This is a sort of half-baked theory I was playing around with in my head. Maybe someone else will know where to take it from here?
Poststructuralist Semiotics and Evolutionary Psychology
Poststructuralism is a theory of semiotics (language and signs) that, broadly speaking, says that meaning is an effect of language, rather than a cause. In other words, what things mean to us is formed by language as opposed to our language having a 1-to-1 correspondence with reality. This theory, of course, takes the blank slate theory axiomatically. But what if we combine it with evolutionary psychology?
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Music, Video Games, and Murder
Any U.S. readers will be aware of this, but for those outside the U.S. who aren’t, there were two independent mass shooting incidents in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio over the weekend. As per usual, both immediately became political. Soon after political blame games, the other usual suspects are trotted out – music and video games.
Depression and Lethargy
I suffer from a menagerie of psychological issues. Depression tends to be the principle culprit, but as I’ve mentioned before, I am a recovering alcoholic and I also have Schizoid Personality Disorder.
Is Consciousness Logically Supervenient?
I am currently reading David J. Chalmers’ 1996 book “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory” which claims that, due to consciousness not being logically supervenient, there is no reductive explanation for consciousness. Thus Chalmers concludes that consciousness must be explained through a dualist paradigm. I have some issues with the argument.
Has Memetic Evolution Halted?
Memes are not just the captioned images shared on Facebook and Twitter. The original conception of the term was to conceptualize the propagation of propositional and cultural information between human minds. But has human society reached a point where the natural selection of memes has stalled, thereby halting memetic evolution?
Categories of Understanding, Qualia, and the Operations of Intuition – Revisited, Revised, and Expanded
What follows is, as the title says, a revisit, revision, and expansion of an earlier post I made. I may continue doing this as new thoughts come to mind while I work through my thinking on the subject of Philosophy of Mind.
Persistence of Self-Identity Through Time
Should I be responsible for things I did ten years ago? Or am I a different person now than I was then? And not just in a ‘personal growth’ way, but actually a different person.
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Should Social Media Monopolies Be Trust-Busted?
There is a lot of talk lately about social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. being gatekeepers to our free speech. I’ve written on the issue before from the free speech angle. Here I’m more interested in the human behavioral side of things.
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Does Journalism = Activism?
I just read this piece by conservative Christian Rod Dreher commenting on this story by Anthony Borrelli and Katie Sullivan Borrelli in the Ithaca Journal newspaper. Dreher says that this is tantamount to the Ithaca Journal getting permission from a commissar, which makes the story propaganda for the LGBTQ agenda. Is Dreher right about this?
Human Rights, Virtue Ethics, and Tyranny
If there are no human rights a priori of government force, how can tyranny be avoided? In the absence of any deontological justification for normative ethics, there is only virtue ethics.
Prelude to War?
Is this Iran’s “Gulf of Tonkin Incident?”
