Colours, Corners And Complexity

"There is a philosophical question as to what one really sees". Wittgenstein's remark raises all sorts of questions: Does one see tables and chairs, people jumping up and down, their jumps, their sadness ? Does one see colours and forms, coloured forms, dynamic and static, that are above or to the left of other coloured forms ? If the latter, are these things one sees private entities or public entities as are, presumably, tables and chairs ? If both answers are legitimate (sometimes, or whenever we see ?) what are the relations between the people we see and the coloured forms that we also see ? In other words, is what is presented to me in my visual field private, public or partly private and partly public

Long Trails of Etymology

Sometimes, though we scarcely ever notice it, words give clear evidence of where they came from: arrive makes it obvious that Frenchmen reached the river in this way, while Greek helps one to see that harmony came from making a joint, making things fit together. See if you can name the words whos history is briefly summariezed in each of these cases. Get half of them right and you deserve a medal (originally a metal coin)

On Silhouettes, Surfaces and Sorensen

In his book “Seeing Dark Things” (2008), Roy Sorensen provides many wonderfully ingenious arguments for many surprising, counter-intuitive claims. One such claim in particular is that when we a silhouetted object – i.e. an opaque object lit entirely from behind – we literally see its back-side – i.e. we see the full expanse of the surface facing away from us that is blocking the incoming light. Sorensen himself admits that this seems a tough pill to swallow, later characterising it as “the most controversial thesis of the book” (2011, p199). I will argue against Sorensen’s controversial thesis and in favour of what seems to me to be a much more natural and commonsensical alternative: when we see a silhouetted object, what we see is its edge and only its edge – so we do not see its entire back-side

Postage Due: Stewardship, Stamps and a Watch Pocket

Why do we forget that people are human? I\u27ve been asking myself that question more and more lately. Partially it\u27s driven by a laundry list of things happening in the world, vitriolic attacks on humanity, both strangers and friends. I just see cruelty looming sometimes, particularly over the lowest in our society. [excerpt

Multiscale modeling in biology

The 1966 science-fction film Fantastic Voyage captured the public imagination with a clever idea: what fantastic things might we see and do if we could minaturize ourselves and travel through the bloodstream as corpuscles do? (This being Hollywood, the answer was that we'd save a fellow scientist from evildoers.

Seeing things that are not there: illusions reveal how our brain constructs what we see

What we perceive is not always what our eyes see. Vision, and perception more generally, should not be thought of as a webcam that just takes pictures of the world. This is not a fault in how our brains work, but rather is exemplary of how the brain constructs perception and takes advantage of its massive inter-connectedness in ways that are highly similar to social networks. The construction of perception is not only based on the information the eyes capture, but also based on the information stored in the brain and "guesses" based on this stored information. Illusory figure similar to that shown in Figure 1 is a laboratory example of this construction process and demonstrates well how the visual system works. In the real world, the visual system must handle situations of occlusion, noise, and equivocality (that is, when it is unclear what bits of what we see belongs to one object versus another)

Evaluation of a project giving boarding school places to young people living in difficult situations: A summary of findings for young people

In November 2006 the government began a project in 10 local areas in England to see if boarding school might be a possible option for children and young people who could no longer stay all the time with their parents or carers or who were facing difficulties such as not attending school and not getting on with their families. The evaluation took place to find out more about: - The things that worked well about the project; - In what ways some young people could benefit from going to boarding school; - The things that could make the project work better. The evaluation also aimed to help the government decide whether to extend the project to other parts of England

I want to, but...

I want to see the concert, but I don’t want to take the long drive. Both of these desire ascriptions are true, even though I believe I’ll see the concert if and only if I take the drive.Yet they, and strongly conflicting desire ascriptions more generally, are predicted incompatible by the standard semantics, given two standard constraints. There are two proposed solutions. I argue that both face problems because they misunderstand how what we believe influences what we desire. I then sketch my own solution: a coarse-worlds semantics that captures the extent to which belief influences desire. My semantics models what I call some-things-considered desire. Considering what the concert would be like, but ignoring the drive, I want to see the concert; considering what the drive would be like, but ignoring the concert, I don’t want to take the drive