Author: geoff

That's that, then

So that’s the end of the Philosophy of Mind course that I’ve been taking. Lectures, check. Term paper, check. Final exam, check. Now I wait to hear how I did.
I came out of the final exam feeling pretty good about it. Yes, I’d blanked on two of the short disambiguation questions (on Block’s psychofunctionalism and Rosenthal’s HOT), but I felt that the essays were OK, if slightly unbalanced (9 pages for one, 6 for the other). Now, of course (a couple of hours later) all I can think of is the defects: what I forgot to include, why I wasted time on McGinn instead of talking more about Churchland, why I didn’t say more about how varieties of functionalism might be compatible with dualism, etcetera. However I guess that’s only to be expected.
And now I’ve got this philosophy-shaped hole in my life! I’m not taking any courses this summer (too many potential distractions), so until the Fall Semester I guess I’m going to be reduced to reading some of the (many) books I acquired during the course. Summer reading, sitting on the deck, with a long cold drink… it could be worse.

Too busy revising to blog

I’ve been so busy revising for my Philosophy of Mind final on Wednesday that blogging has had to take a back seat. Yet while I wrestle with questions like Brentano’s view of the intentionality of mental phenomena, I’m concerned that one of the biggest challenges is going to be mechanical: handwriting. The two hour exam will include a short multiple choice section and two essays. I don’t think I’ve handwritten more than half a page at a sitting since the mid-1970s. There’s a real danger that I’ll hand in a bunch of stuff that’s completely illegible….

Raikonnen in Spain

Today’s F1 Grand Prix was from Spain, and once again it was being televised on network TV five hours after the event. Again I face the dilemma: whether to avoid all sources of news so that I can watch the race without knowing the result. I decided to do so, with some difficulty – even my screen-saver is a news channel! (Mac OS X “Tiger” includes a cool RSS reader screen saver.)

An impressive performance from McLaren (which is sponsored by Sun – so where do I find a T-shirt?) and Kimi. Ferrari’s awful season continues: perhaps Bridgestone tyres should quit….

Caesar's Bath thread: "what's all the fuss about?"

Interesting blog meme spotted over at Glorfindel of Gondolin‘s blog: the Caesar’s Bath question: ‘list five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.”‘. So let’s see….

  1. Celebrity TV poker: The latest TV fashion seems to be to stick actors, or sports personalities, or whatever around a card table and viodeotape them playing poker. Tedious…. I’d rather watch the actors act, or the sportspeople do sporty things.

  2. SUVs: They’re ugly, inefficient, and seem to encourage thoughtless, selfish behaviour on the part of their drivers. When I pull into the Sun parking lot next to an SUV, and an otherwise blameless colleague climbs out of it, I never know what to say. (“Are you compensating for something, perhaps?” No, that’s tacky.)

  3. TiVo: OK, I know that a couple of times I’ve been rescued by people with TiVos (when I forgot to record a program), but some people seem to live for their TiVos. They spend ages discussing TiVo hacks, complicated configurations of TiVo boxes and satellite receivers, and so forth….

  4. The Matrix: It’s not just friends and colleagues. Even philosphy professors seize on the film as an explanatory device. (Think “brains in vats”.) But it wasn’t even a good film…. (The Animatrix, a DVD of Matrix backstory details by various anime film-makers, was vastly superior to the film itself.)

  5. Blog hit counts (or page ranks, or whatever): Some of the bloggers I know seem to be obsessed with knowing how many people are reading their stuff. C’mon guys: with all the aggregators around, and spiders (which are getting increasingly clever at disguising themselves), and spambot probes, you can’t believe any of the numbers. Just relax and have fun – OK?

The new Al Stewart album

Just listening to tracks from the new Al Stewart album, “Beach Full of Shells” on a great Internet radio station: Radio Frontiers. A nice mix of old and new Al music, and a nice crowd on the IRC chat. The DJ, Peter, is repeating it on Saturday; I’ll find out the exact schedule and update this. (UPDATE: 1pm EST.) No special software needed, really: I’m using iTunes. (Oskar reports that WinAMP with the MP3Pro plugin is crisper.)

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

In conjunction with getting my new car, we decided to donate my Mazda Miata to charity (specifically to the Lupus Foundation of America). After filling out a form on their website, we were contacted by the company that handles the transport for them (and many other charities, I imagine), and they came to take it away. Just two more things to do: cancel the insurance, and take the plates back to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. It turns out that the former depends on the latter, so tomorrow morning I’ll be stopping in at the Watertown RMV to return the plates.

While I was at the RMV website, checking on opening times and so forth, I started thinking about whether to get a custom, “vanity” license plate for the new car. Here in Massachusetts, the rules for cars are simple: 2-6 letters, letters that might be confused with digits can only be used in “recognizable words”, and nothing “inappropriate”. (You can use digits, but there are too many restrictions – they want to keep their options open.) And you can check online to see which combinations might be available. To my surprise, all of the following were reportedly free:

GEOFF
GEOFFA
EVOLVE
EVOLTN
EVLUTN
DARWIN
SECULR
HHGTTG

Hmmmm……

UPDATE: I’m going to apply for EVOLVE. They shouldn’t have any problem with that….

UPDATE: It turns out that EVOLVE had (just) been taken. Curses, foiled again…! So I went with my second choice, DARWIN. Quite apart from affirming evolution through natural selection, and celebrating one of the most influential scientists in history, there’s a nice Mac geek connection too.

HHGTTG – oh dear.

Saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this evening. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. You know it’s bad when the high point is spotting the old Marvin robot (from the BBC TV series) queuing in the Vogon office. And to those who say that it’s what Douglas would have wanted – yes, I agree, it’s full of things that exemplify his weakest tendencies. Douglas’s strength was satirical dialog, skewering pompous bureaucratic gobbledygook and content-free marketing pablum with equal energy. However, he was also a geek, always fascinated with shiny toys – even if he didn’t know how to use them properly. Giving Douglas a large SFX budget was like giving a bipolar wine-taster the keys to the cellar. He was (admirably) obsessed with the environment, and endangered species; his book Last Chance To See is wonderful. But that doesn’t mean turning HHGTTG into a “green” manifesto. It’s a comedy, dammit! (But I noticed that hardly anyone in the cinema was laughing – including me.)
And whoever wrote that stupid theme song should be forcibly re-educated and compelled to take up a new line of work.

On the unreliability of imagination…

“Our capacity or incapacity of conceiving a thing has very little to do with the possibility of the thing itself; but is in truth very much an affair of accident, and depends on the past history and habits of our own minds.”

Mill, J. S. 1874, A System of Logic, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers