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For theta’s sake, smash up your TV and go for a walk

For theta’s sake, smash up your TV and go for a walk

You can get experienced meditators to produce, on demand, feelings of timelessness and spacelessness. Tell them ‘Try to be outside time’, and ‘try not to be in the centre of space’, and they will.

These sort of sensations tend to happen together – so strikingly so that Walter Stace proposed, as one combined element of mystical experience, ‘non-spatial-and-non-temporal’.1

Why should that be? asked an Israeli research group in a recent and fascinating paper.  And was the generation of these sensations related to alterations in the sense of the body?Read More »For theta’s sake, smash up your TV and go for a walk

Contemporary space exploration, spectacles, and the creation of role models

Desire for space exploration and fantasies about what life will be like once the human race breaks free from the chains that bind us to this planet have been along for a long time. Some have envisioned a bright future without scarcity as we know it in which man is no longer driven by base desires for material well-being. Some envision the opposite, a known universe taken over by more or less vicious corporations. Yet others solemnly contemplate man and man’s condition aboard a spaceship that lost its course and is doomed to for eternity drift away into unknown space.

Read More »Contemporary space exploration, spectacles, and the creation of role models

Book review: ‘Moral Tribes’ by Joshua Greene

The dictator Joseph Stalin reputedly once said that “The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic.” Behind this chilling remark lies an important insight into human moral psychology. Our moral intuitions are myopic. For instance, we are repelled by the idea of causing others direct physical harm, while it is psychologically much easier to inflict the same, or greater, amounts of harm in non-direct ways. (Think of controlling a drone, as opposed to stabbing someone at close range.)Read More »Book review: ‘Moral Tribes’ by Joshua Greene

Luck and Success

I have long been uncomfortably aware that luck has played a major factor in my success (such as it is). I spent more than three years after my PhD alternating between unemployment and low paying part-time jobs, before I got two lucky breaks. First one philosophy department urgently needed a full-time lecturer for a few months due to an unexpected absence, than a second; in both cases, I just happened to be around at the right time. The second job got renewed a few times, and then I was around when the department secured a very large grant which kept me employed for the next five years. I was able to take advantage of my lucky breaks by publishing a lot, but I was lucky to be given the time and conditions to do research. I know that lots of other people who left philosophy due to the scarcity of jobs would have done as well, or better, if they had had the breaks I had.Read More »Luck and Success

The Terror of Ignorance

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 along with its 239 passengers and crew has dominated recent news coverage.  Hope for their survival has dimmed, and my thoughts and prayers are with the relatives of those on board.  This incident is getting so much attention, though, not only because it involves a large commercial airplane and potential large loss of life, but additionally because of the mystery of what happened.  There is apparently no trace of the plane; an oil slick and debris in the sea were apparently not related, and there was no mayday or other indication from the pilots of something going wrong (at least, not that’s been reported).  Some sort of accident is possible, but the revelation that two passengers were traveling with stolen passports makes it quite plausible that this was a terrorist attack.  Given that likelihood, I would like to suggest that this would be a uniquely devious and disturbing form of terrorism due to our current ignorance concerning what happened, by whom and why. Read More »The Terror of Ignorance

Prisoner disenfranchisement: the supposed justifications

Speaking in December last year, David Cameron reinforced the current government position that prisoners serving a custodial sentence in the UK should not be given the right to vote, stating that “if parliament decides that prisoners should not get the vote then I think they damn well shouldn’t.” The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that the UK’s blanket ban on prisoner voting is unlawful, contravening the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Cameron’s comments followed a warning from Thorbjørn Jagland, secretary-general of the Council of Europe, that if the UK, a founding signatory of the ECHR refused to enforce the judgment, it would weaken and deprive it of any meaning.Read More »Prisoner disenfranchisement: the supposed justifications

Page 3 untainted?

A somewhat surprising announcement by The Sun that from now on every Tuesday Page 3 models will be part of a campaign to raise awareness on breast cancer (“check ’em Tuesday” in the poetic words of The Sun) caught some commentators off guard: How should one feel about mixing the sexist page with health promotion?

Read More »Page 3 untainted?

The cold equations of ethics

Cory Doctorow has written a thoughtful critique of two science fiction stories and how they might promote short-sightedness and morally bad behaviour. If one thinks science fiction is good for teaching us to think about the future (or literature in general about the world), is there a moral responsibility of authors to avoid moral hazard? And if that is true, what about ethicists coming up with thought experiments?Read More »The cold equations of ethics

A minimal proceduralist argument against Crimean independence

As the Ukrainian crisis continues to unfold, attention has shifted from the deposed president Viktor Yanukovych to the Crimea peninsula.  Crimea has an ethnic Russian majority and as such are much less sympathetic to the pro-Western uprising that toppled Yanukovych (see the very useful maps posted here).  Now the Russian military has occupied the region, and there is some movement towards either independence or annexation into Russia.  Western powers are unsurprisingly outraged at this military intervention, with UK Prime Minister David Cameron saying there is “no excuse” for Russian occupation.  I would like to suggest that the case against Russia’s use of force is not as clear cut as it first appears, as it could potentially be justified on the grounds of promoting Crimea’s right to self-determination.  Still, careful attention to how recent events unfolded do indicate that both the occupation and recent (quite quick) moves for separation from Ukraine are illegitimate on relatively minimal procedural grounds. Read More »A minimal proceduralist argument against Crimean independence