Zombies vs Shombies

Richard Marshall, a writer for 3am Magazine, has been interviewing philosophers. After interviewing a long list of distinguished philosophers, including Peter Carruthers, Josh Knobe, Brian Leiter, Alex Rosenberg, Eric Schwitzgebel, Jason Stanley, Alfred Mele, Graham Priest, Kit Fine, Patricia Churchland, Eric Olson, Michael Lynch, Pete Mandik, Eddy Nahmais, J.C. Beal, Sarah Sawyer, Gila Sher, Cecile Fabre, Christine Korsgaard, among others, they seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, since they just published my interview. I had a great time engaging in some Existential Psychoanalysis of myself!

Three New Papers

This summer has been semi-productive for me and I have completed drafts of three new conference length papers that I hope to be shopping around later. These are all in various stages of revision/draftyness and I would appreciate any feedback/comments.

1. Explaining Consciousness and Its Consequences

2. The Higher-Approach to Consciousness: The Hot Ticket or In Hot Water?

3. The Identity Theory in 2-D

WordPress vs. Blogger?

I have been giving some thought to switching from wordpress to blogger for some time now, both for Philosophy Sucks! and the online consciousness conference….what are the relative merits of each? Is blogger better? What’s the deal?

Commercial Free Philosophy?

I recently cam across Rick Grush’s Commercial Free Philosophy site, a movement which I am deeply sympathetic to (see below)…I have been dying to read the new paper by Michael Gazzaniga but my school is too cheap to subscribe to Science Direct so I’ll never know what the right level of mind-bran analysis is…but anyways, I noticed that there was no mention of presenting at for-profit conferences. It seems to me that the arguments which support abstaining from publishing in for profit journals would also apply to conferences.

Just as an example, and since this one is coming up, take the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness,

		Late Fees (after Friday 21st of May)
		Student Member	CA $280
		Member	CA $430
		Non-member	CA $530
		Tutorials	CA $60 each
		Conference Dinner	CA $70
		Accommodation	CA $94/night (or $47 shared)

$500.00 just to present a poster!?!?! 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 to charge something in order to offset the money put into organizing the conference (well, you don’t HAVE to (I didn’t) but I can see why one would think it was fair to do so) but these prices are ridiculous…most of us can’t afford that to present our research. It is true that the University helps offset the price but unless one is at a fancy research institution (hint: most of us aren’t) the help is negligible. So, to go to the apa in Vancouver cost me $2,500 and I got $500.00 from LaGuardia…big help. And for what? To be crammed into a session with three other papers plus commentators and five minutes scheduled for discussion? What a joke!

What is Philosophy that it Sucks so Bad?

Brian Leiter wants to know what philosophers think of philosophy in 75 words or less…here is my 50 word stab (longer stab here)

Philosophy is distinguished from other endeavors by its method, which is roughly this: a good argument with the conclusion that p is a reason to believe that p. Philosophers, as we say, feel the force of arguments and are compelled to either accept their conclusions or to show why one needn’t.

You Must be Joking

A few years ago I had the terrible idea of taking classic jokes and “translating” them into philosophical lingo. Some work has been done in this area on lightbulb jokes but there are so many other kinds of jokes. Some are pretty obvious…like

• Yo mama is so fat, when she sits around the house she sits AROUND the house; in all possible worlds
• Yo mama is so dumb she has the B relation of taking more than an hour to watch 60 minutes

Some are just plain silly,

• Yo mama is so fat she is the truthmaker for ‘your mama is fat’
• If you mow your lawn and find the nonbeing of four cars…you might be a philosopher
• If you go to a psychology conference hoping to meet women…you might be a philosopher
• If someone asks you to fill out a form and you think of Plato…you might be a philosopher
• If you think “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” actually was a good defense…you might be a philosopher

Some are just plain ridiculous as in

• Yo mama is so dumb she thinks the transcendental deduction is a tax break for club kids
• Yo mama is so dumb she thinks the T-schema was the code name for the Boston Tea Party

Others?

On an unrelated note, thanks to Netflix I just rewatched Return of the Living Dead II and I realized that whenever I am asked the name of the blog that I contribute to I should say Braaaaaiiiinnnnnsssss!

C02 Program Finalized

Well, I finally got my computer back. Sadly the hard drive was so messed up that I was totally unable to recover any data. I lost a couple of papers that I was working on and ALL of the photos from my honeymoon so I am not happy about that. …at any rate the program for the Second Annual Online Consciousness Conference is now finalized (I have been putting this together from my iphone for the last few weeks if you can believe it!) check it out and spread the word!

Clip Show

Just ‘Cause It’s So Awsome

Yo Mama is a Philosopher!!

