The Apprentice 3

MelbournePhilosopher
I decided to start naming my Apprentice posts in synch with the episode number.

Last night, I think Trump may have made a mistake. Unfortunately, I missed episode one, so lack some crucial knowledge about events referred to. (Moral of this story - never miss an episode of The Apprentice). There was one woman on the all-female team, Stacy J, who has been socially outcast by the group, who was voted off. The cattiness of the all-female team is quite surprising, especially given the very strong performance of the female team last season. The past few episodes have been cautionary tales on group dynamics if nothing else.

Stacy J was far from the worst performer of the night, which The Donald didn't hesitate to point out. However, she was dragged into the boardroom for judgement by the project leader as a scapegoat, hoping to shift blame. So what went wrong? Was Trump bamboozled by the collective dislike of Ms J? What led to her rejection by the larger group? Is the groups repeated poor showing the result of incompetence, or of hopeless team management? What lessons in life can we learn about the dynamics of groups of people, our animal instincts, leadership and achieving social acceptance? Questions such as these are brought to the fore in the high-pressure environment of this most fascinating of reality TV programs.

Big D called the entire team in to act as jury, and they voted for execution. "She's crazy" was the allegation - people were claiming to be frightened and nervous of Stacy on the basis of some behaviour exhibited in that crucial first episode, and they pulled it off.

To what extent does the good of the team come above that of an individual? Assuming Stacy was no less unbalanced than any other member of the team, does she have a right to expect better? Did the D trip up, failing to meet his social obligations as Dictator? Certainly, something had to change, and next week we will be able to taste the results of removing this catalyst from the team. To me, I think it was poor judgement by The Donald, as I don't believe Stacy J was the true source of team discontent. Mediocre leadership, possibly brought about through too many people refusing to play Indian in a team full of chiefs, is where I lay the blame. The boys have consistently rallied behind their leader, and formed a genuine camaraderie which is the Philosopher's Stone of company performance. Synergy and group effort will bring any group success, while an inability to work as a team brings failure more surely than the cost of any individual failing to perform.

Once again it is shown that strategy and dynamics are the true drivers of group success, not finger-pointing borne out of feelings of fear. However, might the firing of the possibly innocent Stacy J nonetheless be the starting point for a new synergy on the female team? May it in fact be the best option to remove the tallest poppy, such that the others may grow?

Information For Free

MelbournePhilosopher

One of my personal goals is to make information more Freely available. There is a common distinction in software development circles - Free as in liberty or free as in beer. I think that both are important, but the first more so. Specifically, I think the current state of academic publication is a joke, and it suffers from neither kind of freedom.

Copyright is a word covering a set of laws governing how you may make use of art - be it writing or painting, digital photography or whatever. It's what stops me ripping off famous authors and selling their works as my own, setting up a line of toys based on the latest Disney cartoons, and so on. Sounds like a good thing, right?

The Internet is home to a nearly limitless supply of Copyright rants, especially given the US laws which allow copyright laws to maintain the ownership of a work long after the author's death - up to 75 years in most cases I believe. Australia is set at 50 years, but thanks to the Free Trade Agreement we may shortly find ourselves having imported some things bitter along with the sweet. At its inception, I believe the Copyright period was a mere 20 years.

This article is not setting out to provide a dissertation of existing Copyright laws, but rather to highlight why it necessarily fails institutions whose goal is the spread of knowledge. Look at the Bible - it's long out of copyright, and it's the best selling book of all time. Co-incidence? (well, I may be drawing a long bow here). My point is more that the goal of academia (other than to provide people with job tickets) is to foster human knowledge. It has become rather a muddy pool of late, including commercial interests, students wishing to sell their ideas, and otherwise re-gearing the principle of study to a commercial market.

Is this a good thing? It is consistently assumed by people that there is a degree of inevitability towards the marginalisation of science, and the increasing burden of living in a commercial reality. But why? Surely society becomes more prosperous over time, not less so. Why should anyone ever face heavier economic burdens that those in the past?

In fact, I believe that guarding knowledge is directly causing the marginalisation of philosophical study. Instead of promoting the free access to all of an essentially altruistic knowledgebase, academic essays wallow in obscurity. This is bad. I leave you with the (very much still in copyright) quote from Douglas Adams' book "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy"

ARTHUR: Yes, well, as soon as I heard, I went straight round to see them. You hadn’t gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody.

PROSSER: The plans were on display—

ARTHUR: On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them!

PROSSER: That’s the display department!

ARTHUR: With a flashlight.

PROSSER: The lights had probably gone out.

ARTHUR: So had the stairs.

PROSSER: But you found the notice, didn’t you?

ARTHUR: Yes, I did. It was "on display" in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, "Beware of the Leopard."

PROSSER: Mr. Dent, have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?

I put it to you that PROSSER might equally well stand in for "professor". Slowly, slowly, the list of available resources on MP is expanding, but it's a process rather akin to trying to find a small piece of straw in a huge stack of needles.

For space reasons, I will continue this discussion tomorrow.
Cheers,
-MP

Nothing to Contribute

MelbournePhilosopher

As an act of karmic spite against the world around me which today interrupted my productive work needlessly several times, knocking me out of my train of thought, I today have nothing to contribute.

-MP

Works In Progress

MelbournePhilosopher

MelbournePhilosophy.com has been doing good things. A recent site redesign now means that you don't have to recoil in horror at the sheer purpleness of it all, and the WIKI area has been re-jigged to provide better, clearer navigation.

MP has also climbed up to page 5 in Google's rankings for "melbourne philosophy", which isn't bad. I'd like to see it in the first three - that's usually how deep I go when researching something, unless I'm very determined on a particular issue. Reverse the search-words however, and I can't even find it. Oh well.

I am currently working on an essay for my current undergraduate subject, "Minds and Machines". I am arguing that "mind" is not definable in the Aristotelian sense. That is to say, there is no list of conditions which uniquely and precisely identify what a mind is. Rather, it must be understood in a distributed sense, depending on an aggregation of conditions, but not solely on any particular one of them. Answering the question "Could a machine have a mind" is not a simple question, because mindness is unclear. While in a human (for example) the inability to feel pain does not disqualify you from having a mind, it seems that our inability to explain how a machine might feel pain poses a major intuitive problem. I am arguing that mind does not have a consistent set of tests which determine whether or not it is a mind, but each case must be examined.

If that is the case, one might ask what use it is to talk about having a mind as being important. Maybe our decisions (such as can a machine be conscious) hinges not on "whether it has a mind" but rather "can it experience things". It would seem that a machine could have the functional appearance of a mind - for some questions this is enough, and for others it seems to have no answer.

