Etch-a-sketch-arama

Given access to an incredibly expensive piece of equipment and a massive dose of courage, how would you decorate your powerbook?

I reckon I'd have to go for a tasteful image of Alison Goldfrapp wearing a coat. I was going to go with the whole Janus thing from Felt Mountain, but that's just way too weird for everyday life...

Mornington Crescent

I've just happened across the Encyclopedia Morningtonia, which provides some pretty interesting background on the game, although the experienced player will still not want to be without their trusty copy of Stobold...

Is pleasure wrong?

Today's though comes from the concluding paragraph of Julian Baggini's philosophy briefing:

So there are reasons for not smoking dope, but they are nothing to do with it simply being pleasurable. Its main drawbacks seem to be that it shortens your life and turns you into a bore. But then so does spending all your life sitting on your arse reading philosophy.

I already knew that philosophy turns you into a bore, but I didn't realise it also shortened your life span. Oh, well, something to look forward to, I guess...

ID podcast

Seems there's a podcast of a debate between Jack Cohen and Steve Fuller on the subject of Intelligent Design. What will those crazy academics think of next?

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Updated: It's actually quite an interesting podcast, although the two debaters seem to be talking at slightly cross-purposes. Fuller argues that it's better to teach a variety of theories using a dialectical method to assess the benefits of each one and that the value of ID comes from it's use as heuristic tool with which to investigate the world, Cohen argues that ID is the fundamental product of intellectual laziness and that it is basically equivalent to claiming, "we can't explain this, so it must have been designed by a supernatural power."

In general, I don't think the debate does Fuller any favours. He seems willing to justify teaching a theory that appears to be both scientifically and philosophically weak on the grounds that it's not entirely clear what constitutes an accepted theory and that it is useful for high school kids to debate the issues, even though he accepts that this is something that was explicitly ruled out by the Dover trial (the outcome of which, he claims, is "better than nothing").

Cohen acquits himself rather better, agreeing with Fuller that in a lot of cases the teaching of evolution is significantly out of date and talks in turns of a single species and period mutations, whereas he prefers the metaphor of a species as "a number of hand built cars, not identical model T's, each tuned to a similar specification" He argues against ID on the grounds that there probably isn't time in education to teach a theory with so few merits and that most of the arguments in favour of ID are simply lazy and introduce additional complexity.

Certainty and religion

From Philip Pullman's interesting article on freedom of speech, published in Saturday's Grauniad:

Those who are passionate adherents of their faith, who are willing to kill and die for it, are less likely to take a wide and considered view of the subject. And the fact that religion makes people willing to do these extreme things is one of the reasons we need to examine it. Something in the nature of religious conviction gives believers the chance to experience sharp and intoxicating tastes; those inclined to it can become addicted to the gamey tang of the absolute, the pungency of righteousness, the furtive sexiness of intolerance. Religion grants us these malign sensations more strongly and more deeply than any other human phenomenon.

While I suspect it's unfair of Pullman to restrict the taste for "pungency of righteousness" to religion alone, I think he underlines an important point: the arrogance of absolute certainty is a corrupting influence wherever it occurs. It seems to me that in order to do politics, science, religion, philosophy, or any other significant area of human activity, it is necessary most of all to have an open mind, humbly to admit that you might not know all the answers and that your current view might be incorrect or incomplete.

Ever the man with a soundbite, Bertrand Russell neatly summarised the situation when he said, "I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine." Amen.