For the last 20 years, I have found myself on the inside of a revolution, but on the outside of its resplendent dogma. Now that the revolution has not only hit the mainstream, but bludgeoned it into submission by taking over the economy, it's probably time for me to cry out my dissent more loudly than I have before.

The encounter occurred aboard the presidential yacht USS Potomac, the same steel-hulled craft that, half a century ago, carried Roosevelt to his meeting with Churchill wherein they secretly plotted World War II. It cruised on the San Francisco Bay as helicopters hovered above, dropping smoke flares to mark a jumper from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Jaron Lanier: Maybe we should go over what Virtual Reality is. We are speaking about a technology that uses computerized clothing to synthesize shared reality. It recreates our relationship with the physical world in a new plane, no more, no less. It doesn't affect the subjective world; it doesn't have anything to do directly with what's going on inside your brain. It only has to do with what your sense organs perceive. The physical world, the thing on the (...) other side of your sense organs, is received through these five holes, the eyes, and the ears, and the nose, and the mouth, and the skin. They're not holes, actually, and there are many more senses than five but that's the old model, so we'll just stick with it for now. (shrink)

In the conclusion to his article, `Consciousness as an engineering issue' , pp. 52-66), Donald Michie argues that the inclusion of intelligent computer systems in workgroups will lead to a blurring of the distinction between human and machine consciousness. He also refers to the increasing use of intelligent agent software in commercial applications. Given the exponential growth in the availability of on-line information through networked computer systems, AI routines are being developed to filter information, based on the user's own stated (...) needs and preferences. In this article Jaron Lanier, who originated the term `virtual reality', argues that the use of intelligent agents will devalue human intelligence and creativity and diminish the role of conscious experience. The mind-body debate needs to move beyond the confines of academic philosophy as it has important implications for practical issues such as the design of computer systems. (shrink)

[opening paragraph}: It turns out that it is possible to distinguish a zombie from a person. A zombie has a different philosophy. That is the only difference. Therefore, zombies can only be detected if they happen to be philosophers. Dennett is obviously a zombie.

Consider the idea of the present moment in time. This is one of the most imprecise of concepts. Does it last for an instant or for three seconds? Do all the parts of a brain share the same present moment? Is the present moment one is conscious of even coherent enough to compare to the position of the hands of a clock? In a relativistic universe, can it ever be sensible to talk about a present? To the best of our (...) knowledge, the answers to all the above questions must be had at the expense of the integrity of the idea of ‘now'. People do not make very good clocks -- we are poor at sensing the absolute passage of time, and, even if we were better at it, relativity would only allow us to share a ‘now’ with compromised accuracy. Despite the looseness of the present moment, the fact that we can talk about it at all, even with imprecision and ambiguity, is an important bit of evidence to keep in mind when considering consciousness. Let's suppose the universe is, for practical purposes, deterministic. The universe in this case isn't ‘doing anything’ that can distinguish one moment from another. And yet the human perspective does achieve such a distinction. The vaguely perceived present moment is distinguished from other moments. This human ability reminds one of the old joke about a dancing bear: it's not that the bear dances well, but that he dances at all that charms an audience. The very concept of a present moment is only meaningful to one who is trapped in time by being conscious. (shrink)

PAUL SOLMAN: Let's begin with a look at some estimates of Internet use and how it's been exploding in the past year. Our numbers come from a variety of sources. About 80% of Americans now have personal computers. About 100 million people are online and at last count the Net was adding 38 new users every second. Some 55 million Americans log on to the Internet, in a typical day. About 40% of them check their e-mail every day. About 30% (...) check several times a day. In 1998, the U.S. Postal Service delivered 101 billion pieces of paper or snail mail. The number of e-mail messages transmitted in 1998 is estimated to have been around 4 trillion. 60% of regular Internet users report watching less television; 34% spend less time shopping in stores; 13% attend fewer social events; more than 25% say they now have friends they've never met in person; and-- our favorite-- 48% of regular Internet users, according to a UCLA study, say they now deny their children on-line access as a punishment tool. In short, the Internet is becoming a given of the American and global landscape, whether we like it or not. (shrink)

The role of consciousness in contemporary scientific thought is similar to the role of death in everyday emotional life. It is usually ignored or denied outright, frequently obsessed over, and is sometimes the inspiration for uncharacteristic breaches of common sense. It is time to state the obvious. The problem of consciousness is deeply interwoven with the problem of death. And yet death is rarely mentioned in relation to consciousness studies. Consciousness is the thing of consequence that dies. Surely this explains (...) a great deal of why there is such an energetic conversation about consciousness, and why passions are so often raised concerning a subject whose basic nature is so elusive and disputed. (shrink)

The hendecachoron is an abstract 4-dimensional polytope composed of eleven cells in the form of hemi-icosahedra. This paper tries to foster an understanding of this intriguing object of high symmetry by discussing its construction in bottom-up and top down ways and providing visualization by computer graphics models.

