So, the Tucson conference is winding down. I may post some thoughts about some of the talks later. But, all in all I have to say that it was disappointing, to say the least. It’s not that the talks were uninteresting, most of them were very interesting. The problem was that, on average, each presentation had about 5 minutes of discussion. This is verging on criminal. I was racking my brain trying to figure out why one Earth the conference organizers would set it up this way. Then a grad student at U of A (who shall remain anonymous) told me that this conference is for profit. That’s right they are in it to make money. No wonder they want to cram as many people into a session as possible. What crap! I had thought that the fees associated with the conference were merely for recouping the money spent organizing the conference. I doubt very much that I will come back to this conference (not that they will miss me 
Filed under: Misc BS
How can you have five minutes of discussion per presentation? Isn’t that sort of contradictory to the topics at hand?
I’d have thought it would be five minute presentations and three hour debates.
Anyways, thought I’d let you know that I cannot post anything on the Blackboard Plantinga forum doohickey. The text box for the entry isn’t there. That might (just might) explain the overall lack of action on the board.
Or people are really lazy.
I suspect it is the latter…but you should try reloading the page…that usually works.
Or maybe it’s a third option; viz, you don’t know how to use Blackboard.
Did you click on the ‘Plantinga and Mackie’ link? Did you click on ‘add new thread’? Did you click ‘reply’ to one of the existing threads?
I think it is just a matter of convention (no pun intended). At scientific conferences usually there is little time for A&A, while in philosophy they give tons of time to questions. At SFN (Society for Neuroscience), for instance, there isn’t a whole lot of Q&A. To read more into it, like some kind of profit motive, just seems a bit nutty.
I went to the first Tuscon conference (I believe it was in ’96), when Chalmers took it by storm with one of his first presentations of the “hard problem.” It was a wonderful, crazy conference, with all views given equal weight. Sort of loony, but stimulating.
Hey Eric,
Well, I wasn’t reading anything into it, someone told me ‘the conference accepts as many papers as possible because they want to make profit’ someone else told me ‘one year the conference made $50,000.00 in profit’ (profit!). Now of course, it’s not like some person is getting rich off of this (like Chalmers), the money goes to the Center for Consciousness Studies, and that may ultimately be a good thing. My point was that the conference would be better with (at least) 10 minuets of discussion, and even that is platry. But mostly I was just mad ’cause I got 15 minutes to do a 20 minute talk…it was an expensive 15 minutes!
I’m sure the ’96 conference was cool, but the ’08 one looked like a dinosour. (for what it’s worth I thought the ’06 one was much better)…
Hmmm….I am used to a slew of 15 minute talks at SFN, with longer time for the big events like the Nobel Laureates. Did it cost more to register if you were a presenter, or did you just pay the normal registration fee (and I assume a nominal fee for submitting an abstract)? It sounds like it is modelled after the big science conferences is all, with lots off different types of sessions (some short talk, some poster, and some longer talk).
At any rate, I can’t expect any consciousness conference to be like the one in ’96. It was electric, as it felt like we were on the verge of a new wave (we were). It is now fairly acceptable to discuss consciousness.
Do they still have a bunch of kooky new-agers there? I assume with Hameroff at the helm they do. He’s into some weird shit (intellectually speaking).
Yep, that’s why SFN sucks and I don’t go to it. I can read the paper. Just because scientists run their conferences this way does not mean that it is a good way to run a conference. Even though, I realize that there are reasons why it maight work better at a science conference than a philosophy conference.
Yeah, ’96 must have been cool…I heard about consciousness in the Spring of ’97 when I had my first undergraduate philosophy of mind course (taught by Kent Bach). I heard about Tucson in ’98 and went to my first conference in 2002 (to present a poster). Even as an undergraduate I could sense that something exciting was happening,,,I didn’t get that feeling this time…sort of like seeing the Grateful Dead in the ’90′s…very commercial, all for a profit…maybe what I should do is start up a consciousness conference in the parking lot of the TCC for those who don’t want to pay to get in to the show, um I mean, conference
But yeah, there are still some kooky types (I went to a party sponsered by the digital immortality group, for instance), Hoameroff was moderating several talks and instead of taking questions from the audience he would ask a question of his own that would force the speaker to deal with his views about gap junctions and quantuum tunnels (not that I am against that). Other than that the plenery talks were good (the ones I attended, so I did not go to the ‘Sex and Consciousness’ stuff. In particular I like the panel on attention and consciousness (with BArrs and Tye), and the talk by Singer was excellent.
My argument wasn’t about whether SFN sucks or not (though I can’t imagine anyone with more than a passing interesting in neuroscience saying it sucks unless they haven’t been), but was simply meant to explain that this isn’t all that strange, not a problem you need to “rack your brain” over. It sounds like a perfectly normal conference–philosophy colloquia and conferences are unusual in their focus on comments from the peanut gallery.
I thought this post today during the Qand A at a talk by Millikan. She wasted 20 minutes explaining the basics of her theory to a freaking person in the audience who wouldn’t shut the hell up (egads, freaking Dretske and Alex Rosenberg are in the audience and this person dominates the QandA and doesn’t understand the most basic things about the field). That always bugged me about philosophy formatting. I prefer to give the speaker more time than to give the peanut gallery more time, given the usual types of questions you end up hearing.
I hung out with quite a few parapsychologists at the conference. It was fun. It’s too bad if it’s turned into something lame (in 96 there were no concurrent sessions–we all sat through Brian Josephson’s kooky talk on universal consciousness, Penrose on microtubule consciousness, Koch, Chalmers). Perhaps that was part of the fun. But it has grown, and with such growth comes a bit of depersonalization which kinda sucks. That conference pushed me to apply to grad school in philosophy to work on consciousness (that turned out to be a mistake that took 3 years to correct).
You make good points, and to tell the truth I wasn’t thinking about the difference between science conferences and philosophy conferences when I started complaining about this stuff. But still, this seems fucked up to me. I thought that the purpose of a conference was to present research to your peers, partially to inform people about interesting results you may have uncovered, but also partly to subject it to critical scruntiny. This cannot be done with the way that these conferences are organized. Factor in to that the enormous cost of someone like me showing up to present in the first place, and the fact that the considerations are profit driven (as per two very reliable sources), and what you get is my sentiment expressed above.
I vertainly agree with you about the Millikan stuff. She is too nice for her own good. But that is where a good chair is supposed to step in and divert the trainwrek by appolgizing and moving on.
LOL. Yes, the chair was too passive (sorry Karen). It was sort of funny, really. I sat for probably 10 minutes, getting more and more annoyed. Then I just got up and left and went to the bathroom. I came back, they were still talking, and it went on for like 5 more minutes. By then I was just laughing.
Yes, I think the science format is probably not as good for presenting philosophy. It kind of forces you to do the real interactions after the talk.
On the other hand, the science format forces people to be much more succinct and clear in their questions, and makes people less likely to ask lame questions.
[...] On top of the money to fly there and have a room…Horseshit! Similar remarks can be made about the Tucson conferences, the SPP, the apa, and virtually every major conference out there. Now, look, I know that you need [...]