Slate’s Steven Metcalf offers insight into the evolution of Nozick’s thoughts on libertarianism.

Our universe might be really, really big — but finite. Or it might be infinitely big.

Both cases, says physicist Brian Greene, are possibilities, but if the latter is true, so is another posit: There are only so many ways matter can arrange itself within that infinite universe. Eventually, matter has to repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways. So if the universe is infinitely large, it is also home to infinite parallel universes.

If nature is governed by laws, three questions arise:

1. What is the origin of the laws?
2. Are there any exceptions to the laws, i.e., miracles?
3. Is there only one set of possible laws?

Print and read The Grand Design demandingly (highlight and take notes). Come to our next session prepared to unpack it.

Errol Morris is a filmmaker whose movie “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004. He has also directed “Gates of Heaven,” “The Thin Blue Line,” “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” “A Brief History of Time” and “Standard Operating Procedure.” He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and lives with his wife and two French bulldogs (Boris and Ivan) in Cambridge, Mass.

Read this five-part piece that Morris contributed in the New York Times. I read it in installments as it was published and have wanted to discuss it ever since.

Unlike many of the readings that I “assign” you, I do not have a list of questions or prompts to guide you. Just read and enjoy this piece and come to our next session prepared to contribute to a discussion about it. Oh, and bring a printed copy to our next session.

Read Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace and consider the following questions before our next session:

• What are the ethical dimensions of Wallace’s piece?
• What connections, if any, are there between ethics and morality?
• Would the “knife in the head” or the slow boil method strike you as more ethical?
• “Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in?”
• Interpret and apply this rich line from the text, “[s]ince pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.”

If you are interested, here is an interview with Wallace recorded two years before his suicide.

In this conversation recorded as part of the New York Public Library series, Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants) try to convince Robert that the things we make—from spoons to microwaves to computers—are an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And we may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.

Listen to this 20 minute discussion and consider the following questions for our next session:

• What does technology want?
• According to Kevin Kelley, what is the “technium”? What does it want? What are its tendencies?
• Where do good ideas come from? How do “eureka moments” figure into good ideas?
• What are the relationships between technology and good ideas?
• How does this connect to the philosophy of Emergence?
• How, if at all, might technologies evolve along with human/social evolution? Is there an “inevitable” correlation between these evolutionary processes? Inherent in this question is another question: how might the history of technology and the history of humankind inextricably intertwined?
• Does technology “invent” us as much as we invent technology?
• What is the adjacent possible? What might be the implications of this concept?
• How have humans created themselves? How has technology created the human experience?
• Can we understand the universe without advanced technology?

Prof. Sugata Mitra is currently (2010), Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated at many places, Hole in the Wall (HIW) has more than 23 kiosks in rural India. In 2004 the experiment was also carried on in Cambodia^. His interests include Education, Remote Presence, Self-organising systems, Cognitive Systems, Physics and Consciousness.

Mitra’s experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel Q & A – this subsequently went on to become the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

Watch this 20 minute video, take some notes, consider the questions below and come prepared to discuss.

• How does this connect to Life in Limbo from “Turbulence Magazine” and Politics of the Common by Michael Hardt?
• How does this connect to the philosophy of Emergence?
• What do Mitra’s ideas suggest about educational philosophy and educational policy?

Type a one-page essay in support of (yes, I am only seeking pro-arguments so get into character if need be) the following prompt and post it in the comments section below. Feel free to perform some research–draw on Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, William F. Buckley, Herbert Spencer, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, et. al. Of course, you may quote such philosophers so long as you do so sparingly.

“Man owes nothing to society and man should ask nothing from society.”

I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass mankind? –Nietzsche

Analyze the following sources and come to our next session with written responses to the questions below.

Required Sources:

• The Wiki entry on the ubermensch just to get started
• A short passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrusta, Towards the Ubermensch
• A passage from Blood Meridian, pages 248-249 or a professional reading of this passage (for you aural learners)

Optional Sources:

• A Wiki entry which summarizes Blood Meridian
• A link from the University of Virginia which describes the real Glanton Gang
• A video discussion of Blood Meridian from an undergraduate class at Yale (The American Novel Since 1945 with Professor Hungerford)
• Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrusta (entire book online for free)

Response Questions:

1. Define and describe the concept of the ubermensch.
2. Apply the definition and description from #1 to characters throughout history, both real and imagined. Think: Omar from The Wire, Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, Dexter, etc.
3. Assess the functions and dysfunctions of the pragmatic applications of the ubermensch philosophy.
4. How does Judge Holden personify the Nietzsche’s ubermensch?

