Tag: Philosophy

  • Saving the Public Sphere from the Onslaught of Digital Media

    In this piece, Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, discusses what some respected thinkers are saying about how to approach “the infopocalypse,” which Aviv Ovadya of Harvard has described as “a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas with no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.”

    The piece argues that “democracy cannot survive this failure of the marketplace of ideas because it disables the formation of any shared ground where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole.”

    The main problem that the piece is trying to highlight is that “the digital media ecosystem disempowers the public sphere.” The author writes:

    “Without institutions and practices that can establish and preserve the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for democratic discourse.”

    His suggestion for creating such institutions and practices:

    “[…] new mediating institutions, such as citizens’ assemblies, that encourage and enable civil discourse and consensus formation at the same virtual scale as social networks, are more necessary than ever because the forces of fragmentation have never been greater. Mending the breach of distrust between the public and institutions of self-government in the digital age can only happen by absorbing the wired activation of civil society into governance through integrating connectivity with common platforms for deliberation.”

    Read the full article here.

  • The Illusion of The Self: From Eastern Philosophy to Neuroscience

    This piece for Big Think by a neuropsychologist discusses how experimental science may be coming to the same conclusion that Eastern philosophy has provided for more than 2,500 years: “that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing.” 

    The author points out that in Western thought ““I” represents the idea of our individual self” and “[t]his I/ego is what we think of as our true selves, and this individual self is the experiencer and the controller of things like thoughts, feelings, and actions.” However, the author challenges us, “The next time there is an intrusive thought, consider the very fact that your being unable to stop it proves that there is no inner self that controls it.” 

    Eastern schools of thought like Buddhism, Taoism, and the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, on the other hand, say “that this idea of “me” is a fiction, although a very convincing one” and that “the concept of the self is seen as the result of the thinking mind”: 

    “The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.” 

    The author points out that several studies over the years “have shown that the left side of the brain excels at creating an explanation for what’s going on, even if it isn’t correct, even in people with normal brain functioning”:

    “The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.”

     Importantly, despite the progress in the field of brain mapping, the self has never been mapped as a function of the mind. The author argues: 

    “While various neuroscientists have made the claim that the self resides in this or that neural location, there is no real agreement among the scientific community about where to find it — not even whether it might be in the left or the right side of the brain. Perhaps the reason we can’t find the self in the brain is because it isn’t there.” 

    Read the full article here.