Adopting Social Responsibility

MelbournePhilosopher

For the most part, we all fulfill our responsibilities to our country, and that's as far as it goes. Australia is not an anarchy - proof by example that we are sufficiently law-abiding. But what about people who believe that's not enough?

People usually form social groups, and while these are fuzzy entities, they more or less form an extended family, to which we pay our dues, and from which we receive support. However strongly the instinct is to bond, membership is still entirely optional. While few people really live in a vacuum, plenty of people subvert social grouping into a form of elitism - that is to say they ascribe moral qualities to their social group on false bases.

To some extent, elitism is nothing but self-defeating. In the kind of Desmond Morris (author of "The Naked Ape") way, these people are selling themselves short if they believe that a group consisting only of strong members is stronger than a more mixed group. In fact, humanity has flourished precisely because they have been able to extract the fullest value from every member, rather than concentrating on the abilities of the strongest only. In a Darwinian sense, evolution is favouring social grouping over individual strength.

However, it is possible (indeed regular) to have very influential groups coming into existence, and for a short time dominating. (Nazism is an interesting example - one could indeed argue that they were a strong elitist group, but they too failed in their ambition). Of course, the ambition of most social groups is rather less than world domination. However, it can lead those who are not a part of this social group to feel unwanted, outcast and unloved.

As such, the best (and strongest) social group is one whose entrance criteria do not depend on poor assumptions - for example that what you wear is more important than what you think.

When on the inside of such a group, the intelligent realise that they are achieving less than they might - both as a group and as individuals. Desire is a poor indicator of good action, although it is very powerful. Taking a more studied look at what is good gives us far better insights into what we must do in order to achieve happiness.

On the outside, one might be jealous of the skills and abilities of those inside such a group. It is understandable to feel admiration for those with good abilities that you might feel are superior to your own. They might even actually be superior to your own. Dealing with this can be difficult. On the whole, you just need to learn to live with it, and fix your own circumstances rather than trying to change the group. There is nothing that can be done to prevent the occasional formation of such groups, but in the long run they will bubble and disappear as their false beliefs come back to undermine them. (Of course the lifespan of some such groups can be greater than a human lifetime, and in fact may arguably persist indefinitely, but there is at least a counter-acting evolutionary force).

Rather than try to answer the question "what should we do", perhaps understanding this process can give people looking in from the outside a more subtle understanding of their own worth, and what is really worth fighting for.

-MP

Philosophy at NGV

MelbournePhilosopher

Yesterday I attended a philosophy lecture at NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) presented by Professor John Armstrong, a speaker I found charismatic, and with undeniably good diction.

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whatson/whatson_eventlist.jsp?locationID=4&eventID=246

The first lecture covered Socrates, Plato and Neo-Platonism, which a traditional starting point for getting into philosophy. Anyone can understand the issues raised by Socrates, and the questions don't just go away as you learn more either, so they are also relevant no matter how much study you have done. One develops increasingly subtle understandings of the questions, applies them in new contexts, etc.

By far the best part was having coffee afterwards, however. I've always felt that philosophy is best done in discussion. A group of about 5 of us - 3 from MelbournePhilosophy and a couple of blow-ins from the lecture - sat down and had a good old yack about the philosophy of mind, broadly prompted by Platonic Forms, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and the Halting Problem. We nearly touched on brains in vats, but the conversation slewed in a different direction.

There are another 7 lectures in this series, if you're looking for a bit of afternoon brain food, they're worth attending. There is a cost, but it includes a catered tea-break as well as the 2-hour lecture.

An open question : Do people think there is a difference between the mind and the soul?

Cheers,
-MP

The Apprentice

MelbournePhilosopher

Everyone goes through television obsessions - mine is The Apprentice, the Donald Trump reality business show. Competing teams are set business tasks, and members of the team dramatically fired in boardroom mock-ups at the end of each show. It is a truly fascinating insight into the high-flying world of business, human nature under competition, and the hard-world reasoning of "The Donald" in his choice every week.

Last night's episode did not fail to please! The teams are initially set up as boys vs girls, with the current teams showing far more team unity amongst the gentlemen, with cattiness and disorder spoiling the ladies' performance.

What does this have to do with philosophy? Everything! Far more than other reality shows where the obstacles are artificial and the prize merely financial, "The Apprentice" contestants are really just competing in life. They have been shown a short-cut into a ritzy lifestyle of power, money and respect. All they have to do to get it is be the last man standing.

Sharp reasoning skills are necessary to succeed in their environment - a skill which few of them appear to have. Team leadership is thrust on each candidate in a rough rotation, quickly exposing the difference between introvert and extrovert, thinker and doer, the accurate and the slapdash. How, one wonders, would I fare?

The temptation put by the show is one I certainly find immensely attractive, more so than the artificially marketed razzamatazz given to our pop idols and major prizewinners. In essence, "The Apprentice" gives the immediate fear of jeopardy to the jobs we all do everyday. Any one of us could simply walk out of our job, go to the bank and lay it on the line. But our lives seem to be a certain comfort, and the fears of bankruptcy and the achievable nature of our modest targets seem to be a better way to live out our life.

The question of what is important in life is central to this show. Is it best to work for financial security, to live out our lives in the pursuit of mediocre success but finding happiness in our social relations? Or is it better to set our life at naught in the Samurai tradition, and live absolutely according to principles of honour, regarding life as not worth living unless lived well? Is it better to fly closer to the sun, or further away? To the contestants of the Apprentice, and those risking it all in entrepreneurial exercise, they have chosen to take up the challenge of risky business. Maybe they are foolish to risk falling so low that they can never again stand up, or maybe they are the ones able to see that the fruits of life taste their best when one has risked all in the pursuit of ones goals.

The Philosophy Web

MelbournePhilosopher

I've started hacking on a new content area inside Melbourne Philosophy . It's called "The Philosophy Web", although it might be best to call it a dynamic index. Finding stuff on the web I have found to be very difficult. The Internet has no bullshit filter, and as such you never know what you're getting until you've got it. If reading everything on the internet (or even everything Google, or for the more erudite, Clusty brings back) sounds like a poor way to find what you're really after, this is for you.

MelbournePhilosophy can be your bullshit filter for philosophical information. It might not be complete, it might not be familiar, it might be slow, unresponsive or poorly edited. But it will give you a way to find information quickly, just by pushing buttons. And you will know what you are getting yourself in for.

