Because I think Posterous is going to cease to exist after its acquisition by Twitter, I'm going to be moving this blog's contents to Tumblr as soon as someone creates a quick way to do so.
And I'm going to stop posting new content here as of tonight. If you wish to see the sort of stuff I used to write here, please check out my Tumblr -
http://damienadupont.tumblr.com/
Thanks for reading!
Damien
Introduction
You’ve probably never heard of philosopher and theologian (also trained in medicine) Richard Cumberland, but he was highly respected in his time, particularly for his work in political philosophy. He had a deep interest in the way the natural world worked and in identifying natural ethical laws. He followed many of his contemporaries in a spending tremendous amount of time and ink arguing against the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (even though he shared Hobbes’ mechanistic bent). But the second most influential philosophy on Cumberland was Descartes’ intricate dualist theory of mind and emotions
Cumberland followed but also improved up on the Cartesian theory but his efforts led thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume to repudiate the cognitive line of thinking on emotions and morality, paving the way for William James’ wholly visceral account at the end of the 19th century.
Read the rest at my philosophy blog!
Nasa will provide video here starting at 5:30 PM ET, but they are already broadcasting:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Check it out! The album doesn't even come out until next week!
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153301078/first-listen-japandroids-celebration-rock
Descartes’ theory of the emotions along with his Stoic tendencies pressure him to recommend that the emotions are fully controllable by the mind. In fact, he goes so far as to say that failing to eliminate them is wrong.
As we’ve explained, Descartes argued that only our thoughts are completely in our power. So that would mean that emotions better be thoughts. If they aren’t, if they’re more like natural appetites or drives, such as for food or sex, then they wouldn’t be under our control.
As he was so interested in providing a materialist, or physical-system explanation of how the mind and body work, Descartes recast the struggle between the natural appetites and the will as a battle between movements of the pineal gland caused by chemicals (body-caused) on the one hand and movements of the pineal gland caused by the will. (soul-caused). In this set up, there are no “parts” of the mind, nothing in the soul to compete against will-guided-by-reason, not even the emotions.
Read the rest at my philosophy blog!
The Power of Being Pulled Over
Tom Vanderbilt is the author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).” He writes the “Transport” column for Slate and blogs at How We Drive.
February 27, 2012
A few weeks ago, I saw something unusual happen in New York City: A driver was pulled over for going through a red light. The police demanded the driver’s license and registration, and after a brief moment in the squad car, returned to tell the driver to “pay more attention to your surroundings.”
The driver, in fact, was me. A bit pressed for time, I had, rather uncharacteristically — and without seeing the squad car directly behind me — done what I see happen, unchecked and with dreary regularity on the city streets: I “scooted” through the intersection on what had once been the yellow but in reality was a full red. As a pedestrian (and driver) in New York I know that a red light is really on the beginning of a sort of stopping process for a stream of traffic. When I am waiting to cross a street, I institute my own mental “clearance phase” of a extra few seconds, even after getting the walk signal.
What often matters in reducing traffic violations is not punitive action per se, but simply the process of receiving a warning.After receiving the reprimand from the officer, I thanked him. Not for letting me off without a ticket, but for actually pulling me over in the first place. What was remarkable about the event was not just that it was me — this was the first time I’ve been pulled over in some two decades of city driving — but that it was happening at all.
As a parker, I have a vivid and intimate awareness of the presence of the city’s parking enforcement officers, and have learned many times the consequences of running afoul of them. Moving from the victimless crime of parking violations to driving violations, however — and drivers kill more people in the city each year than die in “stranger homicides” — the diligence of the traffic wardens seems to have been left at the curb. When’s the last time you actually saw a driver pulled over for driving faster than the citywide speed limit on, to cite one of many examples, Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn?
But wouldn’t that just be another way for the city to raise revenue? Wrong. Traffic is a complex system in which interventions can be exceedingly difficult to track, but there are a few truisms: The more traffic violations, the more crashes — both on an individual and systemic level. And people who commit on-road violations are more likely to be involved in crime outside the car. Societally, the more crashes, the higher the cost to the city (according to a recent study, four years of pedestrian injury in San Francisco cost the city $20 million, the majority of it paid by the public); to use an example from epidemiology, you can issue the “vaccine” of traffic tickets, or you can wait for the outbreak of fatalities. We don’t accept the word “accident” in those cases.
You might think that the police officer who pulled me over wasn’t doing his job, because he didn’t ticket me. But there is evidence that what often matters in reducing traffic violations is not punitive action per se, but simply the process of being pulled over and receiving the warning. This imparts the idea that the driver has violated some community norm, and reminds him (and other drivers who pass by) that there are police looking after those norms.
The effects can be dramatic and long-lasting. Take the example of a study in Miami Beach: after a two-week period in which drivers received police warnings for violating pedestrian right-of-way in crosswalks, the violation rate dropped drastically — and a year later, without enforcement, it was still down.
Enforcement alone is never enough: roads should be designed that clearly suggest how drivers should behave. It is in some combination of the two (among a host of other factors) that drivers will finally get the message.
Fascinating, encouraging stuff.
A very interesting explanation of how Canada beat the US in the War of 1812, thus allowing it to continue to exist as a separate nation.
Aside from the absurd fact that the word 'Quebec' only appears twice, I think this is well worth reading.
That's how the man's name is pronounced in Quebec-French.
He is the best catcher of the 80's. Tony Pena and a couple of others might have been better on Defense. But he was good there too. And boy, to hear pitchers tell it, he could call a game. And he was THE best hitting catcher. In Montreal and in New York.
'There's no way I'm making the last f------ out.' - Gary Carter in the 1986 World Series. (A devout man, he almost never cursed - but he was a gamer).
