Choose a topic





.. Epistemology
Language and thought

.. Art
Fake art

.. Cognition
General Artificial Intelligence
Observing My Experience

.. Computers
Microsoft

.. Epistemology
22 Theories of Consciousness
Consciousness defined
Dialectics and Evolution
Everything contains the seeds of it's own destruction
Free Will
Intentional Stance
Mental Telepathy
Projection
Training vs learning
Validation
We cannot escape stories
What is a Vegetable?
Why Do We Like Pictures?

.. Evolution
Life is Amazing
Swarms
What is a Species?
Why are Tropical Birds So Colorful

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Philosophy
Amateur Philosophy

.. Politics
Silos
Strikes
Unelected Bureaucrats
Who Decides an Election?
Why Are So Many of Our Relationships Adversarial?

.. Society
Adversarial Legislatures
Borders
Cut Energy Use
Emotional Plague
Entropy and Life
Genocide
Getting Old
Improving Democracy
Jesus and the Money Changers
Merry Christmas
Misinformation and disinformation
Moral Hazard
Pay
Privacy
Red flags
Red Rover Red Rover
Religion in Schools
Reusable Bags
Sleeping in a tent
Social Media
We Live in Interesting Times

.. teems
Cars made bicycles possible

... evolution
Philosophy of Plants

...HUM
Culture is Ordinary

Art
AI and Art
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Excellence is a Plateau
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
Gender dysphoria
Genius
GIGO
I Lost My Knife
Illusion
Incomplete Information and Stories
Instinct
Intelligence and Motivation
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
Structures of Understanding
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?
What is going on?

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
Inflation
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
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
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?

Epistmology
Dire Warnings

Evolution
Body Plans
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
Temes
The Evolution of Purpose.
The Problem with Natural Selection.
The Source of Bad Behavior
Thinking about Tails
Why Does a Leopard Have Spots?
Wildlife

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 Job
A society needs a government.
Antisemitism
Babies and Bathwater
Belly of the Beast
Civilization
Compassion
Conservative
Corruption
Cultural Appropriation
Disinformation
Drag Story Tellers
Family Values
Governance
Governance and Power
Griefers and Misinformation and Disinformation
Homelessness
I Distrust the News
Immigration
Inclusion and Christmas
Indigenous
Its a Free Country
Life Extension
Magic
Moral Decline
Open Society and Falsification
Parents, Children, and Community
Possessions
Prisons
Privacy
Race
Rethinking Rights
Rules in a Knife Fight?
Sex and Gender
Should We Go to Mars?
Social vs Individual Responsibility.
Society and The State
Society evolved
Spheres of Influence
Swimming
The Care and Feeding of Free Speech
The Collingridge Dilemma
The Common Good
The Dual Meaning of Power
The Homeless
The Problem with Hedonism
The Rule of Law.
Thoughts on Justice
To the Moon
Totalitarianism
Trial by jury
Virtue Signalling
Voting
We Live in the Present
What is to be said?
What made freedom a bad word?
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







10 Views of Landscape

Perspectives

Reuben Jentink from SFU presented HUM class with a consideration of landscape as an abstract topic. Part of the reading leading up to the class was an article titled "The Beholding Eye: 10 versions of the same scene" by DW Meinig.
Meinig lists them:
1 Landscape as nature.- all the works of man are paltry compared to nature
2 Landscape as habitat - creating resources out of nature's materials
3 Landscape as artifact - we see the mark of man in everything
4 Landscape as system. - all we see is an immense and intricate system of systems
5 Landscape as problem - a condition needing correction
6 Landscape as wealth - assigning value to everything in view
7 Landscape as ideology - the symbols of the values, governing ideas, and underlying philosophies of a culture
8 Landscape as history - a complex cumulative record of the work of man and nature at this particular place
9 Landscape as place - an individual piece of the infinite mosaic of the earth.
10 Landscape as aesthetic - a preoccupation with artistic qualities instead of identity and function.

When I was a photographer I was very interested in landscape10. I was interested in light and form. Ansel Adams was a hero. I was interested in whatever caught my eye though, not particularly the wonder of nature. After all, the initial impetus to become a photographer was the amazing formwork I saw when I was a laborer on a hydro dam under construction. For me, photography was a matter of composing a picture within a frame by selecting a point of view. So for me, I might say that 'landscape" means "pictures I take outside". And I've taken dozens of pictures of the same scene; that is within the landscape as aesthetic perspective alone.

I find the very phrase "landscape as" to be unusual here. Generally I would say "a landscape" or "the landscape" or even "this landscape".( I forget the grammatical term here - article?) What the phrase indicates is the particular range of interests of the speaker.

For instance "landscape as nature" carries the implication that the works of mankind are somehow impure. I've lived pretty close to nature and it's not really very pure. Think about it. There are all these animals around pooping and peeing. Everything is covered in bacteria. So it's a phrase that carries an unspoken ideology.

Saying something counterintuitive like "landscape as nature" forces the listener to ponder. The first response is - wtf does that mean and then the brain starts attaching meaning until one seems to work. And with these 10 presented my brain tries to find what they all have in common that makes them "landscape"? I haven't quite found it yet ?

What do you think?
I open the floor

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.