“Focus on your current state of consciousness – your experience of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, willing, and so on – and ask yourself what kind of being this consciousness is, what its function might be, how it is related to the activity of cells in your brain, what could have brought it about in the course of evolution. Allow yourself to feel the attendant puzzlement, the sense of bafflement: now you are doing philosophy of mind.”
Tag: 02.20.12
Mexican Conductor Kidnapped, Held For Seven Months
“Rodolfo Cazares, a Mexican symphony conductor, was sleeping in bed with his wife in northern Mexico when masked gunmen burst into their home and shook them awake. … Seven months later, Mr. Cazares – a 36-year-old leader of the Bremerhaven city orchestra in Germany – and three other men are still missing, even after family members paid four ransoms to a presumed drug cartel.”
The Book So Embarrassing That An Alabama Prison Banned It
Last year, a legal aid lawyer sent to an incarcerated client a copy of Slavery by Another Name, “Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of how the South instituted a form of de-facto slavery by mass arresting black men on nonsense charges and ‘selling’ them to plantations, turpentine farms and other places of back-breaking labor.” Prison officials thought the book “too dangerous” to have around.
China Loosens Restrictions On Foreign Films
“China has agreed to ease restrictions on the number of foreign films shown there, and to increase the amount film studios can make from ticket sales. A quota of 20 foreign movies, which are mostly US exports, remains. A further 14 Imax or 3D films will be allowed.”
Proposed Washington Law Would Require State To Sell Art To Fund Scholarships
“So how broke is the state of Washington? It’s so broke it could start selling off its art collection – including some masterpieces – and using the money to pay for low-income students to go to college.”
Where Women Orchestral Players Outnumber The Men: South Korea
“Of the 105 members of Seoul Philharmonic, women account for 65 members, or 62 percent. The ratio is even higher for the Bucheon Philharmonic Orchestra, where 63 of its 74 members are women, or 85 percent.” One Korean critic attributes the phenomenon to traditional Confucian gender roles.
When Facebook Is Part Of The Message
“There is a symbiotic relationship between message and medium, and that medium influences how the message is perceived. If a user posts that he or she just got married on Facebook, they are essentially encouraging all of their friends to accept and react to that status update on Facebook. The medium embodies this message – you are married, on Facebook.”
Italian Police Arrest Gang Using X-Rays To Help Forge Antiquities
“A two-and-a-half-year-long suspected archaeological fraud involving thousands of forged Greek and Etruscan artefacts, a hospital x-ray machine, a philanthropic aristocrat and a sophisticated network of forgers has come to an abrupt end after police raids late last year on two homes belonging to alleged members of a gang.”
Decline Of The Arts? Really?
“Of course decline can be a fairly straightforward descriptive term–in the sense that we say that a person who is old and ill and will probably never entirely recover is “declining.” But to speak of “The Decline of the Arts” is to suggest a development with a philosophical or ideological amplitude, to evoke thoughts about the rise and fall of civilizations and cultures, about periodicity, systemic failure, decadence, maybe even the divine retribution that is sometimes woven into arguments about the collapse of civilizations.”
Mona Lisa Copy Draws Big Crowds At Prado
“Crowds gathered Tuesday at Madrid’s Prado Museum to view a copy of the “Mona Lisa” for the first time since restoration revealed it was almost certainly painted by one of Leonardo da Vinci’s apprentices as he worked on the original.”