Let me give an example. Vernor Vinge on the Singularity is a kind of wacky area-51 kind of take on future directions in evolution and artificial intelligence. It's funky, for the large spart speculative, and fun to read. But it's not much good for someone trying to understand artificial intelligence, because it's just too out there. Google can't tell you that kind of thing, all it knows is how many other people liked reading that article.

These are exactly the kind of arguments that were used by the guy who came up with the first HTML page. The index should give you this kind of information. Like pages should point to other like pages. By using hyperlinks, you should be able to thread a chain of relevant articles together in a way that search just can't give you. Of course, once the marketing department got their hands on it, all hell broke loose, and it took Google to save us. I mean Clusty. Well, we don't have a marketing department at MP, or if we do, it's just me, and the use of we is entirely royal.

If you've found something neat, log on to MP and stick it someplace. I would suggest under the "Philosophy Content Web" area, but anywhere will do. I trust that for the most part, people will put information in visible places because it's relevant, and that's right where it should be. Just as an index provides a list of documents organised according to some structural attribute, a web provides a list of documents according to the abstract concept of relevancy. If it's not really philosophy, find a good-looking spot, and plonk in a new content area called "not really philosophy". I won't get mad. I might move the link off the front page, but hey someone else might move it back. Cream rises to the surface.

That's why they built the web, and when it comes to particular applications, it's still more efficient than search. How else can you get from Nietzche to Restall in just three clicks? Organising documents isn't easy, you know...

-MP

The Federal Health System

MelbournePhilosopher

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/19/1097951701315.html

At the moment, the health system is apparently partly state-run and partly national, although you'd be forgiven for not realising. Health is one of those things which you worry about, but can't do anything about. You pay your taxes, maybe join a private fund, and hope you don't get sick enough to need it. The government are probably trying to fix the problems, but they seem to be virtually insoluble. Doctor, heal thyself!

This article is talking about getting rid of the state-level control over the medical system - whatever that is! If you read it carefully, it tells you that what the states do is run hospitals. The government funds medicare, and the state funds hospitals. This seems sensible at some level, because it brings the money and the hospital closer together. Voters can lobby their state government if the hospitals suck, without having to compete against other more pressing national concerns.

What seems to make sense is to have medicare and the hospital system unified. Certainly it makes sense to standardise wages for hospital staff, put in a decent central computing system to enable the exchange of medical records between venues, perhaps put in a national doctor's network. Monopolies are efficient, if you can trust them not to abuse their power. And if you can't the government, well who can you trust? (Don't answer - it's a rhetorical question.)

Philosophy doesn't have too much to say, except to suggest that having a central point of failure is poor system design. Half of New York lost power when a little bit of their electricity grid caused a cascading failure. If you want something to be robust, break it into little bits. On the other hand, you don't want duplication of effort either. In the end, all philosophy can tell us is that we need to take a lot of care in building the proper system - it could work brilliantly, cutting down on inefficiency, promoting standards, improving communication and patient tracking. On the other hand, it could be consigning the whole lot to a beaurocratic grave.

In the meantime, it might be a good idea to take up jogging.

The Revival of Religion

MelbournePhilosopher

Wherever you look, there's a Christian success story lurking just under the front page of the nearest discarded newspaper - discarded by a member of the old guard, a scientifically-minded professional who has read all he needs to understand the world on page one. Just as it looked like Religion was dead, it came back again. Why?

The article which prompted this is located at http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/18/1097951626195.html, and brings up the old issue of the separation between the church and the state. This blog post contains a lot of conjecture, but I don't think it's unreasonable..

More or less everyone admits that there were some shocking examples of bad leadership by religious groups - cue the sad music and a documentary about the Crusades, religious war and the justification of the monarchy through divine imperative. The masses revolted, and instituted democracy in the place of these old-school anachronistic institutions. Religion, it seemed, had been left behind by science and economic rationalism.

So why is it coming back, and how is it coming back? Well, the how is easier - political candidates are no longer ashamed of their religion, and churches have improved their behaviour. Shedding their ties to barbarism, and adopting the love of God and ones fellows as their marketing buzzwords, religious groups have been re-awakening interest in the community in groups of people who had previously just been living next to eachother. Economic power, the choice brought by the industrial revolution, the fight for equality - these have all improved our quality of life immensely in terms of our physical comfort. But they haven't done so much for our souls. Youth suicide is high, marriage rates are down, fear, uncertainty and doubt stalk the land like two ... giant stalking things.

Your standard physical church is a building which contains
a) Wooden benches
b) Symbolic imagery
c) People who will welcome you
d) People who want to hear what you have to say
e) People who will help you understand your problems, albeit on their terms

For the disenchanted, these are powerful attractions. While most people pooh-pooh the idea that a church can help them with their troubles, actually walking into one (especially if you have a friend to help you through this socially frightening process) is really very comforting and rewarding. People are finding out that all the economic choice in the world can't buy them happiness. Sure, the lack of economic choice brings pain and misery, however it does not logically follow that economic abundance necessarily breeds happiness. Issues of personal power, relevance, feelings of inadequecy in an impersonal world all come to the fore when our needs are met. Thomas Aquinas once describe "a god-shaped hole in the human heart." Myself, I think the hole is more philosophy-shaped, but there's room on our planet for a few different kinds of people.

Most people still view the political intervention of religion as an essentially bad thing, because it scares them to think that people with a scientifically unjustified socio-economic agenda might make terrible mistakes in the running of the country. However, it is also true that more and more people are coming to see the economy as not such a big problem after all, and maybe we're ready to move on and consider religion.

I really must point out that this post describes only one way of looking at a complex situation - it's not something that I defend as being a rigorous philosophical position, but it is a viewpoint, and I think it has merit.

The Best Justice

MelbournePhilosopher

Here's a short version of an argument made by Plato :

1) The best objects are made by the best artisans (houses by builders, paintings by painters) etc - it is the nature of things to be done best by experts, rather than by people who are inexpert.

2) Something about the nature of good

3) So the best judge of goodness is expert opinion, not common sense

This, for example, is counter to the idea that any of us are very good at telling the difference between right and wrong. In a sense, this is how our society does work. We have judges to decide the guilt of many crimes, hand down sentences etc. However, we still have jury-based trials for the most serious of crimes. This is more or less accepted by everyone as being a good thing, because there is some feeling that ultimately, the judges and justice should be serving the ideals of society, rather than pursuing their own course. This kind of thinking is echoed by Nietzche when he refers to a change in paradigm about the goodness of actions. Platonic thought essentially regards the outcome of an action as the best judge of its goodness. However, we have come to understand that many ideas can be better judged according to their origins. The ultimate origin for an action is taken to be intention. Personally, I rather suspect that Nietzche merely identified intention (or perhaps motive) as a logical point at which to examine the origin of actions, and the phrase "ultimate origin" is really a little meaningless. The concept, however is the same. In modern thought, the goodness (or evilness) of an action is not considered by outcome alone, but by considering the intentions and motivations that brought the action about. When considering motive and intention abstractly, is is no longer clear that the best good comes from the best results, and one can no longer so neatly define good and evil by the positive and negative outcomes of action.

