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Apropos of Sagar’s wish to foist the A.I. industry by its own petard, this article appeared in print in yesterday’s…
I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…
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I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…
Hear hear
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No particularly "sexy" ones from the standpoint of philosophers, I would imagine, but good news for the beleaguered field of psychology. (If I'm wrong about the philosophical import of some of these results, please explain in the comments.)
There was at one time quite a hullabaloo (technical terminology I know, but bear with me) about the "hidden persuaders," about how nasty Madison Avenue folks had figured out subliminal perception and used it to deprive us of free will and get us to buy their products. The height of the scare on subliminal advertsing was, I believe, roughly the fictitious Don Draper's heyday.
The one fascinating finding among these involves motor priming. Although subliminal perception CAN play a part in this, the now successfully replicated finding is that the consequence of a subliminal perception is the opposite of what one would have expected had the perception been of the super-liminal sort.
So Don Draper might have prepared an ad that subliminally says "eat burgers" and the viewing public might have been turned off of burgers? Well, that is a gross extrapolation of the finding. But the actual un-extrapolated finding does help bury what remains of the hidden-persuaders panic.
Surely, almost all of these experiments add weight to – if only weakly, and if further confirmation is needed –
(a) assertions by Nietzsche, Freud etc that 'conscious'/ self-reported / articulated views on our own mental states & processes are often and systematically in error
and/or
(b) hints as to how & even why this is so
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