Onion Story Mistakingly Published in Wall Street Journal

Professor threatens suing her students cause “they’d argue with your ideas” (ht: Wide Scope)

Related stories:
Guy in philosophy class needs to shut the fuck up
Mad Lit Professor Puts Finishing Touches On Bloomsday Device
Professor pressured to sleep with student

EDIT:Oops. Fixed the link to the first Onion story.
ANOTHER EDIT:Changed the link to point to the original story
(I promise I’ll get this post right soon)

Chalmers Finally Got The Answer

Happy 42nd birthday to David Chalmers! Go to his blog, and follow the link to the pictures from the birthday party!

Eliezer Weaves Epiphenomenalism Into A Movie Script

This is very funny - Zombie - the movie over at Overcoming Bias.

But don’t forget… Zombie Argument is good.

Easy Explanation of Kant

(You can see other cartoons that I’ve done on the ‘Me Stripping‘ page)

Physical Domain Closed Earlier Today!

After more than a year, physical domain has been causally closed today. This was decided after C.T. from Chur, Switzerland complained that every weekend he has to buy new dishes, as they regularly turn into tiny flowers for no apparent reason.

My Cool Response To Niels Bohr

-’Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.’ - Niels Bohr

-’Anyone shocked by the world has not yet understood it.’ - Me

Am I a Product of my Imagination?

I bought a Nintendo Wii gaming console few weeks ago, and both me and my family (kids and wife) have spend good time playing Wii sports (especially Tennis, though lately I find Bowling Training mini-game with obstacles very challanging). So, I thought I buy some new game for the Wii, and went to Amazon.de. I usually shop Amazon.com for books, but Wii games are region specific, so if you have an European Wii, you need to buy European versions of the games. I added one game to the shopping basket, and went to the check out, but there it said that they don’t send games to the place where I live. Which is this place? Well, it is a state, which lot of people refer to as Macedonia, lot of people refer to by FYROM. It is the Republic Whatchyamacallit.

Why Watchyamacallit? I guess you’ve heard about the problem with this state’s name already. The short story is that its name and the name for the people here came century or two ago from the name of the territory on part of which it resides. And the territory is called Macedonia. HOWEVER another part of the territory called Macedonia is in Greece, and a small part in Bulgaria. And Greece doesn’t like that we (that are ethnic Slavs) call this country Republic of Macedonia, and ourselves Macedonians, as those were the names for the ancient Macedonians, and ancient Macedonia belongs to the Greek cultural history. So, now we are under pressure to call ourselves differently. I was thinking about this, and I concluded that probably in Greece no two people share the same name, and that’s why some of them find this confusing. But anyway that is another weird story, which in this few last months includes a treat from Greece to stop Macedonia entry into NATO unless the name issue is solved (read - that we agree to change our name). The bad thing is that given the ethnic tensions in the region, entering the NATO is expected to give an assurance to prospective foreign investors, so we would really like to enter NATO. This is whatchyamacallit - “blackmail” maybe?

Anyway, back to the story… I wasn’t too surprised that Amazon doesn’t deliver to Macedonia. I searched for other sites that sell games, and found Gameseek. Macedonia wasn’t in the list there, even they say that they deliver to UK and Europe. Now, this ‘Europe’ can’t mean European Union, as they deliver to countries like Ukraine and Croatia which are not part of the union too. So, it appears, this place where I live - the Republic Whatchyamacallit isn’t on the continent where it should be. And that is where I started to suspect a possible Matrix scenario. Well, just that here not just that the things you thought are real are not real, but the names of those unreal things don’t mean those things also!

So, I sent an email to the Gameseek, asking them if it is possible to buy a game from here, and they said it is, just that I need to open PayPal account, and then send them an email, and they will process the order manually. I didn’t quite like that, but it sounded better than nothing, and a new game would make my kids happy (not to mention me and my wife). So, I went to PayPal. And there my suspicions that I am just a product of my imagination were confirmed. There is a hundreds of countries there, but Macedonia is nowhere on the list. Nor FYROM. So, no new game for me for the time being. Though, I start to feel some strange urge to install a mod chip in the Wii, so I could just download “backups” for games I don’t own, and play the backups until there is possibility to buy the originals.

Not Creative (And I Even Cheated)!

OK, the code that they gave me, doesn’t work on wordpress.com. So, imagine ‘23%’ between ‘My brain is’ and ‘wired for creativity’.
I think that for low percentage, they need new messages like:

My brain is unwired.
or
I’m never blue when I’m sad.
or
I have touch-Angelina Jolie synaesthesia. I see Angelina Jolie when my wife touches me.
or
My brain is not creative, but I am.

How to tell if you suck at telling philosophical jokes?

Head in for some milk and cookies!

Johnny’s mom gets philosophical here:

I wonder what the thing she says means in German (if anything).

BTW, this is first video I had prepared and uploaded in my life, and it was fun.  I hope it doesn’t infringe someone’s copyright too much :). If not, probably won’t be available for long.

Disconnectionism

Connectionism (from SEP):

Connectionism is a movement in cognitive science which hopes to explain human intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks (also known as ‘neural networks’ or ‘neural nets’). Neural networks are simplified models of the brain composed of large numbers of units (the analogs of neurons) together with weights that measure the strength of connections between the units. These weights model the effects of the synapses that link one neuron to another. Experiments on models of this kind have demonstrated an ability to learn such skills as face recognition, reading, and the detection of simple grammatical structure.

I call dibs on a view which will be called Disconnectionism, and which will have the following song as an anthem:

All I can say is that it will also be known (because of its anthem) as ‘DISCO’, and will probably have something to do with possibility of things to be disconnected, and will be MUCH MORE FUN than connectionism.

Priming

I guess this is good example of priming:

(I think the teddy-bear picture by kids thing is just result of the position of the paint buckets)

But, I’m not sure if I believe this.

I’m sure that one can have false memories. But to this extent? I’m more inclined to think that this involves some trick, but I’m open to be convinced otherwise.

An Intuition

I have an intuition, that people that are against intuitions, don’t like what their intuitions are telling them.

Monkeys Which Are Product of Intelligent Design

Some monkeys might have evolved, but not those!

Irony

Philosophy, then, according to Kant, is to abate its claims. It is warned off the premises of everything except immediate existence in space and time. It must give up all attempts to know reality, to penetrate behind appearances. But the effect of this solemn warning upon the philosophic world was truly astonishing. No sooner had Kant thus cried “Halt!” to philosophy than philosophy, forming its adherents into a sort of triumphal procession, proceeding, so to speak, with bands playing and flags waving, marched victoriously onward to the final assault, confident of its power to attain omniscience at a stroke, to occupy the very citadel of reality itself. And, strangest of all, this was to be done with the very weapons which Kant himself had forged. It was under the Kantian banner that philosophy moved forward. It was Kant’s own philosophy, hailed as the greatest discovery of all time, which was to accomplish this final and triumphant victory. Philosophy, instead of being sobered by the warnings of the master, rose at once to an exuberant ferment of enthusiasm. It set no bounds to itself. It was to accomplish the impossible, know the unknowable. Such is the confident enthusiasm of the philosophies of that time.

The Philosophy of Hegel: A Systematic Exposition, W.T.Stace p.43

And one more interesting remark from that book (p.76)…

This idea [that there is an absolute separation between things and thoughts] was originated by Descartes and dominates modern philosophy until it culminates in Kant, whose philosophy is nothing else than the reductio ad absurdum of it.

Here the reductio that Stace has on mind is the notion of thing-in-itself, which on one side is supposed to be something which can’t fall under the categories, but which on other hand is described in the Critique as standing in the relation of cause and effect with the sensuous content which appears in the forms of space and time.