gadget quiz 2

1.Copies of "free culture" (downloadable music, online videos) are what kind of expression?

2. (T/F) Digital Maoism rejects all hierarchy.

3. ____________ are the new peasants.

4. What was Kevin Kelly's suggestion to artists, musicians, writers etc. who wonder how they'll make a living in a thoroughly "open" creative culture?

5. What did Ted Nelson mean by "hypermedia"?

6. What was Lanier's epiphany about how the human world works?

7. What's the psychology of "songles"?

8. How complex, open, and wild should an economy be?

misquoting Jesus

We're excited in our department about the approaching visit in February, for our lyceum lecture series, of renowned UNC-Chapel Hill Bible scholar Bart Ehrman.


Not quite so exciting was yesterday's staff meeting, devoted to choosing between three possible lecture topics he's dangled before us. We narrowed it to "Who Wrote the Bible?" and "Misquoting Jesus."


A colleague inquired, of the latter: misquoted interestingly?


Yes, definitely.

Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible. 

And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the life of Christ. 

There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of God? Both? Neither? WashPo

Find out on Feb. 18. [Fresh Air interview]

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bart Ehrman
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

But seriously,

gadget quiz 1

1. Jaron Lanier says his book is for ______, and that you have to be somebody before you can _____.

2. Being a person is not a formula, it's a ___...

3. _______ "turns thoughts into facts."

4. The central faith of early web design in empowered individuals has been replaced by what idea?

5. Who or what are "cybernetic totalists"?

6. What's dangerous about loving software?

7. Like Peter Singer, Lanier speaks of a circle of _______.

8. What "voices" do people in Silicon Valley now (errantly) think they're hearing?

9. What side is Lanier on, in the Updike-Kelly debate?

10. What does Lanier think is the relation between "user interface designs" and an "online culture of sadism"?

11. (T/F) Lanier thinks we understand the brain well enough to construct useful computer models of education and friendship.

12. Lanier says Facebook and other social networking sites reward what?

virtual reality

On our first day with Jaron Lanier in FoL, I recall that I've been chewing this bone for quite some time now. What is "real"? Does your mind make it so? Does it matter which pill, blue or red, you swallow?

really hard

Two weeks from today the Tennessee Philosophical Association gathers once again at Vanderbilt. I'm expected to have something to say about John Rawls. As a past president of this organization I have to say: it is a great pleasure not to be in charge of organizing it this year, though the '07 symposium was great fun. (Just wish the Vandy video-tapers hadn't lost our taped tribute to John Lachs!)


I'm really looking forward to the keynote the night before from Duke's Owen Flanagan. He wrote The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. If I get to do that "Humanism and Meaning"* course someday I may use it. 


Flanagan says of Rawls (and Aristotle, and eudaimonia or human flourishing): 

"The project of human ecology conceived as eudaimonics then becomes seeking the world most beneficial to all human beings, including future ones."

Sounds like a good plan to me.






==

*This course would resemble the "Atheism & Spirituality" course from last Spring, but this time with even greater attention to the reasons for affirming humanism (naturalism, atheism) rather than for rejecting theism. We'd explore and critique the claim that a humanist worldview is as meaningful to its adherents as theism is to theists, with John Dewey's A Common Faith, Andre Comte-Sponville's Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship" and "Why I'm Not a Christian," and more recent voices as well. What makes life worth living, for those who do not seek for meaning beyond it? 

Sound like a good course to you? Vote for it in the Fall '11 survey.

Frankfurtian reality

Jamie's report yesterday was on bullshit.

More precisely, on "On Bullshit," Harry Frankfurt's infamous essay-cum-mini-book bestseller. And, on Bullshit and Philosophy. Plenty to draw on there.

What did Wittgenstein say? Show, don't tell?

But it was not a bullshit report. Not at all. Jamie's regard for the truth was one of its most salient features.



The example I raised in class-- the "birthers" etc.-- poses the question: can you be a liar and a bullshitter both, simultaneously? Frankfurt suggests that the statements of bullshitters are typically

unconnected to a concern with the truth.. not germane to the enterprise of describing reality. [They] do not even think they know, except in the vaguest way... concoct it out of whole cloth...repeating it quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really are.

But if "it" is a matter of the documented public record, and "they" choose to ignore it, they're exactly what Al Franken called Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, et al. "Lying liars." And I say they're bullshitters too.

What if they believe their own bullshit lies? They're delusional as well. Really scary. Happy Halloween.

Future Minds

Matthew's terrific TED-worthy report yesterday on Slavoj Zizek* and altruism, featuring the marvelous RSA hyper-animation format, has inspired me to share another (albeit less animated) Royal Society talk:


Richard Watson examines how screen culture is changing the way we think, and calls for analog-digital balance. "The medium still influences the message." Take a walk, switch off after 6:30, reclaim the quality time you've been missing. Only disconnect, now and again.



*

higher education

"We have a system of education modeled on the interests of industrialisation."