Instead, morality springs from a kind of cultural opinion about what intentions form moral intention etc. It seems to be, although I can see that it is arguable, that this might just be the effect of imperfect efficacy of desire - our actions do not always bring about their intended results. Maybe if they did, then we could truly judge actions according to their results in the Platonic sense.

I claim that this is similar to the idea of "judges serving the people", because they must now interpret the people's morality rather than creating it objectively. The rule of law is something that is constructed by those in the industry, but instead of being Platonic experts, adept at knowing the difference between right and wrong, the system is instead configured as an adverserial system whereby the rightness and wrongness of actions are not considered by the opponents - the defense and the prosecution. The judge is left to assess whether the rule of law is broken, but the equivalence of the laws to moral goodness is taken now from his hands. Instead, it is placed in our parliament, ostensibly by democratic extension, the people's will.

Chinese Room Experiment

MelbournePhilosopher

We just covered this thought experiment in lectures, and I thought it might promote some discussion.

A man is in a room, full of bookshelves. On a table in the room is a book, open at a particular page. He doesn't understand what's written on it - he is English and doesn't understand Chinese. But the book is subscripted with instructions. There is a chute which opens, which contains a sentence in chinese.

He takes the piece of paper, and follows the instructions given in the book. Those instructions are to write something else down, pass it back through the chute, and go and get a particular different book.

After several hours, he leaves the room, and discovers that he has been having a discussion with a native chinese speaker, even though he himself didn't understand the writing being exchanged.

More Freedom

MelbournePhilosopher

One of the readers responded via email, and challenged a few of the things I said about Freedom, so I thought I'd respond to some of their points.

Firstly, I'd like to say how central to any philosophical discussion the concept of "Ontology" is. It used to be just a meaningless buzzword, but I've come to realise that the framework for discussion an idea is vital. Use a word to which someone else gives connotations outside its meaning, and they will respond as though you had meant something different. Use emotive words and they will respond with vitriol. Use non-emotive words, some people will disconnect and stop listening. Use a word with a broad definition in a technical way, and people will misinterpret your points.

The posting on freedom is as much an ontological proposal as a look at whether people in our world are actually free. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom) is often a port of call for information - in this case it has some very inconsistent ideas about freedom. Or, rather, it describes the various uses for which we use the word freedom, which are themselves inconsistent. The fuzzy nature of language gives it descriptive power, but can also lead to inaccuracy.

The key to the reader's post was to say "You seem to imply that a constraint doesn't affect freedom, that only a restraint does that. But I remain unconvinced that there's actually any difference than a minor quibbling about semantics."

To which I would respond - "It's not just semantics! It's semantics!"

They brought in the idea that perhaps there were two kinds of freedom - such as being free to walk the streets at night, and the freedom not to be attacked. i.e. positive freedoms and negative freedoms, or possible active and passive. Clearly in common language it is possible to talk in this way - freedom from persecution vs the right to free speech (freedom of expression). Looked at coldly logically, it clearly the case that one is merely the inverse of the other. The right to free speech is equivalent to the freedom from having someone prevent you speaking. (note - rights are not the same thing as freedoms in all cases, such as in the right to education, or basic living standards)

The point is that the when arguing about how to define a word, one is really arguing about its descriptive power and accuracy. Freedom, I would argue, loses descriptive power if you use it to describe both constraints on you available option, and restraints on your choices. With this definition, it is impossible to distinguish inequity from injustice, or generosity from mercy.

When speaking casually, context allows us to recognise which use of the word freedom is relevant, but it is possible to be clearer still. I suspect that most ambiguities relating to freedom relate to the difference between restraint and constraint. The quote which the reader gave me I would regard me as showing consistent justice, but not economic equality. Is economic equality worth pursuing? Does economic inequality mean the same thing as inequalities of freedom? More on that later...

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
- Anatole France

Tired Posting

MelbournePhilosopher

Just a short post, as it's nearing the end of my waking day. A lot of work has been going into MelbournePhilosophy today - looking at usage patterns, trying to get other sites to link to it etc. It's all part of getting it to critical mass. A number of things will happen when it gets there, but the one I'm hoping for is increased interaction between philosophers in Melbourne. There seems to me no good reason why Melbourne can't have the best environment for fostering ideas in the world. Someone once said "Information wants to be Free". I couldn't find any reputable-looking first source for this so I'm not going to reference it, but it certainly appears that people are using that quote freely enough. I would argue that philosophical information wants to be more free than any other kind. The only point to philosophy is human understanding, and the only motivation to produce philosophy is altruism. Granted, one may also wish to get paid for philosophy, but it's hardly a lucrative source of wealth. Generally, one forgoes wealth in order to gain lesser income but greater reward. It's not always true, but you've got to ignore a few broken eggs if you want to make a baker's dozen.

Oh, yes, I have a point. The point is that philosophical information is buried. It's buried behind academic walls erected out of good intentions, defunct websites put in place by the eager beavers of yesterday, archaic languages and translations from Latin, German and no doubt every language on earth. Opinions are many and varied - studied philosophy presented with a grain of salt is hard to find.

I would like to unbury it, and encourage people to engage in a little creative counter-culture by recognising that they will get more from sharing their information than by hiding it.

Freedom

MelbournePhilosopher

I'm going to talk about freedom, and I'm not going to mention free will at all, except to disclaim it.

What's freedom anyway? There's a fairly obvious progression from being held hostage, to being in prison, to being under house arrest, through various kinds of oppressive regimes until you land where most of us are today - some kind of nominally liberal society with rights and responsibilities, but with more or less self-directed lives. But that's no kind of answer to a philosopher. What is it that you don't have when you're in prison but do have now, is it a good thing to have, and could we have more of it?

When you're being held hostage, your choices are the closest to nil that anyone really experiences these days. You will experience some degree of physical restraint, and certainly your freedom of speech and personal rights will be curtailed. When you're in prison you may not be literally in shackles, but nonetheless you are not free to leave. But you can more or less say what you want, to a certain audience. Out in society, we still have responsibilities to the law and to our fellow man, but we actually have the choice to honour them or not.

