Of all the David Frosts, I am the David Frostiest.
Suppose we learn that a moral judgment we thought reasonable has an origin in merely adaptive emotions? Is that moral judgment now debunked? Perhaps you only care for your loved ones because they incite higher levels of oxytocin in your body. This article I just published considers this question by thinking about the famous “trolley …
Damon Linker’s criticism of science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson’s recent anti-philosophy statements begs the question I’m afraid. I want philosophy to win on this one, but I don’t think Linker has managed to pull off making the case. We could conceive the main beef to be about whether asking unanswerable questions is worthwhile. That’s what …
In case you missed it, at the Atlantic, Patrick Tucker has written an article about the military’s project to create moral artificial intelligence — robots that can make moral decisions. For instance, in a disaster scenario, a robot may be forced to make a choice about whom to evacuate or treat first, a situation where …
Now out with Springer! It’s my book review of The Universe as We Find It, by John Heil! My review has been online for a good while and getting daily traffic at academia.edu. But more recently, the paperback journal has finally printed. Heil’s book is available in hardback at Amazon. Heil argues for a certain …
Crews and Adler believe that most cases of the yips probably have a psychological basis of some kind, but that in some percentage the ultimate cause will turn out to be neurological.[The New Yorker] All philosophers of mind and most philosophers generally will recognize the error in this sentence, or should recognize it. Basically, the …
Folks at Vox (“Rich People are Jerks, Explained“) have written up two domains of scientific research about wealthy Americans. One area of research shows that the preferences of the wealthy are more influential on politics, actual governance and policy than the preferences of non-wealthy people. Here’s a link to the main academic paper Vox used as a …
BishopBlog writes: In 2013, Tom Insel, Director of the US funding agency, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), created a stir with a blogpost in which he criticised the DSM5 and laid out the vision of a new Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project. This aimed “to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and …
Tyson says: My concern there is that the philosophers believe they are asking deep questions about nature, and to the scientist, it’s, “what are you doing? Why are you wasting your time? Why are you concerning yourself about the meaning of meaning?”… If you are distracted by your questions so that you cannot move forward, …