Moftasa's Bookmarks

Posts with the tag « philosophy » :

🔗 Why Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life.

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Gödel proved in 1931 that mathematics is not decidable, an earth-shattering result. He proved that there are statements in mathematics, which are true but not provable within the system. Worse yet, it turns out that you can’t build a more powerful mathematical system. Once a system becomes sufficiently complex, there will always be statements which are undecidable. You’re left with a choice: either have weak system of mathematics or accept that there will always be theorems out of reach. A rough analogy to incompleteness Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which shows that physics makes it impossible to determine both the position and velocity of a particle with exact precision.

A third major theme of the book is isomorphism, which is unique to Hofstadter’s vernacular. In formal …

🔗 Lecture library of 2000+ videos on Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy.

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2000 videos, with an average length of 45 minutes per video, totaling some 700gbs.

Everything is organized by Discipline->Subfield->individual-> course or lecture series. It's mostly non-introductory content.

The psychology section is far and away the most substantive of the three fields, with an emphasis on Psychodynamics, Neuropsychoanalysis, Rogerian/person-centered approaches, and Social Psychology.

The Neuroscience section has a modest amount of anatomy, and leans towards perception, affective neuroscience, and other such frivolity.

The philosophy section is a basic overview with a slight bent towards cognition, and is perfect for winning internet arguments (or whatever it is that philosophy is supposed to be for)

🔗 Parkinson's Law of Triviality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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A nuclear reactor is used because it is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so they assume that those working on it understand it. Even those with strong opinions often withhold them for fear of being shown to be insufficiently informed. On the other hand, everyone understands a bicycle shed (or thinks he or she does), so building one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to add his or her touch and show that they have contributed. While discussing the bikeshed, debate emerges over whether the best choice of roofing is aluminium, asbestos, or galvanized iron, rather than whether the shed is a good idea or not.

🔗 TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine | Ideas of the century: neurotrash (41/50)

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In one area, however, philosophers have taken a great interest in fashionable nonsense and in many cases have also fallen for it. I refer to what the philosopher, poet and neurologist Raymond Tallis calls “neurotrash”. By this he means the rewriting of the human person as the human brain, and using the resulting pseudoscience as a purported answer to some philosophical problem – as in Libet on free will, Zeki on aesthetic taste, Ramachandran on self-knowledge and “mirror neurons”, Joshua Greene on moral reasoning, and a thousand similar attempts to reduce the I to the fMRI.

🔗 Notes on Deontology

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Kant's theory is an example of a deontological or duty-based ethics : it judges morality by examining the nature of actions and the will of agents rather than goals achieved. (Roughly, a deontological theory looks at inputs rather than outcomes.) The end can never justify the means

🔗 History of Vegetarianism - Pythagoras (?580-?500 BC) and the Pythagoreans

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Alas, what wickedness to swallow flesh into our own flesh, to fatten our greedy bodies by cramming in other bodies, to have one living creature fed by the death of another! In the midst of such wealth as earth, the best of mothers, provides, nothing forsooth satisfies you, but to behave like the Cyclopes, inflicting sorry wounds with cruel teeth! You cannot appease the hungry cravings of your wicked, gluttonous stomachs except by destroying some other life.