It seems that constraints to freedom come primarily in the form of physical restraint, at least at the lower end of the scale. However, there are other kinds of things which we experience in our relatively free lives which might more accurately be called constraints. It is useful to make the distinction between a restraint and a constraint because it is the same question as the difference between an impositon on freedom versus the nature of choice. You might think of a restraint as a prisoner's shackle, and a constraint as being like the walls on a corridor. One can't walk through walls, but they are there to hold up the roof, break up the rooms, give privacy etc. A functionalist might say that a restraint is anything design to inhibit freedom, while a constraint affects our freedom but has a different function. This buys us nothing other than a framework for discussion, however, because it gives us no way to discern the difference between a wall designed for restraint and a wall designed for constraint.

Someone subscribing to a causal theory of meaning would analyse the factors affecting the decision of the person who erected the wall - what they had in mind, and what their purpose was. However, the function of an object can change over time - a prison may be converted to a tourist attraction, for example. It would seem that there is nothing intrinsic to the restraining object that makes it a restraint rather than a constraint - only the purpose of the designer can give us insight. It would seem that it is the intent rather than the effect which determines the difference.

If you buy into this, there are interesting implications for how we live our lives in the face of adversity, how we deal with low incomes, or bills, or demands on our time etc. It is tempting to think that economic constraint is a restriction on our freedom - clearly we don't have the option to quit our jobs, have expensive houses etc, and it is tempting to fall into thinking that the rich people who can do these things have more freedom than ourselves. In reality, they merely have more options - fewer constraints. A few miscarraiges of justice aside, they face more or less the same restraints to their freedom as poorer people do. This doesn't necessarily make us feel any better, but it does force us to accept that the terminology by which we must talk about our struggle with adversity must be different. It's not correct to say that we have less freedom by virtue of having less money. To appease the people I have just angered - it is certainly true that this rather at odds with some conceptions of the right to equal opportunity and other social justice systems etc. Additionally, the rich may impose genuine restraints on others by using their money to manipulate the options available to others, which is another form which restraint may take. But taken lassaiz-faire, monetary power itself does not correlate with any inequity of freedom.

Unfortunately, disentangling the concepts can be difficult, and often results in some heated debates. I believe there is still a lot to be asked about whether freedom can be imposed upon in the absence of a designer making that imposition, however that will have to wait for another day.

Qualia

MelbournePhilosopher

It might be useful to discuss the idea of qualia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) Where do our motivations come from, and what makes us happy? Why is it that some people get angry or frustrated while other bear up with equanimity? We all experience these emotions from often differing causes, and qualia is a term introduced to help us talk about what it's like. There's something about anger which is independant from its cause - anger has some ineffable nature which is general, regardless of the cause of the anger, or the other emotions that may be playing across our mind. Qualia is the collective noun for "what it's like to be angry", "sad", "joyous" etc. Each has a particular "quale". Due to the clumsiness of using foreign conventions for plurality, most people just use the word qualia to refer also to a single emotion.

Qualia need not be restricted only to emotions. Describing qualia as "what it's like" to be angry is the best way to understand the word, but it may also be that there are qualia for purely intellectual states of mind.

It becomes almost impossibly to talk about the theory of mind without using the word qualia in every other sentence, where it forms one of the central points of disagreement. It is completely impossible to describe qualia as one can't genuinely describe the experience of redness, or blueness etc. People more or less accept that other humans have minds, but describing how a brain somehow gives rise to qualia leaves everybody speechless. Terms such as "emergent behaviour" are used to suggest that somehow the complex relationships of brain components "give rise" to the ability to experience qualia. Attempting to discuss what other kinds of brain might give rise to minds often hammers at this ability to experience qualia.

It also has linguistic and cultural relevance. While languages differ, to the best of my knowledge, every language has words for all the same qualia. That is, while the cultural importance of things like colour or music or even death vary, there is descriptive equivalence when it comes to talking about qualia. It would be very interesting to try to establish whether there were any "qualia words" (like anger, for example) which are absent in any language, modern or dead. It would also be very interesting to study language in other animals to see the use they make of qualia words. (This is not some Dr. Dolittle fantasy - chimpanzees have been taught to use sign language. While they don't make the same creative uses of it as humans, they _do_ use it form communication, which gives an almost frightening, and definately awe-inspiring, insight into another kind of brain). I would be very interested to see if they could be taught emotive words. It would be my expectation that the chimps would be unable to remember or understand words for which they have no mental object in correspondence.

As I hinted earlier, qualia also has reference for understanding our motivation. I regard motivatedness to have a particular qualia, and to be a concept in and of itself. That is to say, I believe there is something called "motivatedness" which is common to the experience of "motivated-by-fear", "motivated-by-love", "motivated-by-reward" etc which reflects your enthusiasm and mental willingness in engaging with any tasks to hand. This, perhaps, could be seen as Nietzche's will to power (or will to life), the mysterious instinctive, irrational and undeniable mental pressure that we feel to simply live.

Cheers,
-MP

Striving

MelbournePhilosopher

I was listening to the www.philosophytalk.org broadcast on Nietzche, who apart from confounding reluctant spellers the world over, had some interesting ideas about morality and philosophy. Having never formally studied his work, it's hard to see why he is so well regarded. However, the thing I picked up on was fairly generally applicable. Nietzche has the conception of the "Ubermensch" - a kind of mental superman. He proposed that people could be put into two classes, with the vast majority of people being of a kind of lower intelligence, and a select few being these supermen. An ubermensch should not be shackled by the morality of the herd, but instead ascribe to higher goals. Nietzche is more concerned with the origins and causes of moral feeling in humans than championing a cause that sounds suspiciously close to eugenic ideals. In his view, ethics and morality arise from the need in early culture to work together - that these things come from behavioural pressures rather than having any objective good or evil associated with them. This may be said to be begging the question, as it is difficult to see how good or evil could be applied in anything other than a framework of moral obligation. (For those who wish to brave a reading of his work, try "Beyond Good and Evil", or if you prefer allegory, "Thus Spake Zaruthastra."

The question that arose was how an individual might determine whether they were of the herd, or one of the elite. I personally subscribe to the importance of society, of working together, and the everyday, wheras Nietzche contended that progress and the best good came from a few extraordinary people. To his view, society existed mostly to support these people in their lives.

It is true for most of us however that we feel both the pressure of pride leading us to think we are special, that we should aim higher, but also the fear of being wrong and the embarassment that comes from claiming to be too good. The question comes - how close to the sun should we try to fly? What is it that separates Icarues from Daedalus? (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus for a description of this myth.