An essential component of beauty is being undermined and will soon be practically eliminated, and that is scarcity. Botox is to cosmetics what cut-and-paste software is to music production. Whatever was precious five minutes ago becomes overbearingly omnipresent five minutes from now. The quest for beauty coupled with technological proficiency undermines the relative value of each beautiful invention. Find beauty in nature, but when it comes to culture, it's time to forget beauty. It will soon be nothing more than another (...) word for nostalgia. (shrink)

Since there isn't a computer that seems conscious at this time, the idea of machine consciousness is supported by thought experiments. Here's one old chestnut: "What if you replaced your neurons one by one with neuron sized and shaped substitutes made of silicon chips that perfectly mimicked the chemical and electric functions of the originals? If you just replaced one single neuron, surely you'd feel the same. As you proceed, as more and more neurons are replaced, you'd stay conscious. Why (...) wouldn't you still be conscious at the end of the process, when you'd reside in a brain shaped glob of silicon? And why couldn't the resulting replacement brain have been manufactured by some other means?". (shrink)

More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith, the great theorist of capitalism, argued that the free market was a self-correcting mechanism: a lot of people seeking profits for themselves would produce general public benefit. But does it work with ideas? Can there be an encyclopædia that corrects itself, as it grows ever larger on the Web?

When zoologist Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene was published 20 years ago, it practically snuffed out many readers' belief in God and in their own importance, for it described in stunning and terrifying detail a world where all life was merely the conveyor belt for the gene. Its mission: to replicate itself. DNA was the fundamental and irreducible unit of life that spun itself endlessly into the incredible diversity of flora and fauna. Everything we hold most dear--acts of love, altruism, (...) the painterly beauty of the peacock's tail, the birth of a newborn--could, according to Dawkins, be explained by the gene's attempt to survive, and to hitch a ride on the fittest organism possible, the one most likely to mate and reproduce. Darwinian natural selection was Dawkins' ruling theme. The gene looked like the most purely selfish entity one could imagine, but it was more like the Terminator--just programmed to survive. (shrink)

The easiest predictions to make about the next fifty years of computer science are those centering on the computers, ignoring the people. For example, I can predict with a fair degree of confidence that there will be fabulous increases in hardware capability, which will be largely consumed by a corresponding decrease in software elegance as decades of legacy systems tangle like parasitic vines. It's when people are brought into the equation, however, that the business of prediction becomes difficult.

properly, for instance, in today’s videoconferencing systems, because the camera and the display screen cannot be in the same spot. This usually leads to a deadened and formal affect in interactions, eye contact being a nearly ubiquitous subconscious method of affirming trust. Furthermore, participants aren’t able to establish a sense of position relative to one another and therefore have no clear way to direct attention, approval or disapproval. Tele-immersion, a new medium for human interaction enabled by digital technologies, approximates the (...) illusion that a user is in the same physical space as other people, even though the other participants might in fact be hundreds or thousands of miles away. It combines the display and interaction techniques of virtual reality with new vision technologies that transcend the traditional limitations of a camera. Rather than merely observing people and their immediate environment from one vantage point, tele-immersion stations convey them as “moving sculptures,” without favoring a single.. (shrink)

IÂ’m only talking about commercial big time music in the United States. Of course music is gloriously seething in odd corners of the planet as it should. I can team up with some compatible friends and we can go find or make our own music in any of a number of accommodating environments- on the net, in the forest, or in some dank club late at night.

[opening paragraph]: While there are many ideas worthy of test, and especially some exciting speculations on how ‘high level’ processing might feed back into ‘low level’ visual perception, the scheme of ‘laws’ proposed by Ramachandran and Hirstein underestimates the ambition of art, at least as it is probably understood by most serious contemporary practitioners. It should be retitled ‘The Science of Design'. If Ramachandran and Hirstein had looked into the literature of design, instead of art, they would have come upon (...) somewhat similar, though more subjective, explorations of significantly overlapping ideas; symmetry, contrast, methods of limiting distraction, avoiding confusion, etc. Design is an essential element of the artist's training, but it is not the equivalent of art; design is to art as engineering is to science -- it does a lot of heavy lifting but does not in itself contain or explain the agenda. (shrink)

The game of chess possesses a rare combination of qualities, from the point of view of a human mind. It is easy to understand the rules, yet hard to play well; and most importantly, the quest to master chess seems to be eternal. Human players surmount ever higher plateaus of skill, and yet no one has been able to make the claim that chess skill can be pushed no further.

