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Living in Plato’s Cave

Living in Plato’s Cave

Roger Crisp writes …

Plato’s allegory of the Cave (Republic 514a-517a) is perhaps the most famous image in the history of philosophy. Socrates describes a group of people living underground, bound so that they can see only in front of them. Behind them burns a fire, and in front of the fire there is a path with a barrier. Other people carry objects that project above the barrier, casting shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. Naturally, the prisoners believe the truth to be nothing other than the shadows. ‘Strange prisoners’, says Socrates’s companion, Glaucon. ‘They’re like us’, Socrates answers.

This passage resonated with me during the recent mid-term elections here in the US. Liberal commentators were already expecting the worst after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in January, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that the government cannot limit corporate funding of independent political broadcasts. That ruling was described by President Obama as ‘a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans’. During the most recent elections, for example, Goldman Sachs (which you may remember received $10 billion in George Bush’s ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’) gave the Republican party $1.2 million.

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Smoking and yellow teeth

With at least one airline announcing this week that it was stepping up screening on Yemeni passengers, I want to return to a topic I’ve touched on before: profiling.

What interests me is ‘rational profiling’. If a security guard believes, for no good reason, that members of racial/ethnic/national group R are more likely than average to pose a danger to the public, and this assumption is false, then we have a straightforward example of prejudice. But suppose there is indeed a greater risk from members of R? It then seems rational to focus more attention on R-members.

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Is your mobile phone part of your body?

by Rebecca Roache

The Frontline reports that sensors carried on the body of mobile phone users could soon be used to boost the UK’s mobile phone network coverage.  If only half of the 91% of the UK population who owns a mobile phone carried such sensors, then nearly half of the UK population would become part of a ‘body-to-body’ mobile phone network.

When technology becomes as wearable and ubiquitous as this, it raises some interesting questions about what sort of things people are, and about the division between the body and the surrounding environment.  What, after all, is a body?  At first glance, a person’s body is that mass of flesh, blood, and bone that we point to when we point to him or her: all very simple and straightforward.  Things get more complicated when we consider someone who has received an organ transplant.  Does a transplanted organ become part of the body of the person who receives it?  I would say so.  Assuming that the transplant is successful, it functions just like the organ it replaces; and an injury to the transplanted organ would be considered an injury to the recipient.  What about artificial devices that replace or supplement organs, like cochlear implants: do these count as body parts too?  I would imagine that most of us would be less willing to view such things as body parts.  However, if transplanted organs are to count as parts of the recipients’ bodies, refusal to accept cochlear implants as body parts seems mere prejudice.  Both enable the recipient’s body to perform a familiar and normal bodily function; and whilst a transplanted organ is – unlike a cochlear implant – undeniably a body part, it is pre-transplant no more a part of the recipient’s body than a cochlear implant.  So, perhaps we should consider cochlear implants to be body parts too.  If we accept something like a cochlear implant as a body part, though, what else might we feel bound to include?  What about less permanent replacement body parts, like false teeth and prosthetic limbs?  Tools that are not intended to replace body parts, but which nevertheless enable certain people to perform something like a familiar and normal bodily function, like wheelchairs?  Tools that enable people to perform functions that are not familiar and normal bodily functions, like pencils and screwdrivers?  Where do we draw the line between the body and the surrounding environment?

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Would you shock your brain to cope with culture shock?

In a paper published this last Friday, university of Oxford researchers showed that electrical stimulation may help people learn numbers faster (see Julian Savulescu’s post for Why Bioenhancement of Mathematical Ability Is Ethically Important). In the experiment, 20 min of stimulation to the right parietal lobe, a brain region shown previously to be important in numerical ability, caused subjects to faster learn the relative magnitudes ( i.e. which is bigger) of a set of nonsense symbols. Proper magnitude of each symbol was assigned beforehand by the experimenters.

When Cardiff University’s Christopher Chambers was reached for comment in the BBC article covering this paper, “he said that the study did not prove that the learning of maths skills was improved, just that the volunteers were better at linking arbitrary numbers and symbols and warned that the researchers needed to make sure other parts of the brain were unaffected.” Dr Chambers has an important cautionary point, but could learning the magnitudes of arbitrary symbols alone be beneficial? And how much would it matter if other brain areas were affected?

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Death Aquatic

Can science tell us how chefs should treat lobsters? The Independent this week implies it can. It seems that this is important to diners who want reassurance that their dinner has not been killed in a “barbaric” manner.

Science may of course discover the quickest or easiest method of killing. Norwegian researchers in particular have dedicated significant time to this research. Of methods including ice, nitrogen gas, freezing, gradual or rapid heating, piercing of ganglia, salt baths and carbon dioxide gas, apparently electricity is best. A commercial product, “Crustastun” offers the ability to replicate this in the kitchen. However, the retail cost of £2,500, puts this out of the reach of all but the richest, most gadget obsessed or humanitarian seafood lovers. But there is a more basic question: do lobsters really feel pain?

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Retaining privacy: the EU commission and the right to be forgotten

Do we have a right to be forgotten? That was the question posed to me by BBC Newsnight in the light of the EU Commission's latest draft framework for data protection policies. EU Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding stated that “The protection of personal data is a fundamental right”, and set out to fix current privacy protection measures in the light of changing technology and globalization. Among other things users should be able to give informed consent to the use of their personal data, and have a "right to be forgotten" when their data is no longer needed or when they want their data deleted.

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Why Bioenhancement of Mathematical Ability Is Ethically Important

by Julian Savulescu

In a paper just released today, Cohen Kadosh and colleagues (Cohen Kadosh et al., Modulating Neuronal Activity Produces Specific and Long-Lasting Changes in Numerical Competence, Current Biology (2010), doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.10.007) described how they increased the numerical ability of normal people by applying an electrical current to a part of the skull. So what? Most of us don’t do that much maths after leaving school and manage just fine.

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What is a pet worth?

by Russell Powell

Imagine that you leave your sprightly canine companion to the vet for a routine teeth cleaning, only to learn that due to spectacular negligence on the part of the veterinary staff, he was confused for another terminally ill dog and was accidentally ‘euthanized.’ Imagine another even more horrific scenario, in which a malevolent neighbor steals your feline friend and feeds her to his wood chipper, Fargo-style. For many owners who have extremely close relationships with their companion animals, these would be traumatic events of a life-altering nature. Unfortunately, in both scenarios there is little you could do about it, institutionally speaking.

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Why god isn’t really a teapot.

by Lisa Furberg

Russell’s teapot is an analogy intended to refute the idea that the burden of proof lies upon the sceptic to disprove the existence of god. The argument roughly goes something like this: If I were to claim that there is a teapot revolving about the sun and then further suggest that because my claim cannot be disproved there is no reason to doubt it, then I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.
In line with Russell’s analogy, some atheists have “invented” more things in which belief seems just as ridiculous as that in a an orbiting teapot: a flying spaghetti monster, an invisible pink unicorn -to mention a few. This kind of criticism, often coming from people who are self purportedly “scientifically minded” seem to use variants of the original analogy into an argument that seem to have little resemblance to Russell’s original one. This new argument has considerably more “bite” to it, suggesting that belief in god is something of an absolute “no-no”: If you are a rational person who believes in the methods of science, the critics seem to say, you simply ought not believe in the existence of god (or gods) any more than you should believe in an orbiting teapot. So, does a belief in god transgress any of the principles of (good) science?

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