Hey People: Vote now for the topic!
The monthly Meetup is Sunday, April 28 at 5 - 7 PM Pacific Time.
We'll meet by Zoom this month.
We're voting now for the meeting's topic -- I've listed five topics suggested by members. Message me or post a comment with the topic(s) you most want to talk about!
1) FREE WILL: Do humans have free will? What exactly is free will? What are the various notions of free will philosophers talk about? If humans are determined by the same physical laws that control the universe around us, does that negate the possibility of free will?
2) MALE CIRCUMCISION AND FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION. Is one ethically unjustified while the other is permissible, or should we regard those two practices as being morally equivalent? Are we being culturally biased by judging one acceptable and the other unacceptable? For example, would Male Circumcision be more accurately labeled Male Genital Mutilation? Similarly, is the contested term Female Genital Mutilation a culturally prejudiced label for the practice that could be called Female Circumcision?
3) CAN MY COLOR RED BE YOUR COLOR BLUE? Do we all see the same colors? Can we know such things as whether the colors I see as blue look the same as the colors you see as blue (assuming neither of us suffers from color-blindness)? Would you perceive the same colors if you didn't have language? Similarly, how do various languages affect which colors you can and cannot see? If you have a large and nuanced repertoire of color-names, does that increase or detract from your pleasure at seeing colors?
4) SHOULD TECHNOLOGICALLY PRIMITIVE TRIBES BE INTRODUCED TO MODERN TECHNOLOGY? When indigenous people are discovered and they are untouched by modern technology, is it more ethical to introduce them to our technology or to do nothing to disturb their way of life? Providing modern technology would likely lead to a fundamental change of their culture, or possibly a destruction of their culture. However, the tribe might also benefit in many ways: a higher material quality of life, a longer lifespan due to medical and public health measures, a greater variety of life options, and all the other benefits the cultural wealth of global society has to offer.
Here's a related question that comes up in discussions about a tribe's desire to preserve their way of life and the land they've lived on: what qualifies a people as being 'indigenous?' The answer is not as straightforward as it seems.
5) IS A "PHILOSOPHICAL ZOMBIE" POSSIBLE OR CONCEIVABLE? If so, what does that tell us about the physicalism versus dualism debate? A philosophical zombie is a being that looks, acts, and talks just like us, and is a human in every other way, except that it has no consciousness. Here's how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains philosophical zombies and their importance for debates on the nature of consciousness:
"Zombies in philosophy are imaginary creatures designed to illuminate problems about consciousness and its relation to the physical world. Unlike the ones in films or witchcraft, they are exactly like us in all physical respects but without conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave just like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness. Few people, if any, think zombies actually exist. But many hold they are at least conceivable, and some that they are possible. It seems that if zombies really are possible, then physicalism is false and some kind of dualism is true. For many philosophers that is the chief importance of the zombie idea. … It also figures in more general metaphysical and epistemological investigations, for example by raising questions about the relations between imaginability, conceivability, and possibility, and by reactivating the ‘other minds’ problem."
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