The A-Unicornist

Just this week, the legislature in my state of Oklahoma has:


Introduced a bill to impeach ObamaPassed a bill that would make performing an abortion a felonyIntroduced a bill that would allow students, based on religious objections, to have a bathroom that bars transgender students And just a couple of months ago, the passed legislation that would ask voters to restore the 10 Commandments monument to the Capitol after the state supreme court ruled it unconstitutional.
Now look, this is bad enough. Most of this legislation is flagrantly unconstitutional. Our governor Mary Fallin, by most accounts an incompetent stooge, at least had the foresight to veto the abortion law and save the state hundreds of thousands in legal fees from a sure-loss court case. 
But here's what really grinds my gears: shit is bad in Oklahoma, and a good deal of it is the legislature's fault. Years of Laffer-Curve economics has led the state to a record budget shortfall that is threatening funding for medi…

For decades, the neurocomputational metaphor has been an integral part of research that attempts to bridge the gap between the biological structure of the brain and cognition. But it is, alas, only a metaphor. In an essay for Aeon, psychologist Robert Epstein argues that your brain does not process information, store knowledge, or retrieve memories. In short: it is not a computer.

Some choice quotes:
We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not. And..
[The] IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – eithe…

Christian theodicies contend that God has a Divine Plan, and thus morally sufficient (if inexorably mysterious) reasons for allowing this child to suffer. (Click to embiggen...)

His story is one of many. If there's anything that convinces me a theistic god — one who is invested in human affairs — does not exist, it's childhood cancer. And the weaselly rationalization that it's a necessary part of God's unknowable, mysterious, yet presumably perfect plan just strikes me as the most blind and desperate kind of faith.

Galen Strawson, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, writes in a New York Times op ed that the "mystery of consciousness" isn't really so mysterious:

Consciousness Isn't a Mystery. It's Matter.

In his own way, he argues for non-eliminative physicalism:

Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the idea that everything is physical, make the most extraordinary move that has ever been made in the history of human thought. They deny the existence of consciousness: They become “eliminativists.”  This amazing phenomenon (the denial of the existence of consciousness) is a subject f…

Salon has an interview with Sean Carroll in which he discusses his new book, The Big Picture, which releases tomorrow (May 10th). Readers of this blog will no doubt be aware of my fondness for Hawking's model-dependent realismor what I consider to be a cognitive-science-based variation, Lakoff's embodied realism. And while I've often referenced Carroll's old blog post about free will as evidence he shares the basic ideas, some of his comments in the Salon interview certainly have a ring about them that should be familiar to anyone versed in those empirically responsible epistemologies:

Naturalists don’t all agree with each other. On the one end of the spectrum you have the most hard-core variety, who claim that only the most deep-down fundamental description of nature can be said to describe something “real.” They might say that consciousness, or morality, or free will, are all just illusions. On the other end of the spectrum you have naturalists who believe in only th…