Author: Huenemann

Interesting article here about the development of intelligent drones who would make better moral calls on the battlefield than humans. Excerpt:

A year after seeing the Apache helicopter video in 2005, Mr. Arkin, the Georgia Tech roboticist, won a three-year grant from the U.S. Army Research Office for a project with a stated goal of producing “an artificial conscience” to guide robots in the battlefield independent of human control. The project resulted in a decision-making architecture that Mr. Arkin says could potentially lead to ethically superior robotic warriors within as few as 10 to 20 years, assuming the program is given full financial support.

“I’m not talking about replacing war fighters one for one,” he says. “I’m talking about designing very narrow, very specific machines for certain tasks that will work alongside human war fighters to carry out particular types of operations that humans don’t do particularly well at, such as building-clearing operations.”

You should present something! Here is the announcement (the official site is here):

Welcome To The 21th SLCC Undergraduate Student Philosophical Conference Website!

We are thrilled to announce the 3rd annual International Philosophy Conference and the 21st Undergraduate Philosophical Conference held by Salt Lake Community College! This year’s conference will be a two day event in which we will explore ‘Education as a Creative Production of Culture.’

The academic portion of the conference will take place on Friday, November 9th, 2012. It will begin with a one-hour plenary session featuring our keynote speaker Dr. James Faulconer. This will be followed by a two-hour panel session in which students will present their work inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and Pierre Bourdieu.

The artistic portion of the conference will take place on Monday, November 12, 2012. In this session we will enjoy a presentation by Utah Symphony Music Director Thierry Fischer. He will be speaking about, ‘Noise and Noises: Being Surrounded by Noise Affects Our Perception and Creativity.’

We are currently seeking undergraduate students to present papers at the breakout panels. These panels will be conducted and moderated by SLCC and/or visiting professors. Each student will read their paper (maximum of 15 minutes), after which a discussion Q/A will take place. We hope to have 5-7 papers presented at each panel.

The papers may be broader in scope than just Friedrich and/or Bourdieu alone. Furthermore, they need not be exclusive to our conference (enabling students to present at more than one conference). The deadlines are as follows: October 1, 2012 for Abstracts and October 31, 2012 for final papers. Please use the Paper Submission Form to submit your entry to the conference. We will accept papers from anyone in the world that wishes to participate.

No, art cannot be created accidentally; and, no, the past cannot be changed. The oracle of Logan Lanes has spoken. Please note we’re changing the bowling night to the second Monday of each month, since Tuesdays this year are crowded with league play.
Our discussion (between rolls) about changing the past raised an interesting question. Suppose that the future has open possibilities. And suppose, for example, that it turns out that Obama is the last Democrat president of the U.S. When does it become true that Obama was the last U.S. President? Presumably, after that point in the future when the last president of the U.S. has served. But then doesn’t it seem that a fact in the future establishes a certain kind of fact in the past (i.e., in 200 years, it will become true that Obama was the last Democrat president)? Does that equal a change in the past?

For those of you in Kleiner’s special topics course, see the research here.

Here is an interesting conversation between Julian Baggini, who writes splendid popular books on philosophy, and Lawrence Krauss, a scientist who recently wrote a book arguing that physics can explain why there is something rather than nothing. It’s a civil but short dialogue, with some well-expressed disagreements. An excerpt:

Baggini: But if we want to know why someone made a sacrifice for a person close to them, a purely neurological answer would not be a complete one. The full truth would require saying that there was a “why” at work, too: love. Love is indeed at root the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones. How the biochemical and psychological points of view fit together is clearly puzzling, and, as your aside on free will suggests, our naive assumptions about human freedom are almost certainly false. But we have no reason to think that one day science will make it unnecessary for us to ask “why” questions about human action to which things such as love will be the answer. Or is that romantic tosh? Is there no reason why you’re bothering to have this conversation, that you are doing it simply because your brain works the way it does?

Krauss: Well, I am certainly enjoying the conversation, which is apparently “why” I am doing it. However, I know that my enjoyment derives from hard-wired processes that make it enjoyable for humans to tangle linguistically and philosophically. I guess I would have to turn your question around and ask why (if you will excuse the “why” question!) you think that things such as love will never be reducible to the firing of neurons and biochemical reactions? For that not to be the case, there would have to be something beyond the purely “physical” that governs our consciousness. I guess I see nothing that suggests this is the case. Certainly, we already understand many aspects of sacrifice in terms of evolutionary biology. Sacrifice is, in many cases, good for survival of a group or kin. It makes evolutionary sense for some people, in this case to act altruistically, if propagation of genes is driving action in a basic sense. It is not a large leap of the imagination to expect that we will one day be able to break down those social actions, studied on a macro scale, to biological reactions at a micro scale.