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February 20th What is it like to be a cat ? Thomas Nagel asked what it was like to be a bat to show that consciousness and subjective experience cannot be satisfactorily explained using the current concepts of physics. Full text www.evans experientialism.freewebspace.com/nagel.htm.
Can we know other minds? Wittgenstein said we could not understand what it was like to be a cat, a bat or a lion because we could not inhabit their world, just as we cannot understand another person’s pain. If a lion could speak our language we could not understand him.
March 20th 2011 Where am I? What sense does it make to order the Cheshire cat to be beheaded if he is just a head? Daniel Dennett, secular scientist, begins his brain in a vat story by asking whether it made more sense to ask “Here am I in a folding chair, staring through a piece of plate glass at my own brain”, or “Here am I, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes”. Full story can be downloaded at www.smokewriting.co.uk/ philosophycafe/Where%20Am%20I.pdf
Can we know our own minds? Read Dennett’s Consciousness Reexamined. Or watch Dennett explain it on a 23 min video
April 17th Muchnesses
“Muchness” was in use by the 14th century, Muchness means physical magnitude or largeness and is derived from the earlier word mickleness. In literal terms, it just means ‘of a similar quality of being much’. Lewis Carroll has the Dormouse ask Alice”That begins with an M, such as… muchness – you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’ – did you ever see… a drawing of a muchness?”
Difference in degree (much of a muchness) or difference in kind? The origins of Alice’s rabbit hole entry into Wonderland in the Oxfordshire coal mines. Fiction and fact. Reality TV and the real world. Seeing X as Y. Perception and metaphor.
May 15th What is a cause?
Causality. Can intentions have an effect? Masaru Emoto claims that if human speech or thoughts are directed at water droplets before they are frozen, images of the resulting water crystals will be “beautiful” or “ugly” depending upon whether the words or thoughts were positive or negative. Emoto claims this can be achieved through prayer, music or by attaching written words to a container of water. See http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/e_ome_home.html and http:/ /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto
What makes permaculture work? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYgQAfxXHqk
June 19th What does it mean to change one’s mind?
Dan Ellesberg on Vietnam is an example of a person who dramatically changed his mind about the value of America’s involvement in Vietnam. How can one change one’s mind? Gaston Bachelard was critical of the concept of science as a continual progress Scientific developments such as Einstein’s theory of relativity demonstrated the discontinuous nature of the history of sciences. Through his concept of “epistemological break”, Bachelard underlined the discontinuity at work in the historyof sciences, picked up by Thomas Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1971. Louis Althusser showed that new theories integrated old theories in new paradigms, changing the sense of concepts (for instance, the concept of mass used by Newton and Einstein –The physicist who lives in a post-Newtonian paradigm lives in a different world.
Non-Euclidean geometry does not contradict Euclidean geometry but integrates it intoa larger framework. Foucault talks of discontinuity of epistemes in Birth of a Clinic,Discipline and Punish, but doesn’t believe that we progress towards integration.Neither does Daniel Dennett, who says there is no editor, but a set of sub editors, all in contradictory epistemes. Does permaculture mark progress over the traditional industrial model or are they just competing paradigms?