fact, Greene believes, all our intuitions are just manifestations of the operation of our dual-process brains, functioning either instinctively or more reflectively. He endorses one moral position, utilitarianism, not as the truth (he professes to be agnostic on whether there is such a thing as moral truth) but rather as a method of evaluation that we can all understand, and that holds out hope of providing a common currency of value less divisive than the morality of individual rights and communal obligations. ‘None of us is truly impartial, but everyone feels the pull of impartiality as a moral ideal.'”
Nagel isn’t so sure and explains why.
Rethinking consciousness
Why we should rethink what we’ve been told about consciousness. This article describes two competing ideas about consciousness: “physical processes within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a generator produces electricity” v. “the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the relationship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like that of the TV signal to the TV set.” And from there this provocative piece considers the policy ramifications of these ideas, concluding with something like Mill’s liberty principle: “If we as adults are not free to make sovereign decisions – right or wrong – about our own consciousness, that most intimate, that most sapient, that most personal part of ourselves, then in what useful sense can we be said to be free at all?”
Unsolvable problems in philosophy
8 philosophical questions that we’ll never solve? “Philosophy goes where hard science can’t, or won’t. Philosophers have a license to speculate about everything from metaphysics to morality, and this means they can shed light on some of the basic questions of existence. The bad news? These are questions that may always lay just beyond the limits of our comprehension.” But is this bad news? Do you really want to have the answers? Not if that would mean the end of philosophizing!
Socratically Speaking 