The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
At Rationally Speaking, Massimo Pagliucci weighs in on questions addressed in a roundtable discussion at Slate: Since the number of transistors in the networked computers worldwide is three orders of magnitude greater than the number of synapses in the human brain, might the Internet be conscious? Put another way, is there qualitatively something it is like to be the Internet?
Pugluicci, writing at Rationally Speaking, thinks the neuroscientist Christof Koch?s view, that there is nothing that rules this out in principle, given the complexity of the Internet, no more than a pledge of faith in the notion that the brain is just a very complex computer. Daniel Dennett?s view is more cautious ? he thinks that computational architecture matters when it comes to consciousness, and that the brain?s architecture is nothing like the Internet?s. But Piuglucci, like John Searle, points out that, complexity and architecture aside, the physical substrate matters too; the chemistry of carbon-based compounds ? organic chemistry ? may make certain properties, like consciousness, and indeed biological life itself, possible that inorganic materials like silicon cannot.
Pugluicci closes on a note of approbation. He thinks the cosmologist Sean Carroll makes the most important point, on the matter of biological function: ?Real brains have undergone millions of generations of natural selection to get where they are. I don?t see anything analogous that would be coaxing the Internet into consciousness.?
Ignoramuses, Yes, But of What Sort?: Voters in America are often accused of massive ignorance of the workings of the political system, the contents of the Constitution, and even the major political issues of the day. If that is so, how can citizens, through voting, manage to give free and informed consent to their governance, which is normally thought to be the source of the legitimacy of a democracy? At Three Quarks Daily, Scott Aiken and Robert Talisse argue that we need to distinguish two types of ignorance before drawing any conclusions about the quality of democracy in America. There is ?belief-ignorance,? which is just false belief, and ?believer-ignorance,? which is a deficiency in the competence of the subject to gather and assess evidence. Since one can carefully assess the evidence for a prospective belief and still end up believing something false (a routine occurrence in academic inquiry, for instance), one can be ignorant in the first sense without being ignorant in the second. And that sort of ignorance is perfectly compatible with democracy, since no one can be expected never to hold false beliefs. It is ?believer-ignorance,? rather, that might vitiate democratic legitimacy.
The Little Picture: At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlin Romano tries to separate the good Peter Sloterdijk from the bad. He identifies two strains in the prominent German philosopher: on one hand, he is an heir to Heidegger?s gauzy metaphysics, on the other, a hawk-eyed master of Kulturkritik. Romano thinks Sloterdijk does better with the closeup than the panorama. The work that emphasizes historical and cultural minutia over airy abstractions (see his fanciful treatment of sphericity as a master-concept) tend to leave a stronger impression.
Also:
The Los Angeles Times reviews Alan Ryan?s magisterial history of political philosophy.
Is there such a thing as a moral prodigy? Pea Soup devotes a thread to the question.
Frank Jackson takes stock of a classic argument about qualia in the 1980s.
The Los Angeles Review of Books publishes a piece on James Scott?s ?Two Cheers for Anarchism.?
An essayist wonders whether a distinctively female conscience exists, at the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/stone-links-collective-consciousness/
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