Wow, what a well-done project. I found my self laughing and choking up at some of this stuff. Its truly amazing how big and how small the world is. Its even more amazing how most people - myself included - act daily as if this wasn't the case.
Maybe if people had a better understanding of how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things we'd try to have a bit more fun.
Danny McBride is a genius.
Money quote: "But can you really blame them? Wouldn't you be pissed? Jesus helps us win at sports games, yet he's nowhere to be found when poor people need important medicine for their kid's infection, or when they're late on a mortgage payment. Think about it. There are folks in Africa who get AIDS without even being gay. Yet here Jesus is, helping me & Tebow out in sports, just because we're maybe a little bit cooler in his eyes. It's a raw deal, plain and simple. Even though he's hooking me up, I still see it's kind of a cocksucker move on Jesus's part."
The main development or change in how Descartes understands the mind from Meditations on First Philosophyto Passions of the Soul is that in this latter book his theory makes it possible for the body to act without the mind. In fact, I argue, he doesn’t leave the mind any way to affect the body at all even though he of course wants it to. There are a couple of reasons for this state of affairs. First, as we saw in the first Cartesian Error, he argues that the only thing the mind can do is think, and the body cannot think at all. Then in the Second Error, he argues that emotions aren’t thinking and explains that the human body works in such a way as to be able to start, continue and end emotions and emotion-based behavior. I call this organization, this explanation, an example of half-duplex communication between body and mind, a type of communication I previously said was exemplified by walkie-talkies and text messages. Let’s briefly review why this can’t be a reasonable way to look at how the mind and body interact.
If the mind were like a walkie-talkie, by definition only one end at a time can communicate. So if you had a spider on your leg, what would have to happen for you to get rid of it? First, the body would feel the pressure on your flesh. But for your mind to know the spider was there too would require one of four things, all of which have problems and raise more questions than they answer, (at least for Descartes):
Read the rest at my dissertation blog!
Click through and read this if you have a chance, its worth it if you're nervous about our future. An excerpt:
"major economies have only just begun deleveraging. In only three of the largest mature economies—the United States, Australia, and South Korea—has the ratio of total debt relative to GDP fallen. The private sector leads in debt reduction, and government debt has continued to rise, due to recession. However, history shows that, under the right conditions, private-sector deleveraging leads to renewed economic growth and then public-sector debt reduction.
These are the principal findings of MGI’s latest perspective on deleveraging, which revisits the world’s ten largest mature economies to see where they stand in the process of reducing debt ratios (United States, Japan, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, Spain, Australia, and South Korea)."
Last time I finished up by saying that because of his interests and assumptions, Descartes was unable to reach the conclusion he wanted, that emotions are purely mental, and that he looked to be forced into one of two other conclusions: 1) that emotions can exist without mental content, or that emotions can exist without the soul; or 2) that his theory contradicts his assumptions because it's actually lends itself fairly well to defending the idea that emotions must be a type of thought and must have a physiological basis.
Let's have one last closer look. At the very beginning of his book (A1) he explains emotions are "passive events" that happen to the person/soul, but are specifically referring to the person who they happen to. This fits well with his theory of how perception of things like pictures works. However, he also determined that what emotions are made from and how they are made is completely explainable by mechanistic physiology! To put it super-briefly, though he fixes the "home" of emotions in the soul, it is the body and memory that do nearly all, possibly even all, the work of supplying the mental/belief content necessary to start the physical processes that are emotional actions and reactions. This is actually pretty brilliant, but it was a disaster for his beliefs. So he had to find a way out, a way to show that emotions are perfomances of the mind and could not possibly be performances of the body.
To flesh it out a little more, lets look at how fear would work (A38): he explains that the movements of the body that "accompany" the emotions do not depend on the soul, all that is required to put a passion in the soul is the proper course of certain chemicals towards the nerves in the heart. From there they can then strike the nerves that make the legs move - and sustain the action - which automatically causes movements in the pineal gland, which causes the soul to "feel and perceive" that we are fleeing from danger. This process can be started by a learned response (as a child you saw a bear eat your dog, now you see a bear and you run), or by "dispositions of the organs" (think reflexes or innate behaviors (flinching when you believe you see a snake, even if its a stick). That is, in a word, bodily volition.
If you'd like to read the rest, check out my dissertation blog!
We normally say that a company “went bankrupt,” implying that it had no choice. But when, recently, American Airlines filed for bankruptcy, it did so deliberately. The airline had four billion dollars in the bank and could have kept paying its bills. But it has been losing money for a while, and its board decided that it was foolish to keep throwing good money after bad. Declaring bankruptcy will trim American’s debt load and allow it to break its union contracts, so that it can slim down and cut costs.
American wasn’t stigmatized for the move. Instead, analysts hailed it as “very smart.” It is now generally accepted that when it’s economically irrational for a company to keep paying its debts it will try to renegotiate them or, failing that, default. For creditors, that’s just the price of business. But when it comes to another set of borrowers the norms are very different. The bursting of the housing bubble has left millions of homeowners across the country owing more than their homes are worth. In some areas, well over half of mortgages are underwater, many so deeply that people owe forty or fifty per cent more than the value of their homes. In other words, a good percentage of Americans are in much the same position as American Airlines: they can still pay their debts, but doing so is like setting a pile of money on fire every month.
These people have no hope of ever making a return on their investment in their homes. So for many of them the rational solution would be a “strategic default”—walking away from the mortgage and letting the bank take the house. Yet the vast majority of underwater borrowers keep faithfully paying their mortgages; studies suggest that perhaps only a quarter of all foreclosures are strategic. Given how much housing prices have fallen, the question is why more people aren’t just walking away.
A very good point.
