Philosophy & Ethics

Do you want to ban cigarettes and legalize marijuana?  Did you cheer when a judge in one state broke the law regarding the Ten Commandments and hissed when a judge in another state broke the law regarding gay marriage? Freedom is a moving target, as is social authoritarianism, and how people seem to come down on one issue often shows how they think on a whole raft of other ones.  Social authoritarians exist among every political group - anyone who denies that is simply denying an uncomfortable truth about their fellow voters. Social authoritarians are creepy when they are in…

Miss Wombles, 1. Person first language. Learn about it. This is the first clue that indicates to me that you are not equipped to have this type of discussion. --part of a new comment on a two-year-old post The post, in itself, and the remainder of the person's comment aren't what's important here. Plenty of folks have tackled this issue of person-first language. Lydia of Autistic Hoya has done so several times. Stuart Duncan has covered it. I'm pretty sure there are few long-term bloggers in autism-land who haven't handled this issue. As part of my master's in psychology, APA strongly…

CHERRY HILL, NJ -- Standing next to my Dad under the watchful eyes of the sculpted Jesus I remembered well from childhood church services, I resolutely censored a mental curse. I hadn't attended Catholic mass regularly in years, and while I was embarrassed by my stumbling responses to some recently-reworded portions of the service, I was still absolutely certain of profanity's sacrilege during this particular Sunday hour. Whenever I'm home for a visit, I'm reminded of religion's formative importance during a childhood that included attending weekly mass and religion classes, singing in the…

My friend Benny (who produces the Rationally Speaking podcast) really hates the word “skepticism.” He understands and appreciates its meaning and long intellectual pedigree (heck, we even did a show on that!), but he also thinks — based on anecdotal evidence — that too many people apply a negative connotation to the term, often confusing it with cynicism. (And notice, to make things even more confusing, that neither modern term has the philosophical connotations that characterized the ancient skeptics and the ancient cynics!). On the contrary, I really like the word, and persist in using it…

All as about "quantum gravity" as about "the interpretations of quantum mechanics" shows only our misunderstanding of what quantum mechanics means and wants to tell us. Its "complementarity" is especially misleading without being wrong: It hides that wave-particle duality is also wave-particle invariance in the same degree. Our ordinary everyday intuition distinctly separating waves from particles is what misleads us. In fact they are the same in principle and this is what means the formalism of quantum mechanics based on complex Hilbert space.  The anti-isometric dual spaces (Riesz…

3) A scientific "paper" could be any file in the www2) The quotations should be always links: Not only to passages or texts, but also to images, audios, videos, blogs, sites, etc. - should be admitted as quotations 1) The reviewers are all Internet readers: The rating of a publication are its "reads", "downloads", "likes" "ratings", "kudos", etc.All human beings have the right to be scientists!

A short while ago we carried a strange claim from a group of ethicists at Oxford.  Not only should abortion be okay, actual children should be aborted even after they are born. They're ethicists so they can be dismissed rather quickly. Tomorrow they are just as likely to be arguing there should be no abortion at all if you can't abort newborns.  Yet there is growing concern that the government doing more things for more people in the best interests of overall society is leading to a resurgence in the social authoritarian rationalizations that gripped the country (and really, the…

How do you effect change, change that's big, change that's lasting? Can you, can one person, have that kind of impact? I remember arguing adamantly with my grandfather nearly 24 years ago that one person can change the world. We argued back and forth for a good long while, my grandfather getting more agitated but also more resolute that one person couldn't make any difference at all. "Jesus Christ!" I yelled at him, frustrated but not taking the Lord's name in vain. One man made all the difference. One man's followers changed the world. My grandfather wasn't having any of it. Lincoln. Surely…

If we had a prize for Most Celebrated Business Hero in America, it would have to be Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple. The agile doge of Silicon Valley had a “death stare” you couldn’t escape.He had a up-from-orphan back story you couldn’t resist.And he had the vision of ten of his fellow technology executives. That’s why--we’re told--Apple was so good at making the things we love. All things “I”, that is--from iPads and iPhones, to iPods and iTunes. Lately, it also seems that Jobs and the company he left behind were also awfully good at all things Me. Nothing illustrates that as well as…

This blog is more an ear than a tongue. It needs you, and we need a way to revere life while respecting the gift of our critical intellect. We may need to have fun, may need to let our ideas dance for and by themselves. Some elements of a fresh, non-authority-structured Religion 2.0 might include the following, without apologies for the fuzzy thinking that often starts good things off: ·        Respect for all life forms, tempered by pragmatic regard for potential threats posed by them ·        Respect for…