Adam Curtis’ All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Part 1

With thanks to Adam Curtis © 2011.

Introduction

This documentary takes its name from a 1967 poem of Richard Brautigan which called for a cybernetically-programmed ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and mammals living in perfect harmony and stability. By contrast, the film implies that humans have been colonized by the machines they have built: although we don’t realize it, everything we see in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. Computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us. Hugh Montgomery summarised the suggestions made by the film as follows: “By putting our faith in computers [or unfeeling bureaucracies more generally] to create a stable, democratic world order… we’ve become politically and economically naïve and dulled to the business of real social change.”

Logical Conclusions...

Reblogged from G. Norman Lippert's Shiftlock:

OK, just following the logic to its inevitable conclusion:  If sex is such an essential ingredient to women’s health that contraceptives should be provided by law, how long before the government starts providing actual sexual partners to those who cannot find them on their own?

Seriously, if free sex is a right that must be provided by law, what about those poor, awkward, less-than-attractive people for whom free contraceptives would be merely a cruel joke, rather like providing ice cube trays to someone stranded in the Mojave desert. 

Read more… 62 more words

Witty little point about Obama's plans.

Infinity and Space – BBC Horizon (2010)

Intuitively, a finite universe seems much more reasonable to us than an infinite one, if for no other reason than because in an infinite universe (or multiverse) everything that could happen, would happen.

Some Facts for International Women’s Day

(NB: A couple of these facts date from 2008 but none are any more out of date than that.)

On average, women in the UK are paid 17% less than men in full time work, and 38% less in part time work. This is particularly unequal because they are at least twice as likely as men to be relegated to the outskirts of society that is part time or temporary work. A very disproportionately high amount of this part time work is in the very underpaid sectors known as the 3 C’s: Cooking, Cleaning and Caring. More worryingly, disabled women are 3 times less likely to work than disabled men and this is before the sharp cuts the government is presently making to disability support. Indeed, 72% of the government’s planned cuts will come from women, and it is already the worst time for female unemployment in 23 years.

Critique of Libet on Free Will

The experiments of the physiologist Benjamin Libet are famous for their unique contribution to the free will/determinism debate to the extent that in popular imagination they are often believed to have disproved the existence of free will.

Gay Marriage?

The question of whether the law should call civil partnerships marriages is a merely semantic dispute. It is not about equality, under the existing legislation in Britain same-sex couples already have that, and it’s not about homophobia either. It’s simply that the term ‘marriage’ by contrast to near synonyms ‘wedding’ or ‘union’ requires two heterogeneous elements mixed to create something new. To make a crude example, some salad can go together to make a nice salad, but fried chicken and piri piri sauce- that’s a marriage. But of course it goes deeper than that. It is also about mystery, and here the mystery is the unknown nature -yet wondrous complementarity- of the other (in both mind and body).

The semantic dispute doesn’t only come down to whether or not the ceremonies take place in the context of a belief system, but also to the content of a belief. Surprisingly, many people disagree with gay marriage even though they don’t believe that homosexuality is condemned by god.

In our cultural heritage, marriage has always been the Christian sacrament of holy matrimony, a ritual practise which symbolises not just a committed romantic relationship between two people, but the union of two people into one biological whole from which new life (literally) flows as a transformation of their love.

Buddhism & Christianity, Part 2: Differences

After my suggestions about an inclusive model for common ground between Christian and Buddhist philosophies the following discussion took place on another site. Thus we begin with a couple of ‘guest posts’ and then see my response to them.

Robert Peston’s The Party’s Over: How the West Went Bust

Unfortunately I've exhausted my quota of interestingness per article on this pic.

As I know even less about economics than I do law you’ll be happy to know this isn’t an opinion piece but a summary of the documentary series. With thanks to Robert Peston ©BBC, December 2011.

 The 2008 Crash will likely lead to the worst decline in the real standard of living since the Great Depression. There have been a variety of documentary treatments of the Crash ranging from Charles Ferguson’s award-winning Inside Job to Michael Moore’s lighthearted yet heartbreaking Capitalism: A Love Story. All such treatments are necessarily inadequate due to the complexity of the events (especially my personal favourite, Adam Curtis’  All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – since that tried to cover the Crash in a couple of minutes!). While I would like to compare their perspectives for you, I really am far too ignorant of how money works to do so (both the books I’ve bought on the financial crisis appear resolute in their determination to remain unread). Perhaps Peston (the BBC News economics editor) will enlighten me?

Eudaimonology Project Update

My post which was the most original (philosophically) so far was a discussion of the relationship between Eudaimonology and Soteriology. I posed a few questions about the former which will take a long time to answer (such is philosophy).

At the most general level my project is to defend eudaimonology as highly relevant and as the central concern of philosophy. Of course an important part of this project is refining an appropriate definition of the subject. While so far I have only made introductory posts about a third of the different traditions I’m aware of, I realised a working definition while reading the other night. If I remember correctly it looked something like this…

Eudaimonology is study of how human life is to be lived, focusing on:

1. What human beings are (the task of philosophical anthropology),

2. What makes human life fulfilling (a conceptual as well as psychological question),

3. How human beings should interact with one another (the task of ethics and socio-political philosophy),

4. How human nature can transcend itself to become something greater (a soteriological question).

Regarding the first of these, Vincent Nichols said recently that the understanding of human nature is an excellent basis upon which to carry out public discourse because it cuts away pernicious individualism. I agree. Though my expertise falls more towards the study of point 4 (and to a lesser extent points 3 and 2), we should begin from the common acceptance of the human species as the product of natural selection. After this, there are many different theories/traditions in the debate on human nature. I have yet not studied these but I have indicated my sympathy for Marx’s early writings.

More Thoughts On ‘Pro-Life’

This is not a pro-life blog. I am not a pro-life campaigner. And I’m certainly not a lawyer (something you are no doubt as relieved about as myself). But after my previous posts touched on issues of applied ethics without going into them particularly comprehensively, I would just like to clarify some of the other reasons that I’m against euthanasia and abortion.