WNL contents. To engage in philosophy is to ask a variety of questions about the world and our place in it. What can we know? What should we do? What may we hope? What makes human beings human? These questions, in various forms, and others like them are not inventions of philosophers; on the contrary, they occur to most people simply as they live their lives. Many of us ask them as children, but later either ignore them, or accept answers we can live with. Philosophers, however, seek to keep such questions open, and to address them through reasoned discussion and argument, instead of accepting answers to them based on opinion or prejudice. The program in philosophy is designed to aid students in thinking about these issues, by acquainting them with influential work in the field, past and present, and by training them to grapple with these issues themselves. John Dupré and Alex Rosenberg « Philosophy TV. October 13th, 2010 John Dupré (left) and Alex Rosenberg (right) on physicalist anti-reductionism.
According to physicalism, there is no non-physical stuff. According to reductionism, all facts can be captured by some purely physical description of the world. Nowadays, physicalist anti-reductionism is orthodox among philosophers. In this debate, Dupré defends that orthodoxy, while Rosenberg defends a considerably less popular view: physicalist reductionism. Related works by Dupré: “Is Biology Reducible to the Laws of Physics?”
By Rosenberg:Darwinian Reductionism (2006) “Defending Information-Free Genocentrism” (2005) More video:Alex Rosenberg and David Levine (BhTV) JONATHAN HAIDT: The New Science of Morality. Antonio Damasio explores consciousness in Self Comes to Mind. - By Alison Gopnik. Consciousness used to be the crazy aunt in psychology's attic. Behaviorists and cognitive scientists alike practiced denial, but the squeaking floorboards troubled our dreams of a truly scientific discipline. Now, the old lady has been given pride of place in the parlor, with all the respectable scientific furnishing of societies and journals. But let's face it—she's still weird. In some ways, the scientific study of consciousness has been a great success.
This may be less dispiriting when you realize we've been here before. Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who has done illuminating research on emotion, decision-making, and our perception of our own bodies. Scientists should always think that what they study is the most interesting thing in the universe—why study it otherwise? The trouble with Damasio's hypothesis, as with all the hypotheses about capital-C Consciousness, is figuring out how you could test it.
For Damasio as well, some sense of self is essential for consciousness. Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction. These influential theories of the second half of the twentieth century, all of which are focused on language, have their origins in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), particularly his Cours de linguistique gén érale (1916) or Course in General Linguistics, taken from his students' lecture notes and published posthumously. Contrary to many of the linguistic theories of the day, which focused on diachronic linguistics or the changes in languages over time, Saussure developed a theory of synchronic language , how language works in the present. He argued that the relationship between the spoken word ( signifier ) and object ( signified ) is arbitrary and that meaning comes through the relationship between signs , which are for Saussure the union of signified and signifier. So the word "tree" means by custom only and not through any intrinsic relationship between the sound and the thing.
That's why both "arbol" and "tree" can both signify the same signified. The Pinocchio Theory. Mark Abel’s book Groove: An Aesthetics of Measured Time, recently published in the Historical Materialsm book series, offers a new musicological and philosophical account of groove music — which is to say nearly all popular music, in the US and the Americas, and increasingly in other parts of the world as well, for the past hundred years — since at least the start of the 20th century. Ultimately, Abel offers an Adornoesque defense of the very mass-industrially-produced music that Adorno himself despised. This in itself is incredibly useful, given how much of a stumbling-block Adorno has been for decades when it comes to thinking about music — you simply can’t dismiss him, but there are good reasons for refusing to go along with him.
Abel starts by giving an overall definition of groove music — one that goes well beyond the relatively feeble attempts at definition that he cites from musical encyclopedias and from past commentators. All these characteristics are crucial. Structural information theory. Structural information theory (SIT) is a theory about human perception and in particular about perceptual organization. which is the neuro-cognitive process that enables us to perceive scenes as structured wholes consisting of objects arranged in space..
SIT was initiated, in the 1960s, by Emanuel Leeuwenberg[1][2][3] and has been developed further by Hans Buffart, Peter A. van der Helm, and Rob van Lier. It has been applied to a wide range of research topics,[4] mostly in visual form perception but also in, for instance, visual ergonomics, data visualization, and music perception. SIT began as a quantitative model of visual pattern classification. The simplicity principle[edit] Although visual stimuli are fundamentally multi-interpretable, the human visual system usually has a clear preference for only one interpretation. Structural versus algorithmic information theory[edit] Although SIT and AIT share many starting points and objectives, there are also several relevant differences: