http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/en...religious/

EXCERPT (Stephen Law): [...] The Hans Christian Anderson story The Emperor’s New Clothes ends with much mocking of the Emperor as he parades pompously around town while stark naked. The hilarity begins with that small boy who points and laughs. His laughter has a revelatory effect on those around him. Suddenly, as a result of that one boy pointing and laughing, everyone else realizes they’ve been duped. The spell that held them captive is broken. They recognize the truth.

Laughter may not be the only way of getting people to recognise the truth, but it’s sometimes the quickest and most effective way. Satire and mockery are tools that can be employed entirely appropriately, particularly if we’re criticising figures and institutions that maintain a faithful following in part by fostering attitudes of immense reverence and deference. What the pompous and self-aggrandizing fear most is that small boy who points and laughs - and whose name, in this case, is Charlie Hebdo.

Religions and religious figures are mocked and lampooned for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it’s sometimes done for no other reason than to upset the religious. Let me be clear that I don’t approve of that (though I do defend the right of others to do it).

However, more often than not, the lampooning is done with the intention of shattering, if only for a moment, the protective façade of reverence and deference that has been erected around some iconic figure or belief, so that we can all catch a glimpse of how things really are. At such times, lampooning can become great art.

Here’s a second reason for lampooning those demanding overweening ‘respect’ for some religious figure or institution. What do the armed clowns who marched into the Charlie Hebdo offices want? They want to create fear, so that no one will ever dare lampoon their Prophet again. Many of us were already self-censoring for fear of such reprisals. Now even more of us will do so. Freedom of expression is being eroded.

But there’s an obvious way we can quickly reclaim that lost freedom. We can, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali nicely put it, ‘spread the risk’. If we all stand up and repeat what caused the supposed ‘offence’, then tomorrow any individual who might have self-censored out of fear will realize they’re not an isolated target, but just one target amongst countless thousands. The risk is spread between us to the point where the danger faced by any one individual becomes negligable again....

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/

EXCERPT: “I love information upon all subjects that come in my way, and especially upon those that are most important.” Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley's Alciphron. Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dot.com pandemonium. Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? What is information? The question has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information.

Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory. The reader may wish to keep this in mind while reading this entry, where some schematic simplifications and interpretative decisions will be inevitable. Claude E. Shannon, for one, was very cautious:

Quote:The word ‘information’ has been given different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory. It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition. It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field. (italics added). (Shannon [1993], p. 180)

Thus, following Shannon, Weaver [1949] supported a tripartite analysis of information in terms of

(1) technical problems concerning the quantification of information and dealt with by Shannon's theory

(2) semantic problems relating to meaning and truth; and

(3) what he called “influential” problems concerning the impact and effectiveness of information on human behaviour, which he thought had to play an equally important role.

And these are only some early examples of the problems raised by any analysis of information.

Indeed, the plethora of different analyses can be confusing. Complaints about misunderstandings and misuses of the very idea of information are frequently expressed, even if to no apparent avail. Sayre [1976], for example, criticised the “laxity in use of the term ‘information’” in Armstrong [1968] (see now Armstrong [1993]) and in Dennett [1969] (see now Dennett [1986]), despite appreciating several other aspects of their work. More recently, Harms [1998] pointed out similar confusions in Chalmers [1996], who

Quote:seems to think that the information theoretic notion of information [see section 3, my addition] is a matter of what possible states there are, and how they are related or structured […] rather than of how probabilities are distributed among them. (p. 480).

In order to try to avoid similar pitfalls, this entry has been organised into four sections. Section 1 attempts to draw a map of the main senses in which one may speak of semantic information, and does so by relying on the analysis of the concept of data. Sometimes the several concepts of information organised in the map can be variously coupled together. This should not be taken as necessarily a sign of confusion, for in some philosophers it may be the result of an intentional bridging. The map is not exhaustive and it is there mainly in order to avoid some obvious pitfalls and to narrow the scope of this article, which otherwise could easily turn into a short version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Its schematism is only a starting point for further research and the reader interested in knowing more may wish to consult Floridi [2011] and Adriaans and van Benthem [2008].

After this initial orientation, Section 2 provides a brief introduction to information theory, that is, to the mathematical theory of communication (MTC). MTC deserves a space of its own because it is the quantitative approach to the analysis of information that has been most influential among several philosophers. It provides the necessary background to understand several contemporary theories of semantic information, especially Bar-Hillel and Carnap [1953], Dretske [1981].

Section 3 analyses information as semantic content. Section 4 focuses entirely on the philosophical understanding of semantic information, what Euphranor really loves.

The reader must also be warned that an initial account of semantic information as meaningful data will be used as yardstick to outline other approaches. Unfortunately, even such a minimalist account is open to disagreement. In favour of this approach one may say that at least it is less controversial than others. Of course, a conceptual analysis must start somewhere. This often means adopting some working definition of the object under scrutiny. But it is not this commonplace that one needs to emphasize here. The difficulty is rather more daunting. Philosophical work on the concept of (semantic) information is still at that lamentable stage when disagreement affects even the way in which the problems themselves are provisionally phrased and framed. Nothing comparable to the well-polished nature of the Gettier problem is yet available, for example. So the “you are here” signal provided in this article might be placed elsewhere by other philosophers. The whole purpose is to put the concept of semantic information firmly on the philosophical map. Further adjustments will then become possible....

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2015/...orlds.html

ALEXANDER PRUSS: As the length increases, the possibilities for good novels initially increase. It may not be possible to write a superb novel significantly shorter than One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But eventually the possibilities for good novels start to decrease, because the length itself becomes an aesthetic liability. While one could easily have a series of novels that total ten million words, a single novel of ten million words just wouldn't be such a good novel. Indeed, it seems plausible that there is no possible novel of ten million words (in a language like human languages) that's better than War and Peace or One Day or The Lord of the Rings.

If this is right, then there are possible English-language novels with the property that they could not be improved on. For there are only finitely many possible English-language novels of length below ten million, and any novel above that length will be outranked qua novel by some novel of modest length, say War and Peace or One Day.[note 1]

So, there are possible unimprovable English-language novels. Are there possible unimprovable worlds? Or is it the case that we can always improve any possible world, say by adding one more happy angelic mathematician? In the case of novels, we were stipulating a particular kind of artistic production: a novel. Within that artistic production, past a certain point length becomes a defect. But is an analogue true with worlds?

One aspect of the question is this: Is it the case that past a certain point the number of entities, say, becomes a defect? Maybe. Let's think a bit why super-long novels aren't likely to be that great. They either contain lots of different kinds of material or they are repetitive. In the latter case, they're not that great artistically. But if they contain lots of different kinds of material, then they lose the artistic unity that's important to a novel.

Could the same thing be true of worlds? Just adding more and more happy angels past a certain point will make a world repetitive, and hence not better. (Maybe not worse either.) But adding whole new kinds of beings might damage the artistic unity of the world.

[note 1] One might worry about the possibility of arbitrarily long neologisms or names. But a spoken word of English cannot exceed the length of a typical human lifetime at a normal rate of speech, we can stipulate.

BOSTON (CBS) – Losing weight is a very popular New Year’s resolution. And we soon may be able to shed the pounds without the sweat. Boston researchers say they have captured the weight loss benefits of a treadmill in a pill.

Professor Chad Cowan and his team at Harvard University and Mass General Hospital have found a drug that can transform some of your “bad” fat into super-charged “good” fat that simply burns itself — like a day at the gym.

“When you exercise you very naturally do this to some of the fat cells in your body. So we’re going to sort of make it like you’ve done some rigorous exercise a little bit every day so that you burn off those excess calories,” says Cowan.

All of us have so called white fat and a limited amount of brown fat. This breakthrough tricks those white fat cells into acting like those self-burning brown ones. “So now rather than just sitting on the couch it gets up and burns off some of that energy in the form of heat,” explains Cowan.

The drug has proven successful in mice but we are still years away from human clinical trials. The hope is that this discovery could be the fuel needed to battle the obesity epidemic.

Cowan likes to use a super hero analogy when describing how it works: “It’s not that they forgot they were white fat cells. It’s just like Peter Parker, who is Spiderman, still remembers he is Peter Parker. It’s just now he’s also Spiderman.”

But the super-power has its limits: “I do want to emphasize that in no way would a pill like this ever replace physical activity or exercise,” says Cowan.

Which is good news for many fitness buffs we spoke with at the Watertown Boston Sports Club who have no plans to ditch the gym for a drug. “It’s not going to replace the mental and the emotional aspect of working out that you get,” says Ben Perry of Waltham. “I’d rather do the work!” says Yolie Silva of Waltham.

This fat-burning drug is already FDA approved but it’s being used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. As you might imagine the side effects are severe and not recommended for weight loss.

Professor Cowan is convinced it’s likely even more drugs are out there that have the same effect. And he’s already on the hunt for more."===http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/01/07/bo...in-a-pill/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/books/...upted.html

EXCERPT: [...] Humanism has been savaged by theists and atheists, conservatives and progressives, fascists and socialists, scientists and philosophers, though it has also been propounded by the same diversity of thinkers. Who has not felt superior to humanism? It is the cheapest target of all: Humanism is sentimental, flabby, bourgeois, hypocritical, complacent, middlebrow, liberal, sanctimonious, constricting and often an alibi for power. The abusers of humanism, of course, are guilty of none of those sins. From Heidegger to Althusser, they come as emancipators. I think we should emancipate ourselves from their emancipations.

But what is humanism? For a start, humanism is not the antithesis of religion, as Pope Francis is exquisitely demonstrating. The most common understanding of humanism is that it denotes a pedagogy and a worldview. The pedagogy consists in the traditional Western curriculum of literary and philosophical classics, beginning in Greek and Roman antiquity and — after an unfortunate banishment of medieval culture from any pertinence to our own — erupting in the rediscovery of that antiquity in Europe in the early modern centuries, and in the ideals of personal cultivation by means of textual study and aesthetic experience that it bequeathed, or that were developed under its inspiration, in the “enlightened” 18th and 19th centuries, and eventually culminated in programs of education in the humanities in modern universities.

The worldview takes many forms: a philosophical claim about the centrality of humankind to the universe, and about the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality; a methodological claim about the most illuminating way to explain history and human affairs, and about the essential inability of the natural sciences to offer a satisfactory explanation; a moral claim about the priority, and the universal nature, of certain values, not least tolerance and compassion. It is all a little inchoate — ­human, humane, humanities, humanism, humanitarianism; but there is nothing shameful or demeaning about any of it.

And posthumanism? It elects to understand the world in terms of impersonal forces and structures, and to deny the importance, and even the legitimacy, of human agency. It certainly does not mean, as Greif correctly notes about antihumanism, a “hatred of the human.” There have been humane posthumanists and there have been inhumane humanists. But the inhumanity of humanists may be refuted on the basis of their own worldview, whereas the condemnation of cruelty toward “man the machine,” to borrow the old but enduring notion of an 18th-century French materialist, requires the importation of another framework of judgment.

The same is true about universalism, which every critic of humanism has arraigned for its failure to live up to the promise of a perfect inclusiveness. It is a melancholy fact of history that there has never been a universalism that did not exclude. Yet the same is plainly the case about every particularism, which is nothing but a doctrine of exclusion; and the correction of particularism, the extension of its concept and its care, cannot be accomplished in its own name. It requires an idea from outside, an idea external to itself, a universalistic idea, a humanistic idea. Asking universalism to keep faith with its own principles is a perennial activity of moral life. Asking particularism to keep faith with its own principles is asking for trouble.

[...] Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past.

[...] And even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science. The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university, where the humanities are disparaged as soft and impractical and insufficiently new. The contrary insistence that the glories of art and thought are not evolutionary adaptations, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.

So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.

This gloomy inventory of certain tendencies in contemporary American culture — it is not the whole story, but it is an alarmingly large part of the story — is offered for the purpose of proposing an accurate name for our moment. We are not becoming transhumanists, obviously. We are too singular for the Singularity. But are we becoming posthumanists?...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/books/...clich.html

EXCERPT: [...] Usually clichés are used correctly and unthinkingly. So correctly and unthinkingly that mostly we don’t hear them, especially when we say them ourselves. The ways in which canned speech — even the can is now canned! — obstructs thinking, obscures evil and turns us into unknowing automatons have been very intelligently and thoroughly considered already: George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” and George Carlin’s comedy sketch on “shell shock” (about how “shell shock” became “battle fatigue” became “operational exhaustion” became “post-traumatic stress disorder”) are particularly precise and witty. If you are looking for important thinking about cliché, I would go look at either of those pieces before reading the rest of this column. The Carlin bit is about euphemisms, but any popular euphemism is as much a cliché as linguine is pasta.

I can, however, think of one minor point about cliché that fits well into this narrow space. Clichés are like the old talismans dug up at an archaeological site. They often endure even when the times and places that produced them have passed on. When, for example, did we start to say “passed on”? When did glory start showing up in blazes and majorities become vast? When did war become something we wage? When did social commentary so often become searing, and was it around the same time that a certain demographic took a fancy to seared scallops? Why is lyrical something we wax, and why is a whip something we want to be as smart as? At some point someone’s goat was got, someone’s envelope was pushed and the mouth of someone’s gift horse was examined. None of these things happen any more. But we still use the old phrases, like hikers unrolling sleeping mats in the ancient temple at Petra....

- - - - - -

EXCERPT: [...] Clichés lend structure and ritual and glue: They are the subterranean passageways connecting one life to another. They obstruct alibis of complexity and exceptionality, various versions of the notion “It’s different for me.”

The question of clichés is partially a question of purpose and genre: Clichés might offer the consolation of company in a broken world; that doesn’t necessarily make them art. I’ve certainly felt my own resistance to clichés and their overhandled polish. But I’ve also come to recognize that I resist them for good reasons and bad ones: I resist them because I want to grant room for nuance and complexity; but I also resist them because I’m afraid of the fact that in certain basic ways my experience is just like everyone else’s, and I deeply want to believe in the exceptionality of my own interior life.

[...] Clichés work against us when they replace our tongues entirely, when the greeting card messages supplant our own. They work best when they link our singular experiences rather than efface them — when they function as dangling strings around which the rock candy of individual experience crystallizes....

http://www.vqronline.org/nonfiction-crit...literature

EXCERPT: [...] Deidre Shauna Lynch, the Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, has just published a book titled Loving Literature: A Cultural History. To canvass the history of this concept called literary love, the book winds its tortured and tortuous way through that important British cultural chunk between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Lynch wishes to uncover “how it has come to be that those of us for whom English is a line of work are also called upon to love literature and to ensure that others do so too.”

Except I’m not certain that anyone is really calling upon academics to love the subject they study—the point is that they seem categorically incapable of such love, and so they are being pitied for so ardently missing the point of literature.

[...] Lynch dislikes that academics “must make their peace with the fact that viewed from the outside their work does not look like work,” but this again misses how academics are perceived by those sensible enough to dwell outside their ranks: The problem is precisely that their work looks too much like work—onerous, meticulous, pointless, jargon-soaked work without application either to literature or to living. “My experience,” writes Lynch, “does not suggest to me that the personal is repressed when departments of English go about their ostensibly clinical official business.”

Very glad to have her word that her own experience refutes our perception of English departments—although that term “suggest” seems rather unsure of itself, does it not?—but the rest of us have had our own experiences of reading what those English departments produce. We have the fruits of those experiences, and the fruits are rotten: unreadable prose and classes with incomprehensible names. Also: Think twice about any writer who doesn’t mind using the term “business” when referring to “literature.” (Lynch’s previous book has the mind-warping title The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning.)

Seemingly displeased with the conception of literature as having the rare ability to enlarge our understanding of ourselves and others, Lynch has this to say: “We don’t treat literature as a thing but as a person: lovers of literature construct the aesthetic relation as though it put them in the presence of other people and with the understanding that the ethical relations so conjured must not be instrumentalized.”

Good luck parsing whatever that last part is supposed to mean, but clearly she prefers to treat literature as a “thing” and not as a “person,” and one wishes that academics would do just that, because it would be an immense improvement over what they actually do, which is to treat literature neither as a thing nor a person but rather as a frog splayed and pinned to a table. They then dispose of the frog’s innards and insert a tract for their own ideological purposes, a tract that has little or nothing to do with how that poor frog croaked its song in life...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...131915.htm

RELEASE: In an interstellar race against time, astronomers have measured the space-time warp in the gravity of a binary star and determined the mass of a neutron star -- just before it vanished from view.

The international team, including University of British Columbia astronomer Ingrid Stairs, measured the masses of both stars in binary pulsar system J1906. The pulsar spins and emits a lighthouse-like beam of radio waves every 144 milliseconds. It orbits its companion star in a little under four hours.

"By precisely tracking the motion of the pulsar, we were able to measure the gravitational interaction between the two highly compact stars with extreme precision," says Stairs, professor of physics and astronomy at UBC.

"These two stars each weigh more than the Sun, but are still over 100 times closer together than Earth is to the Sun. The resulting extreme gravity causes many remarkable effects."

According to general relativity, neutron stars wobble like a spinning top as they move through the gravitational well of a massive, nearby companion star. Orbit after orbit, the pulsar travels through a space-time that is curved, which impacts the star's spin axis.

"Through the effects of the immense mutual gravitational pull, the spin axis of the pulsar has now wobbled so much that the beams no longer hit Earth," explains Joeri van Leeuwen, an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and University of Amsterdam, who led the study.

"The pulsar is now all but invisible to even the largest telescopes on Earth. This is the first time such a young pulsar has disappeared through precession. Fortunately this cosmic spinning top is expected to wobble back into view, but it might take as long as 160 years."

The mass of only a handful of double neutron stars have ever been measured, with J1906 being the youngest. It is located about 25,000 light years from Earth. The results were published in the Astrophysical Journal and presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on January 8.