Pinker’s deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web.

In 2003, Harvard recruited Pinker for its psychology department from MIT. Time magazine named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004.

Watch this video (there are 2 parts, 10 minutes each…here is part two) take notes and respond to these questions:

• Describe our physiological reaction to swears
• List the five “Contents of Swears” and explain the emotions that these types of words elicit
• What are the five reasons that people swear? Are any of these reasons unreasonable? Are there other reasons?
• Why do we need dysphemisms? What are the functions and dysfunctions of dysphemisms?
• What are the functions of idiomatic swearing?
• How and why are swears culturally specific?
• In conclusion, why do we swear? Oh, and why do authorities try to cease our swearing?

In this video, Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce — and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

• Why is Moskowitz’s assertion “enormously” important?
• What does the Grey Poupon story suggest?
• How does Moskowitz battle with Plato?  (hint: absolutism)
• What conclusion does Gladwell draw from his studies of Moskowitz? To what extent and in what ways do you agree with Gladwell’s conclusion?

BTW, here is Gladwell on The Ketchup Conundrum from the New Yorker. Awesome.

In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds — and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.

In watching this video (18 minutes) take notes. In doing so, consider the following questions:

• What is the relationship between language and thought?
• What is the relationship between language and human interaction?
• How and why do we “veil” our speech?
• How would the human experience (both personal and political) be different if language only had literal/direct connotations?
• What is Pinker’s thesis and what is philosophical about it?

Bring your notes and your responses to these questions to our next session.

There has been quite the hullabaloo these days about implications of the financial troubles of newspapers  in the West. For some time, I feared that the newsroom cutbacks in all newspapers and the outright bankruptcy and closing of others, would have a profoundly negative impact on American society. I was convinced by the assertions of David Simon, Steve Coll and Bob Garfield. However, I recently came around on this issue and decided that I have no valid reason to mourn the death of newspapers in America. Instead, I found myself as angry at newspapers as ever.

Then I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, On the Media (you should give a listen to their weekly, one-hour meta-gab ) where the host, Bob Garfield, invited listeners to email him with a eulogy (he seemed to be looking for nostalgia) for the dead American newspaper industry.

Here is my response to Bob Garfield’s call for eulogies

Now read a compelling argument to the contrary that is probably more convincing (and certainly more well-written) than mine: David Simon’s testimony to the Senate Hearing on the Future of Journalism. You can also watch him deliver this speech in the Senate

During our next seminar, we will discuss:

• Do the newspapers’ failures account for their insolvency? Or did modern technologies destroy the newspapers (or both)?
• Do we need newspapers in their current incarnation?
  
• Can we trust that a superior mechanism of digging up and delivering news will emerge in the place of newspapers?
• Can we rely on ‘democratic’ or ‘citizen’ journalists? (think ‘Emergence’)
  
• What should the role of the government be in saving newspapers (for instance, the French government bailed out Le Monde)?

Come to our next session with some well-reasoned, written responses to the above questions.

What is a memory? Science writer Jonah Lehrer tells us is it’s a physical thing in the brain… not some ephemeral flash. It’s a concrete thing made of matter. And NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, who studies fear memories in rats, tells us how with a one shock, one tone, and one drug injection, you can bust up this piece of matter, and prevent a rat from every making a memory. LeDoux’s research goes sci-fi, when he and his colleague Karim Nader start trying to erase memories. And Nader applies this research to humans suffering from PTSD.

According to the latest research, remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process. It’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7 second memory.

Listen to this piece from WNYC’s “Radiolab”

What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies, all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. How? That’s our question this hour. We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, even our very own brains. Featured: author Steven Johnson, fire-flyologists John and Elizabeth Buck, biologist E.O. Wilson, Ant expert Debra Gordon, mathematician Steve Strogatz, economist James Surowiecki, and neurologists Oliver Sacks and Christof Koch.

Listen Here (1 hour)

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade.

Listen Here (1 hour)