Decision making in any brain is imperfect and costly in terms of time and energy. Operating under such constraints, an organism could be in a position to improve performance if an opportunity arose to exploit informative patterns in the environment being searched. Such an improvement of performance could entail both faster and more accurate (i.e., reward-maximizing) decisions. The present study investigated the extent to which human participants could learn to take advantage of immediate patterns in the spatial arrangement of serially (...) presented foods such that a region of space would consistently be associated with greater subjective value. Eye movements leading up to choices demonstrated rapidly induced biases in the selective allocation of visual fixation and attention that were accompanied by both faster and more accurate choices of desired goods as implicit learning occurred. However, for the control condition with its spatially balanced reward environment, these subjects exhibited preexisting lateralized biases for eye and hand movements (i.e., leftward and rightward, respectively) that could act in opposition not only to each other but also to the orienting biases elicited by the experimental manipulation, producing an asymmetry between the left and right hemifields with respect to performance. Potentially owing at least in part to learned cultural conventions (e.g., reading from left to right), the findings herein particularly revealed an intrinsic leftward bias underlying initial saccades in the midst of more immediate feedback-directed processes for which spatial biases can be learned flexibly to optimize oculomotor and manual control in value-based decision making. The present study thus replicates general findings of learned attentional biases in a novel context with inherently rewarding stimuli and goes on to further elucidate the interactions between endogenous and exogenous biases. (shrink)

. Against modernist illusions: why we need more democratic and constructivist alternatives to debunking conspiracy theories. Journal for Cultural Research: Vol. 25, What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth., pp. 104-122.

In this paper, I will suggest that the ideas of Uddyotakara, the 6th century author of the Nyāya-Vārttika, may have been largely overlooked as a result of Jitendra Nath Mohanty’s and Bimal Krishna Matilal’s influential works on Indian epistemology. Crucial to Mohanty’s and Matilal’s portrayals of Indian epistemology is the thesis that the pramāṇa theory incorporates a sort of causal theory of knowledge. The writers of pramāṇa-śastra, they argue, agreed that at the end of the day, knowledge comes down to (...) an ‘inner’ occurrence, a temporally individuated cognitive episode, and that consequently—the pramāṇa—the most relevant factor affecting knowledge acquisition and the ultimate justification of knowledge acquisition—are “the cluster of phenomena that converge to bring such a cognitive episode about”. I will argue, on the other hand, based on a discussion Uddyotakara conducts at the beginning of the introductory chapter of his work, which I believe to be of crucial importance, that causal factors play only a marginal role in his theory of knowledge and that he claims the pramāṇa to be dependent on samartha-pravṛtti—the habitual, customary and expected procedures or ways of attaining a goal—rather than on their causal antecedents. I will moreover suggest a reading of the pramāṇa of sense-perception, inference and analogy as action-based. (shrink)

I investigate the consequences of Nietzsche's perspectivism for notions of truth and objectivity, and show how the metaphor of visual perspective motivates an epistemology that avoids self-referential difficulties. Perspectivism's claim that every view is only one view, applied to itself, is often supposed to preclude the perspectivist's ability to offer reasons for her epistemology. Nietzsche's arguments for perspectivism depend on “internal reasons”, which have force not only in their own perspective, but also within the standards of alternative perspectives. Internal reasons (...) allow a perspectivist argument against dogmatism without presupposing aperspectival criteria for theory choice. Nietzsche also offers “internal” conceptions of truth and objectivity which reduce them to a matter of meeting our epistemic standards. This view has pluralistic implications, which conflict with common sense, but it is nevertheless consistent and plausible. Nietzsche's position is similar to Putnam's recent internalism, and this is due to their common Kantian heritage. (shrink)

Ever since the start of the Corona pandemic, different and often conflicting views have emerged about the virus and how to appropriately deal with it. Such epistemic, societal, and economic criticisms, including those about government imposed measures, have often been dismissed as dangerous forms of conspiratorial disinformation that should be (and have been) excluded from the realm of reasonable political discussion. However, since these critiques of emerging hegemonic knowledge and policies often involve significant and complex questioning of epistemic and political (...) claims, and since corresponding plausibilities change over time, such clear distinctions between correct knowledge and foolish, fraudulent, and/or dangerous, disinformation are not easy to draw. In fact, they can be considered political acts in these epistemic disputes over the pandemic. These conflicts, which we refer to as the “Corona Truth Wars,” are not just about knowledge, but have turned into societal conflicts and even outright identity wars that run through families, circles of friends, organizations, and entire societies. In this special issue, we illuminate these dynamics by bringing together a range of scholars who have been struck by the complexity of these controversies and their far-reaching social consequences. Far from understanding these controversies as simple dichotomies between truth and disinformation, or between disinterested science and manipulative politics, these scholars are interested in the various ways in which these dimensions are intertwined. Building on a long tradition of exploring (scientific) knowledge controversies, the six contributions to this special issue show how epistemic struggles over truth are not only fought in the realm of science, but increasingly manifest and interact in everyday politics, social media platforms, daily talk shows, and family dinners. The scholars brought together in this issue, with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and from different geographical regions (Denmark, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Israel), present their studies on the various epistemic and social conflicts that have emerged during the Corona pandemic of the last three years. (shrink)

This paper explores a pair of puzzling and controversial topics in the history of late nineteenth-century philosophy: the psychologism debates, and the nature of neo-Kantianism. Each is sufficientl...

