Adventures Among Ideas

I talk with film reviewer and literary critic CJ Sheu (許景順) about how he got into film reviewing, his favorite critics, the differences between academic and journalistic criticism, the relation between literature and film, and more.

Is it immoral to depict or commit violence in video games? What about sexual violence? Daniel Tarpy and I discuss the gamer's dilemma and the nature of games.

Why video games are not art but are still culturally valuable. Compares the aesthetic attitude to the ludic attitude.

Daniel Tarpy and I talk with Johannes "Yogi" Jaeger about a wide range of topics, including: why philosophy should be important to biology, how our ideas affect the world we live in, the differences between living systems and algorithm-based systems, Michael Levin's "Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere," and the importance of art.

Further thoughts on emergence and consciousness.

Written version: https://daviddennen.medium.com/emergence-and-consciousness-reconsidered-7a5c19d5759b

I and Daniel Tarpy try to figure out what emergence means. Is it novelty? Is it the unpredictable? Is it rare? Is it everywhere? What sorts of things are emergent? How do we know when something is emergent? In part 2 we try to explain in what sense we think consciousness is emergent. Along the way we discuss dualism, panpsychism, physicalism, idealism, and pragmatism.

On the concept of "qualitative binding" in art with reference to John Dewey, John Middleton Murry, Susanne Langer, Vincent van Gogh, and Richard Wright.

In this conversation I, Daniel Tarpy, and Tyler Piteo-Tarpy discuss several ways of thinking about fundamental reality, including idealism, materialism/physicalism, pantheism and panentheism, pragmatism/relationalism, and triunalism. The conversation is exploratory; hopefully we’ll revisit certain topics in more depth in the future.

Do we have free will? Does it matter? Daniel Tarpy joins me to discuss the free will debate. We discuss some classic and recent ideas about free will and determinism, including those of Robert Sapolsky, Kevin Mitchell, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, C. A. Campbell, and Roderick Chisolm.

I argue that the problem with Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (or Mary's Room Argument) against physicalism is that it's not about knowledge.