Clearly people are not created with equal talents - our biology plays a strong role in the skills we take out into the world. Some are more intellectually apt than others, some naturally suited to sports, or language, or singing, some more determined than others etc. People do not normally view any of these differences as good bases for moral discrimination, but we are certainly left with the dilemma of knowing our own limits, and accepting them. Growing up is a challenging time, as we learnt first our independance, and then our mortality. Some, like Plato, would have it suggested that we should learn to do one or two things well, and dedicate ourselves to that. Nelson Mandela would have us all free ourselves from the fear of failure, and in so doing realise a greater potential. You can see his inaugural speech at http://www.transformationstation.org/nelson_mandela.htm

It would seem that there are no clear answers, and that many people have struggled with how to understand their own limitations. Perhaps these resources can help us understand ours.

Dr Strangebrows

MelbournePhilosopher

OR

How I came to love the bomb and stop worrying...

Okay, maybe looking for Strangelove in yesterday's election result was the result of an intoxicated and slightly enthusiastic mind, but left-wing thinkers countrywide are mourning the death of democracy in our country. (I'm not really left-wing, I'm with them on this issue) Some libs are celebrating it - most people are probably just out in the gorgeous sunny weather spending their disposable income and hoping they don't need any dental care.

My teeth are really a major worry now. Latham was going to pay for my many years overdue dental checkup, but unfortunately it now looks like I will have to save the money up myself. It's lucky I've got a good job, but unfortunate that by current estimations it will take me another two paychecks to clear all my outstanding bills, which unfortunately is also more or less the period at which the next will arrive. Let's just hope the teeth hold out long enough.

Australia has voted, and they've decided to do away with the old "checks and balances" approach to government, believing that the Howard and Costello double act can do a better job without any pesky intervention.

I can't possibly be objective on a day like today. Philosophy has gone out the window, and instead I'm ranting. But it's good to express your opinions in a heartfelt way, without doing lip-service to anything, just as long as you do it in moderation. Tomorrow, I will return to carefully thinking things through. Today, I wax lyrical.

I'm reminded of a quote from Quark (a character in the Star Trek series "Deep Space Nine). "Root beer. I hate it. It's just like humans - it's so sweet and bubbly and happy. But you know the worst thing? If you drink enough of it, you start to like it."

Making Choices

MelbournePhilosopher

A busy day, so a short post. Today, I took several choices which I regarded as being informed by good philosophy.

Firstly, I voted. This is a legal requirement, but I still exercised my duty and right of choice as a citizen to affect the government of our country. You may not be surprised to learn that I voted Green, but it is a change from the last election where I placed my vote with the Liberal party.

Secondly, I bought a table. This was good on two fronts - surprisingly. Firstly, it was good because I bought it from St. Vincent de Paul, which means most of the proceeds go towards some kind of socially responsible spending. Secondly, it was to provide the furniture for an upcoming dinner party. I regard dinner parties as philosophically good things, because they foster a sense of community, friendship, and discourse.

Philosophy need not be about big things. It can give us a sense of pleasure in the everyday choices we make, and make us more comfortable with the goodness of small decisions.

-MP

Why?

MelbournePhilosopher

Today's post is about the philosophy of Why? People ask why something is the case, without understanding what that question means. Today, I hope to cover a little ground about what is meant when we ask why?

More or less everyone has an intuitive understand of the way that events follow one another. The hammer drops, the nail goes into the wall, the plaster cracks, the painting falls. As we grow up, we find we have acquired an understanding of the nature of causation. When we first start to ask why the painting fell down, what we want to know is what the chain of events was that led up to it. The painting fell down because the plaster cracked. The plaster cracked because the nail went into the wall in a particular way when we hit it with the hammer.

I'll get to the point. The order-zero understanding of "Why?" is that we want to know what the direct chain of events was that led up to some particular situation.

We find out that this is simplistic when we start to ask why in a different sense - why did you choose fruit salad for breakfast? In this case, human reasoning enters the picture. Because it is too complex to understand in purely physical terms, why because a question about mental functioning and decision making. We might answer "because I'm on a diet", for example.

I'll get to the point. Sometimes why is asking about a choice, and sometimes it's asking about a preceeding event.

Let's make this a little clearer. The why of causation can break down under the microscope. Why does the hammer keep falling after we set it in motion? Well, we pull out our physics textbooks, and say here is the answer. Stuff just happens that way, it's the physics we live with. But that kind of answer doesn't actually give us any kind of cause. A question like (when we get down to it) why is gravity becomes more and more like a riddle from Alice in Wonderland - "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" It is a question that cannot sensibly be understood. The chasing of an event back to a first or principle cause leads us to philosophies about the infinite nature of time, for example. Physics tells us how the world works, and allows us to recreate a chain of events contributing to our final cause, but gives no further answers about why those laws exist.

There would appear to be no antecedant to certain physical behaviours. The uncaused nature of primary physical laws has been used by some as an argument for the existence of God, on the grounds that it's inexplicable without recourse to something that breaks the rules. God, it would seem, allows us to break the chain of events.

For those wishing to maintain an atheistic viewpoint - or simply regard such an escape as begging the question - one is led into situations whereby the event is its own cause. Time, under certain physical systems, is no more privileged that space. The universe is painted as a kind of oscillating bag of stuff, whereby a series of bang-crunch cycles leads to an infinite and self-causing sequence of events. Causation is fulfilled, but one is left with a hollow feeling if you ask how it all came about at all. Every event has a precursor, but somehow the answer as to what caused the existence of the universe remains unanswered. It seems, somehow, that the Universe pulled itself into existence by its own bootstraps.

Another kind of Why is the why of morality. When we look at things like politics and philosophy, those championing the cause are often used to justify themselves. Unfortunately, this kind of why always results in begging the question. Essentially, every philosophy and religion everywhere, when asked the question "Why should I believe you" the answer comes back with a justification in terms of itself. If you ask me why you should study philosophy, I can either give you some unstructured facts that you might consider convincing, or try to convince you of the correctness of my priorities. Unfortunately, it is obviously correctness in terms of my philosophy that I am espousing. Religion is the same. If I ask why I should become Christian, it is according to Christian thinking that any structured answer comes back.

Like the problem of the existence of the Universe, the why of philosophy is one that answers itself by its own bootstraps. The mere act of justification is necessarily context-sensitive.

Fortunately, most people are willing to take the existence of the universe as a given without requiring too much by way of justification. But it is precisely this problem of context which leads people to have such differing views and mental models, whether they are aware of it or no.