These are the most viewed posts at Philosophy Sucks! 
1. What is Wrong with Eating Meat
2. God vs. The Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser
3. Why does 1+1=2?
4. A Simple Argument against Berkeley
5. A Short Argument that There is No God
6. Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck
7. There is No Santa Claus
8. Two Kinds of Semantics
9. A Simple Argument for Moral Realism
10. Pain Asymbolia and Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness
11. The Philosophical Method

Less Popular but Still Good

On Physicalism vs. Dualism 
1. The Kripkean Response to Kripke’s Modal Argument Against Physicalism
2. The Contestability of (P & ~Q)
3. Reflections on Zoombies and Shombies Or: After the Showdown at the APA
4. My Body has a Limp

On Ethics  
1. How the Categorical Imperative Entails that we Cannot Treat Animals as a Means Only
2. Not as a Means Only
3. Marriage and Civil Union
4. Polygamy & Incest
5. Secular Christmas!
6. Freedom of Speech Meets Speech Act Theory

On Philosophy of Religion 
1. The (New) Agnostic’s Manifesto: Part 1 -Preamble
2. The Logical Problem of Omniscience
3. What God Doesn’t Know
4. The Possibility of Ontological Arguments
5. More on the Ontological Argument

On Philosophy of Logic & Language 
1. Aristotle on Universal Quantification
2. Did Quine Change his Mind?
3. Stop Your Quining!!!
4. 09/05/07 Kripke
5. 09/19/07 -Devitt on Meaning
6. Timothy Williamson on Necessary Existents
7. Material Implication, English, and Truth at a World

On Empiricism vs. Rationalism 
1. Armstrong on Naturalism and Empiricism
2. The Evolutionary Argument against Ration
3. The Refutation of Rationalism
4. Progress in Philosophy? Well, I Never!
5. Empiricism as the Default Position
6. Einstein and the a Priori
7. The Empirical Justification of Mathematics
8. Invoking God doesn’t Save Descartes from Skepticism

Conference Reports 
1. Shombies & Illuminati
2. A Couple More Thoughts on Shombies and Illuminati
3. Reflections on Language Though, Logic, and Existence after the apa
4. Peter Singer on Climate Change and Ethics
5. Kripke’s Argument Against 4-Dimensionalism
6. Kripke on the Structure of Possible Worlds
7. Fodor on Natural Selection
8. Attributing Mental States
9. Busy Bees Busily Buzzing ‘Bout
10. The Singularity and Simulation
11. Meta-Metaethics at the Yale-UCONN Graduate Conference

On the Higher-Order Theory of Consciousness 
1. Explaining What It’s Like
2. Do Thoughts Make Us Conscious of Things?
3. A Tale of Two T’s
4. Two Concepts of Transitive Consciousness
5. Kripke, Consciousness, and the ‘Corn
6. HOT Theories of Consciousness & Unconscious Gricean Intentions
7. HOT Byrne
8. HOT Block
9. HOT Imagination
10. The Higher-Order Response to the Zombie Argument
11. Priming and Change Blindness
12. Priming, Change Blindness, and the Function of Consciousness
13. Unconscious Change Detection, Priming, and the Function of Consciousness
14. Is There Such a Thing as a Neurophilosophical Theory of Consciousness?
15. Implementing the Transitivity Principle
16. That’s Not an Argument
17. The Introspective HOT Zombie Problem

The Envelope Please

As you no doubt probably already know the results of the philpapers survey are out. These results were especially costly to me as I lost a bet on how many philosophers would self-identify as dualists. I bet Dave $100.00 that it would be less than 10% and it actually turned out to be something like 27%! One nice feature of the results is that you can sort them by rank and AOS. Turns out the only category where I got it right was among people who explicitly identify Philosophy of Cognitive Science as their AOS…coincidentally these are just the people that I usually associate with…I wonder if other people who took the meta-survey noticed that their meta-survey guesses reflected the numbers filtered for their AOS/friends in philosophy?

4th Annual Felician Ethics Conference

I have presented at two of these conferences and each time it has been a fun and rewarding experience. I strongly encourage people to submit something!

The fourth annual meeting of the Felician Ethics Conference will be held at the Rutherford campus of Felician College on Saturday, April 24, 2010, from 9 am – 6 pm. (Felician’s Rutherford campus is located at 223 Montross Ave., Rutherford NJ, 07070.)

The plenary speaker is Christopher Morris (University of Maryland, College Park), speaking on the topic, “Why Be Just?”

Submissions on any topic in moral philosophy (broadly construed) are welcome, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3,000 words). Please send submissions via email in format suitable for blind review by Feb. 1, 2010 to:felicianethicsconference@gmail.com.

Alternatively, send surface mail to:

Irfan Khawaja, Conference Coordinator

Dept. of Philosophy

Felician College

262 S. Main St.

Lodi, NJ 07644

Undergraduate submissions are invited for a proposed session consisting of undergraduate papers.

If you have any questions, or would be interested in serving as a commentator and/or chair for individual sessions, please contact Irfan Khawaja, (201) 559-6000 (x6288), orfelicianethicsconference@gmail.com.