In the spring of 2017, Hampshire College welcomed a new faculty member, one without a brain or even a nervous system. Physarum polycephalum, a species of slime mold, joined the campus not just as a scientific curiosity but as a non-human thinker. As the college put it, this organism “researches important problems from a non-human […]
Category Archives: Philosophy
September
30
What Does Music Have to Do with Gender, Anyway?
posted by Donovan Cronkhite
There has been a lot of debate regarding gender stereotypes in music, but is there actually any inherent quality of music that makes it gendered?
February
11
More than a feeling…
posted by Laura Beebe
As animals with brains, we are challenged to make sense of a world full of rich sensory experience. There is a world created inside of our brains that we may see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Built out of our senses, humans possess an innate ability to extract patterns and other meaningful features from the […]
July
19
Upload Complete: Transferring your brain to a digital format
posted by Susan Lubejko
Imagine a future in which your brain–conscious mind, memories, and emotions included–could be uploaded to a computer. Once running, the complex computer code would be able to perfectly reflect your mind: reacting as you would, showing your major personality traits, holding your unique knowledge from your life as a human. Maybe your personal code could […]
February
08
Did you do that?
posted by Timothy Sheehan
Limited only perhaps by my emotional fortitude and physical abilities, I am unquestionably in control of myself. This sense is perhaps drawn most into question first thing in the morning when I play both sides of an internal civil war: on one side, my bed, on the other, the cold cruel world. Both sides battle […]
November
30
CRISPR and the Real World
posted by Caroline Sferrazza
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” So begins our country’s Declaration of Independence. While we have learned that this preamble is all too simple in the context of wider society, consider the most basic interpretation of this sentiment; at the precise moment of a child’s birth, broader circumstances […]
August
10
It’s a Fine Line Between Utopia and Gattaca
posted by Caroline Sferrazza
In a previous piece, we talked about why scientists and innovators around the world are so excited about CRISPR, a powerful new gene editing technology. The tool was first published 2012, but it still regularly makes headlines. Less than a month ago researchers in Portland, Oregon announced the first successful use of CRISPR in human […]
June
15
Your Brain, the Liar
posted by Jarrett Lovelett
Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Thinking machines, like those portrayed in HBO’s Westworld, use new information from their environment to update their beliefs about the world and take action to further their goals. For all such machines, the success of that process of integrating new input is limited by their hardware, […]
September
19
this, that and the Other
posted by stephnelli
The recent shooting in Ferguson, Missouri has thrown our society’s tendency to binarize people into mainstream awareness. News outlets have been criticized for incriminating Michael Brown by selecting pictures where he fulfills black stereotypes instead of pictures in which he looks like one of Us. Police rely on the same superficial binaries in racial profiling, […]
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