Cheers,
-MP

Living Simply

MelbournePhilosopher

Last night I attended a pleasant discussion group with some of my religious friends. I am myself atheistic, but that doesn't mean there isn't any common ground. They have been working through a booklet entitled "Living Simply," by Murray Shead. Exercise 7, for anyone with a copy at home.

The false allure of an intensely consumerist lifestyle is something everyone battles with. Even people who have good lifestyles are not content - they still hunger for more. Advertising, not merely an informational channel in today's world of marketing psychology, feeds that hunger with suggestions equating consumption and ownership with moral qualities. Alain de Botton's book "Status Anxiety" elucidates this idea. If we live in a world of equal opportunity, where reward is equal to merit, then there is a suggestion that those people with money and wealth are "better" than those without. Few people consciously subscribe to this view that the wealthy are the morally good and deserving, but this is the subconscious message. Without these goods, or a wealthy lifestyle, you are being awarded only your due as a failure. This can lead to a feeling of despair.

Philosophers throughout history have looked at this view. Plato decried material possesions - his writings of Socrates paint him as a person with no home, and no goods, relying entirely upon others to feed and clothe him. It would not be very practical for us all to adopt the same policy, but he asserted that our moral goodness comes not from our worldly possessions, but from our faithfulness to our beliefs. Economists might argue that capitalism is not a philosophy, but a system, or even a science - albeit a loose one. However, the very action of competition for economic resources leads us to see virtue in success, and in excess.

Epicure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism) was an ancient philosopher who argues the greatest pleasure - tranquility and the freedom from fear - was obtained by knowledge, friendship, and living a virtuous and temperate life. Alain de Botton went on in his book to look at the way in which groups of people have come to terms with the contradiction between striving hard enough that one can live well and striving for material posessions as some kind of moral imperative.

The Bible makes a similar distinction between by decrying the greed of individuals, but supporting being "a good steward of goods". The goal, it would seem, is to find a balanced life in which one works to enhance ones experience of life, and ability to be productive and creative member of society, without having the desire for material wealth subsume other important aspects of life. Living simply is to rid oneself false business, false striving, and to make the time to do things properly, as well as to fulfil yourself spiritually. It is a rejection of the idea that through material wealth can we achieve respect and love from our peers.

One very interesting question posed was "what in our society can you think of that represents simplicity and tranquility". Thinking on that highlighted how little place it has in our media and our lives generally.

-MP

Ode To Search

MelbournePhilosopher
by Tennessee Leeuwenburg

Oh the joys of a summer Googlewhackblatt
The philosophies of sentence structure
Chomsky, chomsky, verbal pornography
Under a Melbourne sky

Politics, religion, incendiary writing divisions
Keywords, and linkage to my page revision
Memes, memes, recurring common themes
Threads of unity

Find me in this haystack, netstack, get that?
Crying out to electronic masters of conjecture
A modern writer's artificial ideology
An island in the sea

-MelbournePhilosopher

To Be Or Not To Be

MelbournePhilosopher

Or both? To be alive or to be dead. Or both? I thought I'd present my muddy views on some tough (I think!) philosophy.

This strange option is suggested by a peculiar logic called Dialetheism . This word seems to have no obvious deconstruction - "di" obviously implies a binary split (as in diurnal, didactic, division etc), but letheism (and variants) returns no search results. It turns up in a few Latin texts, but not in any dictionairies Latin or otherwise that I could find online. Closest match I could find was lethe, which is the river that runs through the underworld, Hades. Hopefully that is not relevant...

One of the cornerstones of most logic is that something can't be both true and false at the same time. In language, however, it is frequently true that things are both true and false. Consider a room with a door. Either you are inside the room, or not. However, if you have a door, you can be both inside and outside. While some may see this as a results of a poorly specified problems, there are more genuine although more difficult problems to which the same concept applies. One example is related to Zeno's paradox. From certain perspectives, space is considered as an infinite number of infinitely small points. Imagine now what happens as you enter a room. More and more of your body counts as being "inside", and less and less counts as being "outside". Now, let's consider an irritating person who is trying to stand "just not inside" while being as close to inside as possible. Because space is infinitely divisible, he can always move "a little closer" to being inside the room, without ever getting there. Dialethic logic allows us to express the idea of being perfectly on the boundary of "inside" and "outside". On both a common-language level and a deep physical level, it is not silly to talk about situations which appear to be both true and false at the same time.

Obviously, it also allows us to say things that are clearly ridiculous, like "This pepsi can is a coke can". But we could also say "I feel both happy and sad", which is not impossible even although happiness and sadness are opposites. Dialetheists try to discriminate with assertions like ((coke can is not pepsi can) is not a deletheic) is true. However, is that, too, a dialetheic statement?

Essentially, dialetheism allows us to formally express things which don't fit a binary classical logic assignation. It seems like we frequently use language and hold ideas in a way that is inconsistent by ordinary logic, which might be reason enough to consider dialetheism seriously. A deeper question might be "can all ideas be described in a logical framework". The meaning of negation is to some extent lost in dialetheism, which might be a good criticism of it. Is reality something which corresponds properly with the expressions of logic, or is the binary nature of logic something which is a property only of logic itself?

Do you agree, or do you disagree with dialetheism?

Cheers,
-MP

New Search Engine

MelbournePhilosopher

What does a new search engine have to do with Philosophy? Why, it puts me on the first page of search results for "Melbourne Philosophy" of course! Apart from that, it's good to see some plausible competition for Google. Your average user might not care about the subtle limitations of Google, but us philosophers care about the rightness of things, not just the function of things. Okay, Google is possibly one of the best-behaved corporate citizens in the world, using low-visibility advertising, blinding-fast speed and an objective page-ranking system. Okay, they have provided a valuable research tool into the vast and largely unmapped worldwide web. But there are problems.

How does Google work? Tech people may be familiar with the PageRank system, by which every link to is a vote for that site. Search results are a list of sites containing the search criteria, ordered by the number of votes. As a result, well-known sites are rewarded, and little-known sites are not. As a result, you get a kind of power-law distribution for how highly a site is ranked. The vast majority of sited get just one or two links, with some sites having truly enormous rankings. It is as much art as science getting a website to be sufficiently well-known to appear in Google's search results. Popularity is more important than quality. The success of Google relies on the usually true assumption that quality is what leads to popularity. Popularity can be measured quickly according to this straw-poll mechanism, while quality cannot yet be well measured without human intervention.

