I’m speechless.

This is one of the most depressing things I've ever seen. If you have a spare hour I'd highly recommend the following documentary, unless of course you don't want to be depressed for the next week, in which case I suggest you avoid it at all costs.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUJSME0TORw
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch? ( Read more... )

"That's the trouble with 'pure' philosophical method here. It has no resources for developing, or even taking seriously, counterintuitive theories, but since it is a very good bet that the true materialist theory of consciousness will be highly counterintuitive... this means that 'pure' philosophy must just blind itself to the truth and retreat ( Read more... )

"I am what is sometimes known as a 'qualia freak' I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes... Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain... [and] you won’t have told me ( Read more... )

I don't know how many of you have been keeping track of the Minnesota Senate recount taking place between Al Franken and Norm Coleman, but it's getting pretty interesting. As it currently stands Coleman has a 282 vote lead, but there are still 5,600 uncounted and improperly marked ballots that are contested. Franken desperately wants those votes to ( Read more... )

A recent issue of Minds and Machines is devoted to the philosophy of Daniel Dennett. It includes an interview with Dennett, which is by and large pretty interesting, but which includes along the way the following remarkable passage:

David Chalmers and I have discussed this for what seems an indeterminable number of years, and he candidly grants that ( Read more... )

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil."

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter ( Read more... )

I registered for the Spring 2009 semester today. Hopefully it will be my last semester of undergrad so I decided to just take classes I’m moderately interested and other fluff courses in to get up to the total number of credits required to graduate (i.e. 120). I only need 13 more credits to go, and so I’ve enrolled into three 3 credit courses and ( Read more... )

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- From "Immortality" by Milan Kundera

I’ve started looking into graduate school programs in the last week or so. My intent is to specialize in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, and so the schools I will be applying to are somewhat known for those specialties. I've been told that one ought to apply to 8-10 programs. The following is the list of the schools I'm thinking about ( Read more... )