Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The issue of "free will" is a multi-front forever war in philosophy.  What does the phrase mean?  Do humans have it?  Is it necessary for the coherence of important ideas about moral responsibility to presume that we have it? One of the fronts in the war involves conscious human intentions and their timing.  Do we really form conscious intentions to do X before we do X?  Or are conscious intentions just confabulated after the fact -- after our neurological unconscious has already reached a point of no return? And what notion of free will could survive a "yes" answer to that question?  In 1983, an important paper, by Benjamin Libet at al,  appearing in a scientific journal aptly entitled BRAIN, discussed experiments that seemed to show that humans make decisions before we are even aware of it.  This seemed to destroy any intuitively plausible role for free will, or for the operation of "will" at all.  But of late neurologists have been looking...

  A friend told me this joke sometime in the 1990s. Excuse the techno archaisms.  Various scientists combined their efforts to formulate in proper computer programming form the question "Does a God exist?".  They asked the question to the most sophisticated computer and software available.  The answer came back, "data insufficient."  The team then connected this computer to a lot of other powerful computers and beefed up its data storage. They asked the same question. The answer came back, "data insufficient." Then they combined all the electrical energy available on planet earth with all the knowledge, fed it all in with this computer as the center.  They asked again, "Does a God exist?" Comes the response.  "Yes ... now."    Seemed funny. So How Exactly CAN AI Kill Us All? Experts Explain What That Viral Anthropic Tweet Is Referring To

  No, he appears not to have said that.  A rumor has circulated online in recent days to the effect that President Trump has threatened to turn off the water to Niagara Falls, a natural landmark famously shared by the U.S. and Canada, unless Canada agreed to pay a "100% tariff." The rumor is generally accompanied by an ALLEGED screenshot of the "Truth Social" posting that in turn includes these words,   We have the control. We have the valves. We can reduce the flow, or shut it down completely, and we will if necessary. Canada has been taking advantage of the United States for decades, getting a world-famous natural resource basically for free while insulting our country and making it harder for American businesses.   Snopes has looked into it and has concluded that the screen shot is a fake and the rumor it supports is just false. Perhaps it was an effort at satire gone awry,  Anyway, for the curious, the chief executive of the United Staes does not "have...

  Not surprisingly, the US goes its own way on much journalistic lingo, using terms distinct from those employed in the same context by the rest of the English speaking world. Consider the "sidebar". Often, for a important story, there is material that is pertinent to an understanding of the story but that does not QUITE fit into it. A story, after all, is a narration, not a data dump.  Anyway, the additional material that bears upon a story is often carried separately, by its side, or within a outline (a "box") nearby.   In the US, this is called a "sidebar." In rest of Anglophone, it is a "boxout".  Consider also the "subhead". This is an often italicized bit of material below the headline but before the lead paragraph ("lede graf").  In the US -- subhead.  Rest of world -- standfirst.  And the "copy editor"? This is the last person between the journalist writing a story and the general public about to read it.  Th...

It has been twenty-five years since airplanes, hijacked by terrorists, struck each of the two towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and a third struck the Pentagon. A fourth flight crashed in a rural field in western Pennsylvania, apparently because passengers resisted the hijackers/terrorists.  One odd thing about the 25th year commemorations -- they arrive as our ears are still ringing with the 250th anniversary of our independence as a nation.  This means the period SINCE that terrorist attack represents one tenth of the period of our existence as a nation. THAT fractional amount will only increase with time. This makes me feel old. The point?  Just that once changes are underway they can proceed with dizzying speed and a quarter century zips away. Whoosh. Some of the changes that were set in place by the attacks of September 11 2001 are moving at dizzying speed even now.  The United States responded by declaring a "War on Terror." What this turned ...

A little more than a year and a half ago I offered on this blog a precis of a book by two political scientists, Buzan and Waever, that offered a round-the-world tour of security issues on a region by region basis as of 2003. Indeed, I wrote several posts on the subject through January and February of 2025. Today, I would like to quote from something that appears early in that work that seems to me to have held up well in 2026, twenty-three years after the Buzan and Waever publication. The issue is why "premodern states" are under pressure to conform to "international standards".  "For premodern states, the threat from globalisation is broadly defined by an inability to measure up to international standards of good governance. The danger is either that they will be demoted in the ranks of international society to some sort of trusteeship status, no longer recognised as legally equal and capable of self-government, or that they will simply be neglected and allow...