In Tennessee it's with a "z" but the idea's the same as Sir Ken's, as we faculty Senators were reminded yesterday when the Chancellor-Emeritus of our governing board spoke to us* of the importance of appeasing state legislators' demands that we meet arbitrary and ill-formed "outcomes-based" targets to justify our very existence. 


We dare not speak to our benefactors, if you want to call them that, of the value of a liberal education. They don't like "L" words. Like learnin'. (Or did I misspell that?- A colleague summarizes the Chancellor's message: "TBR -- WE LURN YOU REAL GOOD")




*Chancellor-emeritus Manning delivered a sobering talk to the Senate yesterday afternoon, emphasizing that getting funding for higher ed in Tennessee will always be like squeezing blood from turnips. (And that UT, where "scholar-athletes" rule, will always have first dibs on whatever's on the table.)  


He said we should acknowledge the strong anti-intellectual sentiment now re-ascendant across the land, especially here in the Bible belt-buckle. (The irony of a colleague's sharp, pointed question about anti-intellectualism on the TBR board itself was evidently lost.) Our best long-term strategy for survival at MTSU? Shrink [we currently teach more students than UT-Knoxville] and try not to piss off the "deeply religious" zealots who control our purse-strings. 


Serve our prime constituency, the C & D students who become community leaders and legislators. Don't waste too much time trying to figure out the political "game" in the state capitol. We may not like the budget allocation formula but we should understand that bizness leaders and politicians (a convergent set) love "outcome-oriented" funding. And the new gov's priority will not be higher ed in any  event.

Oh, and when can we hope to get that new science building we've needed for twenty years? Hard to say, ask him again in 2015. 

There was also, another colleague reminds, an obnoxious reference to an 

"Oriental girl on a mule" outperforming the kids with the big backpacks full of books to show how Tennessee education must compete in a global market (or this is what I tried to draw from it).  I have to say this off-hand comment was particularly galling at a school that just landed a Confucius Institute on its campus.

And, 

And please do not overlook the response to his friend's query on the removal of non-christian professors.  I assume he was from the Christine Todd Whitman School of Constitutional Interpretation. 

Yes, speaking just for me and some other academics from Tennessee: a new higher ed paradigm would be welcome here. 

Descartes Leibniz Spinoza

1. Rene Descartes _______ (wanted, rejected) certainty in life, seeking to use reason to provide reliable  ________  for genuine knowledge. His famous __________ deployed the method of ______.

2. Descartes' first rule: accept only ___________ ideas.

3. Descartes supposes nothing is as it appears because ___... He could be ________, hallucinating, or deceived by a demon.

4. "Cogito ergo sum" = ___..., the "first principle" of Descartes' philosophy.

5. The mind is _______ (separate from, identical with, dependent on) the body,l according to Descartes. This made him a _______ (pantheist, solipsist, dualist) and raised the question of how mind and body could work together if they are metaphysically distinct substances.

6.Using a version of Anselm's ontological argument to guarantee the reliability of clear and distinct ideas, Descartes' argument seemed ________ to some critics. (derivative, clear and distinct, circular)

7. If mind and body represent parallel, non-interacting worlds, their apparent interaction must have been pre- _________ by God (said Descartes' follower Geulincx).

8. Spinoza, a _________ , (solipsist, mystic, pantheist) said there is only one metaphysical substance. It can be called ___ or _______.

9. (T/F) Because he thought everything is determined, Spinoza denied that humans can be free.

10. Leibniz  was parodied by ________ in the play "Candide" for implying that everything is perfect. He said there are _____ (no, two, infinitely many) substances, which he called _____ that have no ________.

[From PW]
11. Like Erasmus before him, Descartes' predecessor _________ was more interested in "folly" than in exact knowledge. Unlike Descartes, he _______ (doubted, insisted on) the possibility of indubitable certainty. He was an heir to the ________ (Stoics, Skeptics, Scholastics). By turning away from absolute claims to objective knowledge, he hoped to encourage the virtue of _________.

higher

In honor of Kevin's mind-expanding report this afternoon on consciousness, shamanism, psychedelia, Terrence McKenna, ancient wisdom, "bad trips," spiritual transcendence, and better living through chemistry... a page from Timothy Leary's and Ram Dass's Psychedelic Experience.




"Turn on, tune in, drop out," right? But Kevin's claim today was that this is all in service of transcendence with a social conscience, intending ultimately to protect people of the future and help save the world. I still wonder if such good intentions can so readily be translated into constructive, sustained, impactful acts, when you're in the middle of a 20-hour mental sabbatical from Planet Earth. I do hope so. 


Tim's really out there now, sorta, according to this report:

Seven grams of Leary's ashes were arranged by his friend to be buried in space aboard a rocket carrying the remains of 24 other people including Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek) and others. A Pegasus rocket containing their remains was launched on April 21, 1997, and remained in orbit for six years until it burnt up in the atmosphere.

Far out.