Patience, pets

While waiting for the next substantial blogpost to appear, here is a picture of a fairly huge window at the Royal Library. With a little luck, this afternoon will bring pictures from the academic celebrity spotting circuit. Sightings of Damasio, Zeki and Rizzolatti have been reported.

My favorite building

no 5, Washington Place. The Philosophy Department

A little less information, a little more reaction, please

”A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”. Herbert Simon.

Too much information can be detrimental to decisions. In his recent, excellent book ”How we decide” Jonah Lehrer (here’s a piece of decision worsening information for you: he’s charming and good looking as well) retells the story of how MRI was introduced as a diagnostic tool in medicine. MRI gives very detailed information about the interior state of the body. Lehrer tells us that, it had a very interesting effect on the treatment of back pains. This ailment, whose cause was previously elusive and mainly treated by resting, become possible pin down with the help of MRI scans, and to treat more effectively, or so one assumed.

One found things that seemed to cause the pain: Spinal disc abnormalities. These reasonably seemed to cause inflammation of the local nerves. This, however, was misleading: As it turn out, disc abnormalities does not normally cause back pain, and surgery recommended on the basis of mri scans is often unnecessary – and yet doctors seems to have difficulties disregarding the scan, which sure looks like the best diagnostic tool. ”Seeing everything” Lehrer writes ”made it harder to know what they should be looking at”.

Occasionally, when we have a lot of information we tend to think that the problem must be somewhere in that information, and that can make it harder to think about other solutions. Or, as Lehrer point outs in the phenomena of ”choking” among artist and athletes, it can make it harder to stop thinking and perform an activity that is best done automatically, or ”by ear”.

It is perhaps obvious that information – data – alone is useless: we need to know what is relevant, how information should be translated, interpreted, into inferences and decisions. But the point here is more upsetting: more information might be worse than useless – it can make you think that the thing you know more about is more relevant than it is. Come to think of it, this seems to be the defining characteristic of an academic.

Nominative determinism

”Hey!” someone with the authority to command my attention wrote to me today ”You should take a look at this book” and then there was a link to ”Law and the Brain” by authors Semir Zeki and – wait for it – Oliver Goodenough. I congratulate you, Sir, on a fabulous name. Those, ”good enough”, are also the two last words of my dissertation. As if the title and the splendid collaborator and the recommendation weren’t enough the get me to read the book, some mechanism of nominative determinism seems to drive me towards it as well.

Science Fiction, when the science is not fictitious

Around 50 pages before the end of a Richard Powers novel, I pause and hesitate and fret a bit. Once again, I’m heading towards that unenviable state of having nothing by Richard Powers left to read. ”Generosity” is highly recognisable, veering towards the parodically Powerisian (”Powerful”? The New Yorker ought to have a field day setting titles to reviews). On the one hand, there is the Science (this time around: the science of affective enhancement), on the other: the people doing the science, or being affected by the science (Geneticist, Science-reporter,Psychologist, Writing-Class Teacher, Unaccountably Happy Algerian girl). Powers is that rare thing, someone who writes excellently stuff on both topics. The science is a bit pushed aside this time, made redundant by common knowledge perhaps, and there might be something a bit off about some of the characters (the theme of his former book, the Echo Makers, btw), but in the end, the objection just boils down to the fact that it is too short.

Radio Days

Tonights episode of the chockingly popular radio show ”Filosofiska Rummet” (The Philosophical Room) features Yours Truly, the philosopher, translator and allround splendid person Jeanette Emt and the multitalented David Polfeldt, managing director at Ubisoft Massive and author of children’s books. We will talk about the value of pleasure. I will argue that pleasure is very good indeed, and the other two will suggest that maybe it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.

And, as I am doing my best to outstay my welcome in the media (really, this romance must come to an end sometime), I’ll be featured in next weeks episode as well, discussing the use of empirical methods in moral philosophy. In short: For the next week or so, I’ll be the spoon in your coffee, the knife that butters your bread.

(Foto: Thomas Lunderquist, Lokatt media)

The media is the message, and the media is gingerbread.

This is the motive from the cover of (for?) my dissertation, made from gingerbread. It is totally edible, but, according to certain critics, a bit hard to digest.

On a lighter note

On a lighter note, here is a picture of some cookies.

(Cookies enabled by my fabolous wife, Alice)

Another day, another photoshoot

For the second time this week, I find myself drinking wine in the early afternoon, prompted by a photographer. This time, it’s my wife who is organizing the event, a december food thing. Our kitchen often looks like this.

Who likes short shorts?

Lately, the question ”what is your dissertation about” has become somewhat more frequently asked of me. Forthy-five minutes later, I usually get the impertinent question if I’d mind making the answer a bit shorter. Well, I do mind, but allright. So I end up experimenting with different short-versions, none of which is unqualifiedly true. But then again, to be unqualifiedly true is pretty much to ask of any theory. After all, my argument is that hedonism is true enough. Anyway: I’d thought I’d give it another go, and to give you in less than, say 200 words, the gist of my theory of value. Ready? Here we go:

What’s good? Opinions diverge, so we turn to the more basic question: What do we say when we say that something’s good? What would make that statement true? Theories are wildly at odds with each other. What to do? It seems we are dealing with different uses of the term ‘good’, and we must decide how to treat this problem. The first decision is to look for their common origin, so we can say that these uses are variations on a common theme. The other decision is to treat goodness as a natural property.

Whatever value is, it must correspond to what we believe about it. We might be mistaken about it, but cannot be totally wrong. Value should fit with our beliefs about value and be part of the causal explanation of those beliefs. I argue that pleasure fits with many of our value beliefs, especially regarding how value relates to motivation, and it is universally believed to be valuable. Hedonic processes, are also a key part of the causal explanation of our evaluations, and evaluating abilities. This means that the common beliefs that the theory does not make true, it can explain away. Pleasure is value.

How did I do?