bojangles
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bojangles has not written any posts yet.
Tentatively:
If it's accepted that GREEN and RED are structurally identical, and that in virtue of this they are phenomenologically identical, why think that phenomenology involves anything*, beyond structure, which needs explaining?
I think this is the gist of Dennett's dissolution attempts. Once you've explained why your brain is in a seeing-red brain-state, why this causes a believing-that-there-is-red mental representation, onto a meta-reflection-about-believing-there-is-red functional process, etc., why think there's anything else?
Here's how I got rid of my gut feeling that qualia are both real and ineffable.
First, phrasing the problem:
Even David Chalmers thinks there are some things about qualia that are effable. Some of the structural properties of experience - for example, why colour qualia can be represented in a 3-dimensional space (colour, hue, and saturation) - might be explained by structural properties of light and the brain, and might be susceptible to third-party investigation.
What he would call ineffable is the intrinsic properties of experience. With regards to colour-space, think of spectrum inversion. When we look at a firetruck, the quale I see is the one you would call "green" if you... (read more)
Not about intelligence specifically, but I believe this was the first (well-known) paper making the claim: http://www.philbio.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Lewontin-The-Apportionment-of-Human-Diversity.pdf
The point is that even if the heritable component of (say) intelligence among white people formed a bell curve, and the heritable component of intelligence among black people formed a bell curve, a priori you'd expect the two curves to be pretty much the same.
(Lewontin's other conclusion, that "race" is "biologically meaningless", is separate and doesn't work because what small racial differences there are are statistically clustered: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10315/abstract;jsessionid=831B49767DB713DADCD9A1199D7ADC49.d02t02)
I wouldn't recommend agreeing with him about a lot of things, but he's definitely worth paying attention to.
The gist of "The Mind Doesn't Work That Way," from what I can tell so far:
So partly sparked by his own work, modularity became an important idea in cognitive science; not all parts of your mind do the same jobs, or have access to the same information. For example, knowing the Müller-Lyer illusion is an illusion doesn't ruin the effect.
Some cognitive scientists of an evolutionary bent saw functional modularity, with the functions defined by the adaptive problems they were designed to solve, as the key to predicting and understanding the mind's entire functional architecture. If... (read more)
If you have no taste then neither do I.
Things your list reminds me of:
Van Halen - Right Now
Queen - I Want It All
Michael Jackson - Beat It
Bachman Turner Overdrive - Roll On Down The Highway
Bon Jovi - Livin On A Prayer
David Bowie - Modern Love
Guns N Roses - Sweet Child O Mine
Heart - Crazy on You
Boston - More Than A Feeling
Survivor - Eye of the Tiger
Europe - The Final Countdown
Some other favourites of mine:
Youngblood Brass Band - Brooklyn
Racer X - Technical Difficulties
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Can't Stop
K'naan - In The Beginning
The Clash - Revolution Rock
Chicago - In The Country
Coven - Wicked Woman
Biggie - Mo Money Mo Problems
Sugar Hill Gang - Rapper's Delight
Kool G Rap - My Life
Jay Sean
I stopped being afraid because I read the truth. And that's the scientifical truth which is much better. You shouldn't let poets lie to you.
-- Bjork
From such experience, this might be a fruitful approach to trying to shift the gender imbalance in the community. It's unfortunate that describing oneself as a rationalist can have the potential to come across as having a superiority complex, and doubly unfortunate is how common-place is the meme of rationality being a "men's" thing (all women are slaves to their bleeding vaginas, amirite?)
A possible consequence of this is that, when it's phrased explicitly as such, the idea of a "rationality community" conjures up images of boorish men talking about how "you're irrational if you get offended when I say women are sluts who always cheat! IT'S SCIENCE!", which is not at all... (read more)
I do it in a roundabout way. I've gotten far fewer people started off by trying to teach them about biases directly than by saying "dude check out this fanfic it's awesome HARRY'S A SCIENTIST," or by showing them Crab Canon from Godel Escher Bach and telling them the rest of the book's just as much fun, or by showing them the game of life. Once they're hooked on these marvelous new ways of thinking, I show them the blog.
I haven't read the comments yet, so apologies if this has already been said or addressed:
If I am watching others debate, and my attention is restricted to the arguments the opponents are presenting, then my using the "one strong argument" approach may not be a bad thing.
I'm assuming that weak arguments are easy to come by and can be constructed for any position, but strong arguments are rare.
In this situation I would expect anybody who has a strong argument to use it, to the exclusion of weaker ones: if A and B both have access to 50 weak arguments, and A also has access to 1 strong argument, then I would expect the debate to come out looking like (50weak) vs. (1strong) - even though the underlying balance would be more like (50weak) vs. (50weak + 1strong).
(By "having access to" an argument, I mean to include both someone's knowing an argument, and someone's having the potential to construct or come across an argument with relatively little effort.)