Choose a topic


.. Cognition
Intelligence and Motivation

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Society
Disinformation
Drag Story Tellers
I Distrust the News
What is to be said?

...Cognition
Structures of Understanding

...HUM
Culture is Ordinary

Art
AI and Art
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Is this picture real?
NonFungible Tokens
Public Art
Tearing Down Statues
Weave
What is Art?
Working With Reality

Cognition
Artificial Intelligence and the Collingridge Dilemma.
Bird Brains
Bounded Rationality
Competence Without Comprehension
Consciousness is More Like Fame Than Television
Developmental Processes
Emergence and Cognition
Genius
GIGO
I Lost My Knife
Illusion
Incomplete Information and Stories
Instinct
Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
Natural Law
Necessary Illusions
On Affordances
Pencil and Paper
Post Phenomenology
Reflective Equilibrium
Return of the Law of Forms
Shifting Meanings
Superstition
Taking Things on Faith
The Hard Problem
The I Love You Gesture
The Imagined Order
The Phenomenology of Swim Bladders.
Thinking about medical procedures
Thinking About Risk
Underdetermination and Redundancy
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
What Does Google Know?

Economics
A Country Is Not Like A Company
Alternate ideas lying around waiting for disaster
Blood and Money
Can Capitalism Survive?
Do Our Minds Own Our Bodies?
Everyday Communism
Invisible Hand
Job Creators
Job Destroyers
Markets
Money and Value
Money is Different
National Accounts
Necessary Production
Paper Wealth
Post Capitalist Society
Profit Motive Fails
Rentier Capitalism
Social Wealth vs Surplus Value
Spending Money Into Existence
The Metaphysics of Money
The Ontology of Debt
Thinking about Money
Wealth is What Money Buys

Environmentalism
Blowing Up Pipelines

Epistemology
Absolute Knowledge
Equivalence
Exists
I do not know everything
Rethinking Knowledge
Rethinking Knowledge
Semiotics and Body Language
The Curious Ineffectiveness of Facts
The Past and the Future.
Uncertainty and Unpredictability
Unpredictability
Verificationism
Whatever happened to The Truth?

Evolution
Competition and Cooperation
Dr Malthus would be pleased
Error Correction
Evolution Defended
Evolution is not Religion
Evolution of Cars
Extinction
Forces of Nature
Is Natural Selection Obsolete?
Networks
Omicron
Politics and Evolution
Roles
The Evolution of Purpose.
The Problem with Natural Selection.
The Source of Bad Behavior
Thinking about Tails
Why Does a Leopard Have Spots?

Freedom
Free Speech in the age of Twitter
Freedom and Badness
Freedom and Morality
Freedom From and Freedom To
Freedom in the Age of Convoys
Laws
Libertarian Coercion

HUM
10 Views of Landscape
Affect and Effect
Dataism
I pay rent.
Listening to Corn
The Reform vs Revolution Paradox
What is Public Schooling For?

Levels of Abstraction
Levels of Abstraction and Minds
What is a newspaper?

Mathematics
As Much As Possible
Zipfs Law

Memetics
Emotional Plague
Memes: Imitated Behavior.
The Problem with Memes
What is a replicator?

Morality
Beyond Rules Based Morality
Freedom and Morality
Moral Realism.
What do we owe animals?

pending
Police

Philosophy
Agency
Being
Maps and Territories
Metaphysics Without Absolutes
Philosophy Buds
Ratchets
Sincerely Held Beliefs
Sorites Paradox
Stereoscopic Vision and The Hard Problem
The Gorilla in the Room of Science
The Purpose of Science
What is Going On?

Politics
If It Walks Like a Duck
Right Wing Freedom
The Sovereign Citizen
Tyranny of the Majority

Programming
Loopsidaisy

Science
Constructed Life
Correlation Wins
Fields
Neurophilosophy
Quack Doctors
The Great Shattering
The Material Space
Thinking about Interconnection
Time
Too Small to See
UFOs
Watching Pigeons
Weirdness in Physics

Society
A society needs a government.
Antisemitism
Belly of the Beast
Civilization
Corruption
Cultural Appropriation
Family Values
Governance
Griefers and Misinformation and Disinformation
Immigration
Inclusion and Christmas
Magic
Open Society and Falsification
Privacy
Rules in a Knife Fight?
Sex and Gender
Should We Go to Mars?
Society and The State
Spheres of Influence
The Care and Feeding of Free Speech
The Collingridge Dilemma
The Dual Meaning of Power
The Homeless
The Problem with Hedonism
To the Moon
Totalitarianism
Voting
We Live in the Present
Why is there a shortage of nurses?
Work - Productive, Useful, Worthless, and Bad.

UBI
Implications of Very Productive Technology
Modest Proposal
Problems with Universal Basic Income
Tormenting Unlucky People
Why there are oligarchs







If It Walks Like a Duck

And Talks Like a Duck

And then goes - who me? I'm not a duck!!!!
What are we to think?

My own stance about religion is secular atheist.
Secular in that I don't think religion should have a role in government. Secularism is what enables religious freedom. America was founded by people fleeing persecution by state religions.

And I'm atheist. I dislike the term but there it is. I don't think god exists. I'm pretty open about that but also I understand that many people around me are religious. I don't wear a symbol proclaiming to everyone that I'm an atheist but it's not something I hide.

So, secular atheism serves as both a label and a description of my position.
In general, I have no problem with descriptions (assuming they are accurate) but labels are vulnerable to abuse.

The thing about labels is that they stand for a lot of things that are not said.
And the baggage attached to labels is notoriously different for each person.

I get along well with Christians. I was raised as a Christian and am comfortable with Christian symbols. I understand Christian morality and can get along with it because of secularism - there are things we each keep private.

Lately that secularism has been under attack.
Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert says "The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church," she said at a church two days before her primary election (and victory) in late June. "I'm tired of this separation of church and state junk."

The term "white christian nationalist" can be taken as a label and a description like secular atheist can.
but a difference is that "white" and "nationalist" are labels themselves that are left undefined.
But when people start saying openly that multicultural America is a white christian nation they are excluding a lot of people from America. They speak of real Americans.

Recently (July 27, Washington Post) I read that Marjorie Taylor Green said: "We need to be the party of nationalism and I'm a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists,"

I notice that neither Boebert or Green or the author of the Wapo article preface 'christian nation' with "white" but I think it's pretty obvious.
The founders were white men conquering a continent from indigenous people who held black slaves who were secular christians.

The motivation is obvious. They don't want to appear to be racist though it's obvious that they are.

But racism isn't the only hidden thing in Christian Nationalism. That leads to stuff like trying to corrupt elections.
Sexism is very apparent - as is shown by the attack on abortion rights which is leading to a very broad violation of women's human rights.
Now many doctors are afraid to treat miscarriages or medical emergencies in pregnancy for fear of being sued.

We live in interesting times. The Jan6 insurrection was an attempt by christian nationalists to mount a coup against the American majority.
I fear we haven't seen the last of them.
But if people walk like a fascist and talk like a fascist then I'll treat them like a fascist.

What do you think?

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.