Where is Osama bin Laden

Just finished watching this documentary and it ended up being more thought provoking about a particular idea that I initially was not expecting to even come up. My overall feeling about the documentary was that it rightfully expressed that it doesn't matter where Bin Laden is because the conditions that gave birth to him and the conditions that make people follow people like him are still going to be there regardless of whether he lives or dies. It's true that he has become symbol of this radical movement where everything that is western is bad and ought to be destroyed, and removing this symbol would slow this kind of movement. But this radical movement is not going to die away if poverty is all over the place and people who express this radical thinking are the only ones who are around to offer some hope for the future (on earth as well as after life).

Anyways, about the interesting idea that I mentioned in my opening statements; there is one piece of american culture that is digested and enjoyed by even the most radical groups of individuals all over the arab culture, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan. Can anyone guess what that is? It's wrestling. Yes, American wrestling, which is thought by the general populace in the U.S. to be something that is on T.V. for the simple minded folks. But this is the piece of american culture that is accepted to the point that not only do they watch it, but they even sell merchandice (T - shirts for e.g.) and publicly wear it. In fact, I saw in the documentary one young individual wear a T - shirt about Jihad and a few scenes later a street store owner selling t - shirts with Rey mysterio, John Cena, Kane, undertaker, and other wrestling personalities. And I imagine they watch wrestling and enjoy it for the same reasons as american wrestling afficionados. Sure, at the most basic level, we enjoy it because includes these really interesting characters that look like suer humans and it contains violence. But when looked a little deeper wrestling shows also tend to contain storylines that flesh out these characters and their motivations for fighting. Various characters represent various archetypes, a hero fighting for all that's fair and good, a villain fighting for glory, a black and white character that's sometimes good and sometimes bad, among others. The storylines aren't that deep but they are good enough to express these viewpoints across.

I can say a lot more, but let me end this post by saying that this is one thing that we share with the muslim world. There are intellectuals who say that if we want to find something common with them, we have to analyze the chirtian and muslim holy texts and show that we are really all praying to the same god (chirtians and muslims at least). But this line of reasoning would be attractive to only those who actually know about these texts in good detail. Most people just don't care about religion to the extent that they actually put effort in understanding the metaphors expressed by these books. As Sartre would say, they are acting in "bad faith". But we have a common ground with our enjoyment of wrestling. If WWE puts effort in creating a face muslim character and the person playing that character has enough of personality to pull it off to the extent that people cheer for him instead of mindlessly chanting "U.S.A" whenever he wrestles, think about how the muslim world would actually change their perception about the U.S. Wrestling is a greatly underutilized tool that is being ignored by people who want to change american perception around the world. Most of the time, it's the simple ideas that are most effective.

Dennett on 300ms moral void

There are a number of experiments done by neuropsychologist Libet that indicates that our behavior is governed by unconscious processes that take place long before our consciousness is even aware that we have made such a decision. Dennett's counterpoint to this allegation is to simply state that Libet is still fixated on cartesian notion of what consciousness is. If we conceive of consciousness as being spread all over the brain and include unconscious processes as part of ourseleves, then there is no moral void. That is an interesting viewpoint and I think if the doctrine of emergentism is added where brain process become non deterministic, then there is more solid foundation on arguing against this moral void. Though I still think that there is something to be said about Libet's research.

On reductionism and eliminativism

Eliminativism is a very interesting theoretical stance that falls within the subcategory of reductionism. Reductionism states how a more basic explanation can be used to explain a particular phenomenon and the higher level explanation is thus not required any more. Eliminativism takes a stronger approach and states how basic level explanation eliminates the need for a higher level explanation. This reminds of Kuhn's views on structures of scientific revolution and how newer explanations supercede old ones. Though we know that in reality, old explanations always tend to make a return in one form or another. Can this critique be applied to eliminativism as well? Can it be said that it doesn't matter how much you explain away some empirical phenomenon in terms of how particular brain area is activated, there might be some explanation that only uses psychological entities as a basis for explanation but nonetheless that kind of explanation might be more suitable in a given situation?

Well it's because we are human beings, less abstract ideas will always be more attractive to us. But based upon what Gestalt psychology has taught us, it is possible to see nothing special in low more basic entities interact with one another but when the whole picture is taken into consideration, suddently the process makes sense.

Dennett's views of memes

The idea of memes is a rather interesting one. I imagine this move is made so that all types of ideas that have positive or negative connotations depending upon who you talk to is neutralized. If someone were to talk about democrats v.s. republicans, many would automatically cringe and form their own preconceived notions about what these ideas represent. But if you talk about these two ideas as being two competing memes, then suddenly these concepts don't lead us to forming preconceived notions any more. Religion is another big one. One important point that dennett makes regarding memes is that you can talk about these ideas with little or no reference to darwinian evolution and how these ideas can have importance without referring to one's biological dispositions. It's about how certain ideas are important and can maintiain a life of their own without any well known benefit being given to anyone. It's similar to an idea being distributed all over the place so that no one knows who is controlling it. Interesting concept.

Churchland on folk psychology and connectionism

His viewpoint on folk psychology seems fair enough. The basic argument put forth by Churchland on why we should not rely on folk psychology is that ideas in folk psychology are vague enough that they can be manipulated to justify any kind of description. Supporters of folk psychology can claim that their viewpoint are meant as an abstract description and not to be taken literally. Thus, if folk psychology can be manipulated to fit multiple different theories then having folk psychology doesn't serve any useful purpose.

Churchland in the same article talks about connectionism and how that is one of the more modern theories that can helop us understand how the brain functions. Churchland fully admits that just because we can create neural networks containing a few hundred nodes it does not mean that the brain or parts of brain function like that. Brain is innumerably more complex than the current neural networks that can be run on modern computers. Furthermore, some of the ways the neural networks function, such as back propagation to solve problems, is physically implausible biologically. Back propagation is implemented by our brains but not in the same way as neural networks function. These criticisms all seem fair.

But I personally feel that churchland fails to express why exactly are neural networks helpful in understanding how the brain functions. The solutions that are generated by neural networks can be different everytime we run it to come to a predefined solution, then what are we to gain from it?

Testing

A B C D E F G H ..... A B C ... CD..

Just finished reading "Insights of Genius" by Arthur Miller. Interesting book. The notion of more developed ideas being more abstract is really interesting.