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[Treoblogging] I for one would like to express my gratitude to Stephen Colbert. He had the guts to stand up to the liberal "media" and support Our President with them right there in the room with him. Bravo, say I!
Incidentally, I find it insulting that so many in the audience were laughing during such a stirring speech.
[Treoblogging] I think this excellent smack-talk from our bass player "Curly" is this tour's winner: "I was soakin' in the whirlpool bath clockin' dollars. What were you doing?" (This was mock smack: the dollars of which he spoke were in the ones. Bar pay, you know.)
Anxiety is fear shorn of intentionality.
(This definition was inspired by my recent adventures in reinstalling Windows XP on my laptop PC. [This post brought to you by Macintosh. {Probably a trend, given the circumstances.}])
I'll be reinstalling Windows XP on my home laptop. In light of the concomitant hassles this entails, of course, it might mean that you'll never hear from me again...
I was just reading about Searle's reply to the Systems Reply to his notorious Chinese Room thought experiment, and thought I'd pass along what I think is a knock-down refutation. First, though, a thumbnail sketch of the Chinese Room dialectic.
The Chinese Room ("CR"). A native English-speaking male who (as it happens) speaks no Chinese sits in a room. A printer prints out strings of Chinese characters. When he receives the printouts, the man consults a rule book (in English) that tells him how to correlate the strings of characters with other Chinese characters in his inventory, stringing these together in a rule-based way to provide appropriate "responses" to the input. Like a computer outfitted with the appropriate program, then, the man here has passed the Turing Test but clearly doesn't understand Chinese. Thus, the Turing Test fails.
The Systems Reply ("SR"). While it's true the man doesn't understand the sentences, he is nonetheless a part (the "CPU," as it were) of a system--memory, instructions, operations--that does.
Searle's reply to SR (SRSR). But the man could (in principle) internalize the system (i.e., memorize the rule book and do the operations in his head), go out in a field somewhere and still pass the Turing Test without understanding a word of Chinese.
Now the refutation. Despite Searle's treating understanding as an all-or-nothing matter, it's pretty clear that Searle's hypothetical man in the field is demonstrating some kind of understanding of written Chinese. Granted, it's not the standard sort of understanding a competent speaker of Chinese would have. But then that's mostly1 because Searle's man in the field hasn't been given the appropriate rule book--the book that provides instructions about what to do in the world when confronted with strings of Chinese symbols having such-and-such syntactical properties. A man who could perform the corresponding, rule-based tasks would "understand" written Chinese in the relevant way.2 But in principle (as Searle would agree), nothing prevents our programming a robot to be able to perform these corresponding, rule-based tasks as well. And if a man so performing these tasks understands the Chinese, then so would the similarly competent robot.
NOTES
1. It's also because Searle analogizes at the wrong level of description. (See John Haugelean's remark in the Stanford Chinese Room article.)
2. For example, a man in a field has memorized my book of instructions. Upon reading the string of Chinese symbols that translates as "Go fly this kite and I will give you 1000 yuan," he takes the kite, flies it for a time, then returns with an outstretched hand.
The intuitive assessment here would seem to be that the man "understands" the Chinese offer. And yet to bite the bullet Searle would have to say, "Well, he still doesn't understand the Chinese sentence." To which our response might well be: Go fly a kite!
Fred Kaplan writes in Slate on contemporary martial dissatisfaction with that SOD Donald Rumsfeld. (Great first sentence: "It's an odd thought, but a military coup in this country right now would probably have a moderating influence.")
The Raving Atheist continues in his quest to justify anti-abortion as a universal imperative.
In the post linked to he displays his fixation with numerical identity as an ostensibly determining factor on the abortion question. The argument goes something like this: I am numerically identical with the zygote that developed into the adult I am now; therefore, for purposes of (all?) moral questions, "that zygote was me."
This fixation is probably the most common, and most puzzling, among anti-abortion antichoicers, whether theist or nontheist. Puzzling because in other contexts numerical identity is never used, and indeed would be odd to invoke, to mandate morally uniform attitudes towards organisms across different stages of their organic development.
Here are some examples of numerically identical pairs of organisms toward which our normative attitudes differ (and I think should differ) according to the organism's stage of development:
To elaborate:
Of course one might counter that these organisms display different characteristics and play different ecological roles at different stages of development. Just so: Not only are adult humans, unlike blastocysts, sentient (in and of itself I think a decisive difference from blastocysts), but human adults also are integrated socially in myriad ways that make their extinction fraught with far more moral significance than the extinction of a blastocyst.
In short, our normative attitudes toward other organisms change according to their level of development, and there is no principled reason to treat the case of the human organism any differently in this respect. Hence, personal identity is not only not dispositive but is in fact irrelevant to the abortion debate.
ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that squirrels are the classic dispersal agent for acorns, so let's just restrict the acorn example to immature acorns; thus, the disperal in question would be fruitless (pun moderately intended).
Mark Kleiman summarizes this NYT article on "compensation consulting":
[T]he "independent" compensation-consulting firm which approved a nearly $20 million paycheck for the CEO of Verizon in a year when Verizon saw its credit rating fall, froze pensions for its managers, and had its net income decline by 5% is also Verizon's benefits manager, and has taken in about half a billion dollars from its Verizon account in the past decade.
Okay, the title of this post is overstated, but, c'mon, this is a bit...hyperinvigilatory.
Richard Feynman here on why science isn't a "reduction" of life's aesthetic meaning but an expansion of it.
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