Philosophy

Since the spring of 2012, Google has started to move from search of particular combinations of letters to searching things. This move from string-based search to searching things is a move towards Google building an ontology of things. The difference with searching things instead of strings is that Google can differentiate between homonyms, things that sound the same but are different. For example, if you think about Google itself, it is both a search engine and a company. And these are two different things, with different attributes. ...

In humanities research related to psychology there tends to be a tendency to look for answer from neurological research. Things like consciousness, language and learning are intimately connected to how the brain works. And understanding the neural underpinnings of our psychological processes tends to give as a better understanding how those processes work. This is very much related to my research, since meaning-making is something that necessarily involves cognitive processes. Should I then be looking at brain imaging data? Trying to pinpoint the areas active in different meaning-making situations? ...

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had comic a while back about political speech. The idea was that, if you replace everything except nouns with nonsensical words, people will still be able to follow the speech. They concluded that if you can get the point from the nouns, the rest is a waste of space. Of course, it was a joke. But it still shows us something about language. However, this is not a feature of political speech, but language in general. It is often packed with information, and people are very good at deciphering meaning from fragments ...

While I wholeheartedly think that science is mostly methodically uniform, there are two things that seem to differentiate the social sciences (or humanities) from the natural sciences. (That would seem to put me on the side of methodical antipositivism, if one is into labeling.) There are two distinct differences between the reality the natural sciences research and the one of social sciences study. While these differences are not immediately apparent, they are easily understandable when pointed out. They also lead to some methodological consequences that must be taken into account. ...

I held a presentation on games in the National Seminar for Philosophy Students (Filosofian opiskelijoiden kansallinen seminaari, FOKS in Finnish) last saturday. It was mostly just basic stuff on (the study of) games, with some quotes from Wittgenstein, Suits, Juul and Salen & Zimmerman. As an ending I presented a loose argument that a minimum definition of games has to include only three points: separation, conflict and rules. Separation means that a game is in some sense separate from the surrounding reality usually both spatially and temporally. (The line of separation is commonly called ’the magic circle’.) This can also be extended to cover the concept of artificiality commonly associated with games, and Juul’s demand that games must have “negotiable consequences”. ...

A while ago I attended a philosophy seminar where the last presentation was about using science fiction as a tool for research. For researchers interested in culture and society, it may give invaluable possibilities. The idea is to use science fiction as a “what if”-scenario. Most of the elements of society can be kept constant (gender roles, economic structures) while some (ideologies, length of life span) are altered to see what the resulting societies look like. These scenarios are intuitively understandable, as long as they are close enough to our own conception of society. ...