What is the semantic contribution of anaphoric links in sentences like, ‘A physicist was late to the party. He brought some bongos’? A natural first thought is that the passage entails a wide-scope existential claim that there is something that both (i) was late to the party and (ii) brought some bongos. Intentional identity sentences are counter-examples to this natural thought applied to anaphora in general. Some have tried to rescue the thought and accommodate the counter-examples by positing mythical objects. (...) I present a new intentional identity sentence that cannot be so accommodated. I then propose a new account of intentional identity and other anaphoric sentences that does not appeal to mythical objects, but instead draws on traditional accounts of definite descriptions. (shrink)

Robert Pippin has recently raised what he calls ‘the Montaigne problem’ for Nietzsche's philosophy: although Nietzsche advocates a ‘cheerful’ mode of philosophizing for which Montaigne is an exemplar, he signally fails to write with the obvious cheerfulness attained by Montaigne. We explore the moral psychological structure of the cheerfulness Nietzsche values, revealing unexpected complexity in his conception of the attitude. For him, the right kind of cheerfulness is radically non-naïve; it expresses the overcoming of justified revulsion at calamitous aspects of (...) life through a reflective, higher-order affirmative attitude. This complex notion of cheerfulness turns out to have roots in Montaigne himself, and it must be thought of as a kind of second nature cultivated through practice, as a kind of second nature. Understanding the meaning of cheerfulness thereby sheds light on the conception of philosophy as a way of life in both Nietzsche and Montaigne. (shrink)

. What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth. Journal for Cultural Research: Vol. 25, What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth., pp. 1-11.

R. Lanier Anderson presents a new account of Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, and provides it with a clear basis within traditional logic. He reconstructs compelling claims about the syntheticity of elementary mathematics, and re-animates Kant's arguments against traditional metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason.

In recent decades, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has become a powerful forum for trade liberalization and regulatory harmonization. OECD members have worked to reconcile divergent national regulatory approaches, applying a single framework across sovereign states, in effect determining whose knowledge-making practices would guide regulatory action throughout the industrialized world. Focusing on US regulators, industry associations, and environmental groups, this article explores the participatory politics of OECD chemical regulation harmonization in the late 1970s to early 1980s. These efforts (...) were conditioned by differential institutional access and resources among stakeholders who sought to shape regulatory knowledge rules. Facing competing European and US approaches to chemical data—a minimum “base set” of test data versus case-by-case determinations—OECD members chose the European approach in 1980. However, US regulatory politics shifted with the election of President Reagan, prompting industry associations to lobby the US government to block the agreement. Examining the micropolitics of these standards in the making, I demonstrate that while long-term structures advantaged industrial actors, ideological alignment with the US government precipitated their decisive influence. The case illustrates the importance of attending to the distinctive politics of international harmonization and the effects on transnational knowledge-making and regulatory intervention. (shrink)

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This paper explores a pair of puzzling and controversial topics in the history of late nineteenth-century philosophy: the psychologism debates, and the nature of neo-Kantianism. Each is sufficientl...

I defend Kant’s definition of analyticity in terms of concept “containment”, which has engendered widespread scepticism. Kant deployed a clear, technical notion of containment based on ideas standard within traditional logic, notably genus/species hierarchies formed via logical division. Kant’s analytic/synthetic distinction thereby undermines the logico-metaphysical system of Christian Wolff, showing that the Wolffian paradigm lacks the expressive power even to represent essential knowledge, including elementary mathematics, and so cannot provide an adequate system of philosophy. The results clarify the extent to (...) which analyticity sensu Kant can illuminate the problem of a priori knowledge generally. (shrink)

Officially, for Kant, judgments are analytic iff the predicate is "contained in" the subject. I defend the containment definition against the common charge of obscurity, and argue that arithmetic cannot be analytic, in the resulting sense. My account deploys two traditional logical notions: logical division and concept hierarchies. Division separates a genus concept into exclusive, exhaustive species. Repeated divisions generate a hierarchy, in which lower species are derived from their genus, by adding differentia(e). Hierarchies afford a straightforward sense of containment: (...) genera are contained in the species formed from them. Kant's thesis then amounts to the claim that no concept hierarchy conforming to division rules can express truths like '7+5=12.' Kant is correct. Operation concepts ( ) bear two relations to number concepts: and are inputs, is output. To capture both relations, hierarchies must posit overlaps between concepts that violate the exclusion rule. Thus, such truths are synthetic. (shrink)