Daniel Aaron Lazar

On Robert Nozick

Slate’s Steven Metcalf offers insight into the evolution of Nozick’s thoughts on libertarianism.

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Free Will?

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the problem of free will – the extent to which we are able to choose our actions.

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A Physicist Explains Why Parallel Universes May Exist

Our universe might be really, really big — but finite. Or it might be infinitely big.

Both cases, says physicist Brian Greene, are possibilities, but if the latter is true, so is another posit: There are only so many ways matter can arrange itself within that infinite universe. Eventually, matter has to repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways. So if the universe is infinitely large, it is also home to infinite parallel universes.

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Fun with Kant

The Kant Song:

Kant Attack Ad:

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Stephen Hawking: The Grand Design

If nature is governed by laws, three questions arise:
1. What is the origin of the laws?
2. Are there any exceptions to the laws, i.e., miracles?
3. Is there only one set of possible laws?

Print and read The Grand Design demandingly (highlight and take notes). Come to our next session prepared to unpack it.

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The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is

Errol Morris is a filmmaker whose movie “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004. He has also directed “Gates of Heaven,” “The Thin Blue Line,” “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” “A Brief History of Time” and “Standard Operating Procedure.” He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and lives with his wife and two French bulldogs (Boris and Ivan) in Cambridge, Mass.

Read this five-part piece that Morris contributed in the New York Times. I read it in installments as it was published and have wanted to discuss it ever since.

Unlike many of the readings that I “assign” you, I do not have a list of questions or prompts to guide you. Just read and enjoy this piece and come to our next session prepared to contribute to a discussion about it. Oh, and bring a printed copy to our next session.

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Consider the Lobster

Read Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace and consider the following questions before our next session:

• What are the ethical dimensions of Wallace’s piece?
• What connections, if any, are there between ethics and morality?
• Would the “knife in the head” or the slow boil method strike you as more ethical?
• “Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in?”
• Interpret and apply this rich line from the text, “[s]ince pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.”

If you are interested, here is an interview with Wallace recorded two years before his suicide.

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What Does Technology Want?

In this conversation recorded as part of the New York Public Library series, Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants) try to convince Robert that the things we make—from spoons to microwaves to computers—are an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And we may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.

Listen to this 20 minute discussion and consider the following questions for our next session:

• What does technology want?
• According to Kevin Kelley, what is the “technium”? What does it want? What are its tendencies?
• Where do good ideas come from? How do “eureka moments” figure into good ideas?
• What are the relationships between technology and good ideas?
• How does this connect to the philosophy of Emergence?
• How, if at all, might technologies evolve along with human/social evolution? Is there an “inevitable” correlation between these evolutionary processes? Inherent in this question is another question: how might the history of technology and the history of humankind inextricably intertwined?
• Does technology “invent” us as much as we invent technology?
• What is the adjacent possible? What might be the implications of this concept?
• How have humans created themselves? How has technology created the human experience?
• Can we understand the universe without advanced technology?

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Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

Prof. Sugata Mitra is currently (2010), Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated at many places, Hole in the Wall (HIW) has more than 23 kiosks in rural India. In 2004 the experiment was also carried on in Cambodia^. His interests include Education, Remote Presence, Self-organising systems, Cognitive Systems, Physics and Consciousness.

Mitra’s experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel Q & A – this subsequently went on to become the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

Watch this 20 minute video, take some notes, consider the questions below and come prepared to discuss.

• How does this connect to Life in Limbo from “Turbulence Magazine” and Politics of the Common by Michael Hardt?
• How does this connect to the philosophy of Emergence?
• What do Mitra’s ideas suggest about educational philosophy and educational policy?

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Dr. Lawrence Lessig

Dr. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, who has been a pioneer in the Free Culture Movement and the founder of Creative Commons, is shifting his focus to fighting corruption in Washington DC. Though I am duly impressed by his efforts to combat corporate greed and influence over licensing arrangements, I am excited that he is devoted to getting to the core of the problem. Lessig has delivered his final lecture at Stanford and will be moving to Harvard to direct the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

He writes about his decision to shift focus here and he was recently interviewed by Terry Gross where he spoke about his decision to fight the next noble battle.

Though always the cynic, I am excited about the prospect of Lessig on a crusade, backed by the coffers of Harvard, to tackle corruption at the highest levels.

Check out his Ted Talk on laws that choke creativity. Brilliant.

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