Cluckers

This video is a little old, but it's still worth it. Climbers who fuck, not fuckers who climb. It's not on youtube, something about not being able to show fake sex or something, I don't know.

I couldn't find a good photo, so I googled "climbing hot." This is what I got, you can see the full image if you click on it. Rawr!

The Savant

I focus much of my time on philosophy of mind with an emphasis on consciousness, the experiences you have from the senses (vision, audition, tactile, etc.) and from thought. There is one large obstacle in the study of consciousness - there is no third person way to experience consciousness, you only have access to your own. Because of this, we are forced to rely on what people say they are experiencing, and people are notoriously prone to error in their introspective reports. It would be like studying how far people can jump by only looking at how far people say they jump when you know they are really bad at judging distance.

With that in mind, how do people experience numbers? I'm not sure what the answer is, but it certainly is not the norm to experience them as shapes. Take a look at this fascinating documentary on a savant who is able to perform complex mathematical calculations in seconds. According to him, he experiences numbers as unique shapes in his consciousness, and his method of multiplication is to place two of these shapes next to each other and look at the space in between. This space is a new shape which he then translates into an answer.

The end of part 5 and all of part 6 contain the most in-depth discussion of his experience of numbers. He is interviewed by a neural scientist at UC San Diego to see if he truly performs calculations in this way, or if he uses memorization (his memory is amazing, he recites pi to 22,500 decimal places early in the documentary). Although it is all only quasi-scientific, the idea that he is able to experience numbers as geometric shapes (or landscapes as he calls it at times) is cool.

If the way he experiences numbers enables him to perform calculations faster and more accurately, perhaps the way one experiences reading (as words, as a narration by an inner voice, or directly onto the ideas) can influence reading speed and comprehension. If this is the case, and the way one experiences reading is trainable, the effect on pedagogy would be huge. I didn't learn to read until I was in third grade because of poor teaching methodology (you can't learn to read like you learn to speak, through osmosis!), so I can attest to the deficiencies in our understanding here. I was in the dumb reading class. Boo hoo.

However, going back to the jumping analogy, how tough to study! Especially when everyone jumps different distances. So irritating when people experience the same thing in different ways! Where are the laws of consciousness? I'm a fan of laws. Sure am.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]
[Part 6]

TA Quandry

One of my students e-mailed me about a poor grade he received on the Business Ethics final last quarter. I graded his paper in a shitty hotel in Tijuana after missing my flight to Monterrey and being forced to buy a new ticked, so I may have been a little harsh. After looking over it again, I decided that he should have received a higher grade on the exam.

I got a grade change form, but it says that “no change of grade may be made on the basis of reassessment of the quality of the student’s work.” The question: is changing his grade a reassessment or not? It seems to me that it can go either way. On one hand, I read the paper once (in a shitty hotel) and gave it a grade, and then read it later (in Potrero Chico) and gave a slightly higher grade. This sure looks like a reassessment.

Yet I probably should have given him the second grade the first time through, which makes it look more like a clerical error than anything else. At the very least, this second way of looking at it doesn’t imply that a drastic reassessment occurred, merely that a mistake was made the first time around and now it must be fixed.

But what a shitty rule this “no reassessment” policy is. What if a multiple choice test is graded using the wrong answer key? If you put it back through the machine, isn’t this a reassessment of the quality of the student’s work? And of course changing a grade for this reason is ok. This rule is shit, and I’m sure it only exists to cut down on paperwork in the registrar’s office. Well maybe if they weren’t so damn lazy over there, we teachers could do our job with skillz.

Hawaii

I spent last weekend in Hawaii, surfing, beaching, snorkeling, running, jumping, all the things you do in Hawaii. I only had three days on the island, but hey, when that's all you've got. I even ate some fish because I'm the world's worst vegetarian. I can justify it because fish don't have souls, and I should know, I'm a philosopher.

Amna and I got this awesome couples photo. I had an asian guy take it for us, I figured they must be the best tourist photographers out there, if not for natural ability then out of sheer practice and repetition. I must be in fifty chinese family/couples photos from my trip last summer. Dudes would ask me to be in a photo with their girlfriends, umm...ok. Creepy, but ok.

I leave you with Amna Superstar. Yay!

Moral Intuitions

Here is what I do all day, read smut like this:

"Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that, was it OK for them to make love?"

So what are the thoughts on this? If there is something wrong with this forbidden love, what is it? Can you give reasons? Whatever the reasons are, they shouldn't appeal to the negative consequences of inbreeding - there were two forms of birth control used. And they shouldn't appeal to the repercussions on their relationship, it got better afterwards. So why is this wrong?

I just read an interesting paper on this. Haidt argues that we don't reason our way to moral judgments, but instead are driven by our gut feelings towards the situation. Reason merely plays an after the fact role in justifying our intuitive feelings. This is partly why this example is so strange (the other one is that it involves incest, eeewwwwww). Our gut reactions are separated from reason because nothing bad happens - reason can't come to the aid of our moral intuitions.

Strange huh, the idea that we don't reason through these things but merely feel them. Also, sex with a sibling is creepy. But is it creepier than masturbating with a chicken before cooking and eating it? But that is another paper for another time.