Berkeley's Puzzle

Walk up to a table, and you can see and feel that the table is there. Indeed, your concept of what a table is has been shaped by your experience seeing and feeling tables your whole life. But what if you walk out of the room? It seems like your change of location shouldn’t concern the hypothetical table and its state of existence. However, you’ve never experienced a table's existence continuing unperceived for the very reason that you were not, then, perceiving it! A troubling question follows from this line of reasoning; if our experience contributes so directly to our concept of objects, how can we justify the concept of an object existing independent of mind? To push the issue even further: how can we even conceive of the concept of mind-independent objects at all, if every concept is inherently experience driven? This seems highly paradoxical.

See Berkeley philosopher John Campbell's interesting radio-snippet about this. 

God. Oh Dear...

The final prompt for my Metaphysics seminar was basically: "Write a paper." God is an unbelievably controversial topic and a difficult one to talk about even within the framework of philosophical debate. So naturally, God is what I wanted to write about. I knew that this would be a challenge, because I consider myself religious but have trouble justifying my belief in any sort of logically rigorous way. And while I discussed my paper ideas with friends, I realized that I had perhaps bit off more than I could chew; almost everyone seemed at best skeptical and at worst offended by my ideas. Let me know what you think!


"Towards A More Plausible Conception of God" 

High School "Senior Thesis"

Back in high school, there were no such things as Philosophy courses. I knew I liked what I thought was Philosophy, but I never had the opportunity to actually study it in a formal academic setting. All seniors at my school participate in a research project called THE SENIOR THESIS, and the idea is that you can pick anything in the whole world to learn and write about. I decided to try to write about fear of death in a philosophical context. I've always been terrified of dying, and I was hoping that studying the reasons for and against this fear would A) let me try out philosophizing for school and B) cure me. A certainly panned out. B, not so much. But here's a link to the final (disclaimer: high school quality) product:

Epicurean Thanatology: The Irrationality of Fear of Death

Challenge

My metaphysics professor challenged us to draw a rectangular circle. I now extend the challenge to you all. See if you can figure it out.

Philosophy Talk

Today marked my first meeting as a student researcher for the radio show Philosophy Talk. I'm basically super excited to have a summer job where I'll be learning a lot about what I love to learn about. The work I'll be doing will feel real and interesting, UNLIKE the experience of sitting at an office chair literally just waiting for my shift to be over (#summer2k11). Everyone else at the meeting seemed much more knowledgeable and self-assured than me, but I guess that's a good thing.

The radio show is hosted by Kenn Taylor, the director of the Symbolic Systems program at Stanford, and John Perry, a Philosophy professor emeritus. Every episode is about a different philosophical issue, with a giant range of topics from neuroscience and the law to language's effect on conceptions of responsibility.

Check out the site for the neat deets:

philosophytalk.org

Semantics

Last quarter I was given my first taste of Linguistics in my Introduction to Linguistics class. Unsurprisingly, the unit I the most intriguing was Semantics, the study of meaning. I had trouble remembering that I wasn't in a Philosophy course during this unit, which led to some annoyance from my TA and fellow classmates (apologies). I hope that I'll have the opportunity to take a Philosophy of Language class eventually; maybe one day I'll finally then understand Kripke and Wittgenstein instead of being awed by their works.

Chomsky's famous sentence that highlights the distinction between syntax and semantics, and a few thoughts about it:

    Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. 

The words of this sentence are in the right order. Adj Adj N V Adv. Uncontroversial. It is easy to see that the sentence is syntactical correct by replacing some of the words with others of the same type: Fat green snakes sleep peacefully. Tada!

So what about Chomsky's sentence is so nonsensical, or "semantically incorrect," to us? We understand the meaning of each word on its own. An easy observation leads us to suspect that internal contradictions between words renders that renders it semantically incorrect. It is impossible to be colorless and green simultaneously, and the action of sleeping cannot be undertaken by an idea because it is not alive. But oxymoron and paradox are hallmarks of literary writing, and it seems like similarily "incorrect" phrases are at home there and still evoke meaning. If they didn't evoke meaning, why would authors make such use of them! Another thought: maybe the sentence is incorrect because it is an impossible thing to visualize. Then again, so are many semantically correct sentences such as "Justice has been served."

To be honest, this sentence almost makes sense to me, and I'm wondering if anyone else feels similarly. At least, it has SOME meaning. It makes me feel a certain way, although I can't pinpoint exactly what. And I almost can't help imagining something when I read it.

If anything, my opinion might just show that I do not know very much about Semantics at all. 

Vernier Acuity

Here's a really neat thing we learned about in my psych class last quarter (disappointingly, one of the few neat things we learned). It's called vernier acuity. It's the ability to discern an offset in a supposedly continuous line. A related term is visual acuity, how small the smallest discernable visual feature is; it's analogous to the resolution at which we can view the world. This is affected by the size of a each cone on your retina.

You'd think that one is limited by the other. You'd think that our ability to detect an offset in a line is limited by our visual acuity, or how "pixelated" the world is to us as a function of the anatomy of our photoreceptors. Surprise! Vernier acuity has a resolution five to ten times greater than our visual acuity! WHAT?!? Where could all that extra precision come from?

This is an interesting demonstration of the critical role that visual processing systems in the brain play in how we sense our world. Our eyes don't just "tell" our brain how the world is put together. The brain must sort, refine, and compile the bits of data from photoreceptors into a cohesive image that we see. As a result, vernier acuity actually transcends the capable resolution offered by our retinas by somehow harnessing the computing power of the brain.

A further and slightly tangential question: as the brain processes raw sensory input signals from the retina, how can we be sure it is accurately tracking real world phenomena? What keeps the saliency of refinements in check if the only information we receive comes from our photoreceptors in the first place? How "real" is our "real"? Maybe our real is just what is most practical. (In other words, a possible answer to ponder: evolutionary advantage is given to those with certain visual interpretations, so these were the cortical processing systems developed).

A cool, INTERACTIVE (YAY! :D) demonstration can be found at the following link.

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/lum_hyperacuity/index.html

I also used this source to supplement my ailing memory about the subject. Seems legit!

TLDR; We see with our brains (rather than strictly with our eyes) more than we might think. Vernier acuity is a really cool example of this.