What is it like to be a doctor in immigration detention centres?

I am often asked questions about my work as a general practitioner in the Christmas Island and Nauru immigration detention centres. Are the conditions as bad as they say? Is the health care adequate? Are they genuine refugees? What are the people like? I often don’t know what to say, and wonder whether my answers are ever sufficient. Words often seem inadequate to describe what I saw, or the ways in which my experience continues to impact upon me. Are the conditions bad? Absolutely. Imagine tents at a grungy music festival, but without the festivity and enclosed by wire. Imagine a world that has a 500m radius and is characterized by bleakness and oppressive humidity. And then imagine living there, for months on end, with no purpose or direction, unable to leave and not being told if you ever will. Is the health care adequate? Definitely not. But arguably this is impossible to provide in such remote and underdeveloped centres, where the primary purpose is not health but segregation and isolation. Are they genuine refugees? I have no idea because I never asked, and as a doctor who sat beside Ahmed, or Leila, or Antony I didn’t really need to know. So what are “they” like? And what is it like to be their doctor? As a practitioner working in a detention centre you see many shocking departures from the ordinary – men with their lips sewn closed with thread from a blanket, women drinking from bottles of shampoo, children with weeping sores and no shoes, people hurting themselves to express their pain. In each case you try and do what you can to treat both the physical consequences of living in harsh environments and the mental anguish caused by losing hope

What Is It Like To Be A Problem?

In this thesis paper I explore the factors contributing to my current art making. I investigate motivations behind my practice in an exploration of conceptual and narrative experience that create its foundation and background. I will notate the development and exhibit examples of my current works in relation to the past three years of MFA research. I will discuss the Arab problem, and through five installation artworks focus on memories of situations in my family and the Pittsburgh Arab community. Throughout the paper I will include current contemporary artists working with similar media and references in social and political environments

“What Is it like to Be a Buddhist?”

What is it like to be a Western Buddhist? How does one experience the world around him, how does one describe, or construct, his own vision of the world, what world-views does one have? In the following research I tried to answer all of these questions with the help of phenomenographical and corpus linguistics analysis of texts that 16 Buddhists, an experimental group, and 16 non-Buddhists, who served as a control group, produced when answering a specially designed questionnaire, the Questionnaire of Life Situations. The point of it was for participants to describe their experience as vividly and as detailedly as possible. The analyses of all the participants’ answers have shed light on quite some differences between the groups, as well as some similarities. Very briefly, Buddhists seem to be a lot more compassionate and tolerant than general population, their way of thinking about the world and about life is much more holistic, as also more positive, optimistic, and bright; they seem to be more self-assure, more peaceful and calm. Although this study has some disadvantages – age bias (non-Buddhist group was fairly younger) and small sample – it represents a novel combination of approaches and an effort to explore the interdisciplinary area of psychology of religion, world-view studies, and cultural issues in cognitive science. In the future, it would be highly interesting to expand the study by getting more participants and, perhaps, including more groups

What is it like to be a chimpanzee?

Chimpanzees and humans are close evolutionary relatives who behave in many of the same ways based on a similar type of agentive organization. To what degree do they experience the world in similar ways as well? Using contemporary research in evolutionarily biology and animal cognition, I explicitly compare the kinds of experience the two species of capable of having. I conclude that chimpanzees’ experience of the world, their experiential niche as I call it, is: (i) intentional in basically the same way as humans’; (ii) rational in the sense that it is self-critical and operates with logically structured causal and intentional inferences; but (iii) not normative at all in that it does not operate with “objective” evaluative standards. Scientific data do not answer philosophical questions, but they provide rich raw material for scientists and philosophers alike to reflect on and clarify fundamental psychological concepts

What is it like to be a (digital) bat?

Could a person ever transcend what it is like to experience and understand the world as a human being? Could humans ever know what it is like to be another entity? In the last century, similar questions about human subjectivity have often been raised within the context of post-metaphysical thinking. In particular, the ones presented at the beginning of this paragraph were tackled from the perspective of philosophy of mind by Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay What is it Like to Be a Bat? Nagel’s reflections and answers to those interrogatives were elaborated before the diffusion of computers and could not anticipate the cultural impact of a technology capable of disclosing interactive and persistent experiences of virtual worlds as well as virtual alternatives to the ‘self’. This paper utilizes the observations, the theoretical insights and hypothetical suggestions offered in What is it Like to Be a Bat? and Martin Heidegger’s framework for a philosophical understanding of technology as its theoretical springboards. The scope of my reflection is precisely that of assessing the potential of interactive digital media for transcending human subjectivity. The chosen theoretical perspectives lead to the preliminary conclusion that, even if there is no way of either mapping or reproducing the consciousness of a real bat, interactive digital technology can grant access to experiences and even systems of perception that were inaccessible to humans prior to the advent of computers. In this context, Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein is employed in order to define in which specific ways the experience of virtual worlds enables humans to experience and understand previously unattainable aspects of reality. What is it Like to Be a (Digital) Bat? proposes a modal realist perspective, where digital media content is recognized as having an expanding and fragmenting influence on ontology. At a higher level of abstraction, this paper advocates the use of digital technology as a medium for testing, developing and disseminating philosophical notions which is alternative to the traditional textual one. Presented as virtual experiences, philosophical concepts cannot only be accessed without the mediation of subjective imagination, but take an entirely new projective dimension which I propose to call ‘augmented ontology’.peer-reviewe

What is it Like to be a Group Agent?

The existence of group agents is relatively widely accepted. Examples are corporations, courts, NGOs, and even entire states. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? I give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate and sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness. In developing my argument, I draw on integrated information theory, a much-discussed theory of consciousness. I conclude by pointing out an implication of my argument for the normative status of group agents

The Problem of Nonhuman Phenomenology or, What is it Like to Be a Kinect?

A description of the epistemological problems opened by new materialist ontologies, explored through a phenomenological discussion of the Microsoft Kinect and Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, and Adrian Freed's performance piece, X (2013)

“What is it like to be a bat?”—a pathway to the answer from the integrated information theory

What does it feel like to be a bat? Is conscious experience of echolocation closer to that of vision or audition? Or do bats process echolocation nonconsciously, such that they do not feel anything about echolocation? This famous question of bats' experience, posed by a philosopher Thomas Nagel in 1974, clarifies the difficult nature of the mind–body problem. Why a particular sense, such as vision, has to feel like vision, but not like audition, is totally puzzling. This is especially so given that any conscious experience is supported by neuronal activity. Activity of a single neuron appears fairly uniform across modalities and even similar to those for non-conscious processing. Without any explanation on why a particular sense has to feel the way it does, researchers cannot approach the question of the bats' experience. Is there any theory that gives us a hope for such explanation? Currently, probably none, except for one. Integrated information theory has potential to offer a plausible explanation. IIT essentially claims that any system that is composed of causally interacting mechanisms can have conscious experience. And precisely how the system feels is determined by the way the mechanisms influence each other in a holistic way. In this article, I will give a brief explanation of the essence of IIT. Further, I will briefly provide a potential scientific pathway to approach bats' conscious experience and its philosophical implications. If IIT, or its improved or related versions, is validated enough, the theory will gain credibility. When it matures enough, predictions from the theory, including nature of bats' experience, will have to be accepted. I argue that a seemingly impossible question about bats' consciousness will drive empirical and theoretical consciousness research to make big breakthroughs, in a similar way as an impossible question about the age of the universe has driven modern cosmology