Finger Tip

In November last year I was involved, like the drummer in Spinal Tap in 'a bizarre gardening accident' and lost the tip of one of my fingers. 

 

Because my brain still thinks I have a fingertip it assumes that lack of information from the end of my finger is caused by a gap or hole in any surface that I am touching.

 

If I run my finger through my hair, for instance, it feels as though my finger is poking into my skull. Unfortunately, as there is no information from where the end of my finger used to be, the inside of my skull seems empty. Thus my brain tells me that it doesn’t exist.

 

Apparently my brain will eventually work out that I have no finger tip and will be very annoyed about it.

Moral Relativism

 


The moral relativist under the bed appears to be taking a meta-ethical position. It may not be possible to establish an objective reason why it is wrong to scare children, but is the child right to be scared? Are moral relativists capable of anything simply because they do not lay claim to absolute moral values? A similar question is often asked about atheists.

Mind reading

The clip above shows pre-recorded scenes and reconstuctions of those scenes based on brain activity. You can see that the clearest images are to do with faces - the brain devotes enormous resources to this and to the interpretation of text. It would be interesting to see if a tiger or other predator would cause different images than that of an elephant

Could a robot be conscious?

There is a good summary of some of the key questions in Philosophy of mind in this BBC article, plus link a to a program called 'The Philosopher's Arms' in which:

a man discovers that his adopted daughter is a robot. Should he treat her any differently from before? She's indistinguishable from a human so should she have the same status as a human?