The problem with this - and really the point of this article - is that Google can fail as a research tool, because it is unable to discriminate websites into groups or classes. The "needle in the haystack" has no way of being discovered against the background radiation of a million other websites. The vast majority of users are happy, because the vast majority of users are looking for the most popular websites. (Clearly this must be definitionally true - although one could imagine a process similar to that of astroturfing http://clusty.com/search?query=astroturfing , whereby false links are deposited around the web. This is a well-known "attack" on Google often employed by meme-gamers. Clusty didn't do so well on this search term - try the "I'm feeling Lucky" button on Google with the search term "French Military Victories" to see an example however.

Clusty helps to separate the results into broad classes, allowing much faster access to information. Tech-users might like to think of this as a tree-size problem. Google presents a list of results, 10 at a time. Finding the 50th site takes you to depth 5. Let's face it, almost nobody is going to go as deep as 5 levels unless they _really_ want that information. Clusty is different. As well as the 10 best-matching items, it presents more ways of going deeper into the tree. Instead of choosing "the next 10", you are given an easy-to-use navigation bar which suggests logical data groupings by analysing the data itself. Google offers something similar by allowing "search within results", however, Clusty wins, because you don't have to have any domain knowledge to move through its options. Groups of web sites containing many common keywords become "clusters" through which you can search, allowing the data itself to describe its groupings. While Google is a syntax-only popularity contest, Clusty places more importance on the content of the documents returned, and the hope is that the clusters will be separated semantically, allowing people to more quickly access the right information.

Anti-War Rally

MelbournePhilosopher

I had been avoiding this topic as done to death, but given that I went to the anti-war rally in the city today, I thought I had better post. Philosophically speaking, there are many arguments on both sides, and my personal opinions about the issues are far to intricate to post in 2000 words let alone 200. However, I thought I'd give you an overview of my impressions of the rally and the message that was put out.

The rally itself was I thought quite small. Hundreds of people, maybe a thousand, but not two. The best speaker was David Risstrom, senate candidate for the Greens party, but there was an Aboriginal activist who also came across well. Unfortunately, the speeches lacked a cohesive message. The various minority groups plyed their own wares, with "And troops out of Iraq" as a mandatory comment somewhere in the politikspeak. David R. was the only speaker who really kept focused on the issue for which I was willing to lend my voice. This was unfortunately echoed in the choice of red flags carried by many of the protesters, some of which bore the image of Che Guevara, thus bringing other left-wing political issues in, blurring the issue. I thought it would have been a more successful rally if the message had been kept more pure.

It was my first political rally since I was about 8 years old, tagging behind cousins and uncles in an antinuclear protest. I have to say, I rather enjoyed it. You get a good feeling of empowerment from standing in the streets, looking out at people who are watching the rally and thinking, "This is it. I'm standing for something." It was as much an opportunity for me to realise my political views as it was any mechanism for real change. I don't think that most people react well to rallies - there is a kind of instinctive reaction against dissidence in our culture which often makes it hard to hear the message being put forward. Which is why protesters need to do all they can to avoid alienating their audience.

I would advise anyone interesting in taking part in rallies not to take themselves too seriously, but to enjoy the experience of shouting to the world "I have an opinion, I will not let you go unchecked." The actual chant was of course a little more catchy, but the meaning was clear :)

Philosophy In The Blogosphere

MelbournePhilosopher

This was originally going to be philosophy of the blogosphere, but I didn't find enough on the web to support any firm conclusions. It would seem that there is little work being done in this area at the moment. However, there's room enough for a short description of what the blogosphere is, as well as a few pointers to its philosophical implications.

The blogosphere is a collective term for "all the blogs in the world". Because there are so many blogs, through which it is very difficult to sift, it has become known as this nebulous, chaotically changing mass. Individually, a blog is whatever a person wants it to be - the key characteristics separating it from a website are regularity of posting, personal nature and similarity to a diary or log. Hence, web log - blog. But where is the blogosphere? It's a bit like asking "where is the worldwide web" - the answer is that it's right in front of you. But just like the WWW, it's hard to see the wood on account of all the trees that are in the way. To get a more overall picture of what's going on in the blogosphere, cruise over to Technorati, and see what it has to say about philosophy . Unfortunately, when I visited, the blogosphere was having a bad moment, and had almost nothing interesting to say.

Apart from the bias in the distribution of people who write blogs (i.e. people who are tech literate enough to manage it, and feel the desire to do so) you could consider the blogosphere as a direct instantation of collective opinion, fully searchable. No longer do we have to wonder about the metaphysics of cultural phenomenon, or precisely what "cultural norms" can really mean in a diverse country. Instead, we can jump directly to a keyword-indexed answer. The blogosphere even has a radio station , so you can just sit back and relax to the sound of the world. Chaos, to order!

Searching for "melbourne philosophy" distressingly turned up no results, something I don't quite understand. However, given the dryness of both Technorati and Google on this topic, I am beginning to think that I might be running the only general philosophy blog in Australia. I did manage to find a personal blog by Greg Restall at http://consequently.org/ who is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne Uni though.

I would love to get comments on what people think might form the basis of a philosophy of the blogosphere. I'll compile any comments I recieve into another post, responding to each, and also posing some questions myself such as consciousness in the blogosphere, whether it is geographically-bound or linked more abstractly, as well as deeper questions about the past, the future and how much attention we should be paying to this odd phenomenon.

John Ruskin

MelbournePhilosopher

Just a short one today! I noticed this philosopher in Alain de Botton's book, "The Art Of Travel." I thought we could all use a break, and this might encorouge us to cast our minds to our simple surroundings.

Name : John Ruskin. Born: London 1819.

"I could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet - examining the knots in the wood on the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses with rapturous intervals of excitement."

"A vermilion morning, all waves of soft scarlet, sharp at the edge, and gradated to purple. Grey scud moving slowly beneath it from the south-west, heaps of grey cumuli - between scud and cirrus - at horizon. It issues in an exquisit day ... All purple and blue in distance, and misty sunshine near on the trees, and green fields ... Note the exquisite effect of the golden leaves scattered on the blue sky, and the horse-chestnut, thin and small, dark against them in stars".

Ruskin believed that in order to "own" an experience we need to describe it. He advocated drawing, photography (although later rescinded this in reaction to the mindless holiday snapping of tourists) and "word-painting".

My word-painting for this afternoon:
"Slow-moving day, sunny but not over-warm. Sounds of the street include a truck, a yelling man, the passing of cars and my neighbour opening his door several times. The air is not moving much, rather it is staying heavily put, refusing to be blown about by the pushy winds that may try to visit from other parts."

Cheers,
-MP