Philosophy 101D

I found the video of the telepathic monkey!

Our final screening will be this Thursday at 7pm in Wohler Hall rm 24. Wohler is directly behind DKH.

We will be watching the documentary Love Machine by Peter Asaro and Doug Matejka. From the press release:

Love Machine considers the social and moral implications of building humanoid robots sophisticated enough to participate in social and emotional roles that are traditionally considered exclusively or even essentially human: friendship, sex and love. The film examines the actual technologies being developed in these directions, and discusses these issues with the people who are pursuing these technologies as well as those who seek to profit from them. It also confronts various social critics, commentators and philosophers of different perspectives in a effort to open a dialogue on what implications these technologies might have for human relationships in the future.

Among those interviewed are:

Roboticists:
Rodney Brooks, Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Hans Moravec, Carnegie Mellon University
Gill Pratt, Cynthia Breazeal, and Brian Scassellatti, MIT
Ken Goldberg, University of California, Berkeley.

Philosophers:
Daniel Dennett, Tufts University
Hubert Dreyfus, Univesity of California, Berkeley
Manuel DeLanda, Columbia University and Institute of Advanced Study-Princeton

Sex & Culture Commentators:
Carol Queen, Robert Morgan Lawrence and Lisa Palac
Ernest Green, Editor of Taboo Magazine

Childhood technology-use advocates:
Joan Almon, and Colleen Cordes

and the entrepreneurs building such products as the Sybian and Real Doll and others . . .

I am still puzzled by the idea that people are still siding with Dreyfus in the debate about the Internet and technology. I mean no offense to anyone who is sided with him, but I find flaws in any and all arguments that he makes. The entire first chapter covers the idea of Hyperlinks and their poor functionality on the Internet. Dreyfus argues that Hyperlinks are a threat to the way we live and the way that we get our information. He brings up the point that libraries are well organized and pieced together in groups according to what they are about, and that Hyperlinks are randomly assembled and have no real interconnection. However, Dreyfus states that the organization of Hyperlinks on the Internet is a threat to the way that we ind information,but he never states exactly how. Dreyfus merely expresses his frustrations with the way that the Internet works. Furthermore, the use of any noteworthy search engine eliminates the need for any sort of organization.
An argument that has been brought up in class and also in other posts that I have read is that over use of the Internet causes isolation and an increasing lack of need or want for human interaction. I agreed that this was possible to a certain extent for a while and could see it in examples of kids playing games online and doing nothing else. Clark makes a very strong argument against this in chapter 6 when he states “According to a University of Warwick (UK) study, heavy Internet surfers are more likely not less to belong to some real-world community group, and less likely to spend time passively watching TV. Talking to others on the Internet encourages, it seems, the appreciation that we can get together with like-minded folk and actually make a difference in the world. This goes directly along with the idea of the Internet as a shoe and not a crutch.

I was sent this video by a student I had last semester. Feel free to leave a comment!

Click the link below to see all the videos shown during last week’s movie screening. Comments are appreciated!

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Please respond by Tuesday’s class for participation credit for this week.

Prompts and Questions:

• Are we natural born cyborgs? Is the mind extended? Are our technological devices part of our (soft) selves?
• Does Clark’s revision of the old mind-body problem solve any of the Cartesian worries we encountered at the beginning of the semester? If so, which ones? If not, why not?
• Which examples in the text did you find especially convincing? Which ones were unconvincing? How does this hurt Clark’s argument?
• What similarities do you see between Clark and Gehlen? What are the differences between these two views?
• Clark boils down our interactions with technology to two fundamental dimensions: the transparency of the interface and the resulting expansion of our capacities. Are there any other ways in which technology might affect our cognitive abilities?
• Clark says the human brain is unique in its plasticity and opportunism. Is he right, or is there some other source of uniqueness? If so, does this fall into the Cartesian problem of dualism?
• Clark downplays the importance of the barrier between biology and technology. Is this barrier important? Why or why not?
• Clark says that language itself is an example of an external prop that not only extends our cognitive capacities but restructures the way we think about the world. Is language an example of an external tool?