current controversies – On the Human

A Story in Two Parts, With An Ending Yet To Be Written

Jason King — Mon, 02 May 2011 14:51:59 +0000

The word “culture” is sometimes recruited as a proxy for “race” in common parlance, and the familiar story of race predisposes us to understand the differences between European and Asian populations in biological, rather than cultural, terms. Culture is a significant shaper of human cognition, motivation, and emotion. The story of race as a biological thing that humans either have or are is not only inaccurate, but also it serves to distort our understanding of human nature. Another way of saying this is that human difference really matters — but not in the way most people think it does.

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Doing, Feeling, Meaning and Explaining

Jason King — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:41:28 +0000

It is "easy" to explain doing, "hard" to explain feeling. Turing has set the agenda for the easy explanation (though it will be a long time coming). I will try to explain why and how explaining feeling will not only be hard, but impossible. Explaining meaning will prove almost as hard because meaning is a hybrid of know-how and what it feels like to know how.

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The Political Economy of Personhood

Jason King — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:16:51 +0000

To speak in the same breath of personhood and political economy sounds odd because of the seemingly obvious radical difference between the two worlds of their application. On the one hand, a straightforward moral term from everyday life referring to the status of our fellow humans; on the other hand, a technical theory with roots in 18th-century French and British philosophical thought about the interrelation between economic production, society, and the state. What could these two possibly have to do with each other?

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Are Women Human?

Jason King — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:26:44 +0000

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that could provide specifically for the formation of trade unions and "periodic holiday with pay", might have mustered the specificity to mention women sometime, other than through "motherhood," which is more bowed to than provided for. If women were human in this document, would domestic violence, sexual violation from birth to death, including in prostitution and pornography, and systematic sexual objectification and denigration of women and girls simply be left out of the explicit language?

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Taking Life: Animals

Jason King — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:48:49 +0000

Is meat eating justified by the fact that millions of animals would never exist should no one care to eat them?

In Social Rights and Duties, a collection of essays and lectures published in

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Humans, Disabilities, and the Humanities?

Jason King — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:46:22 +0000

Bioethics is much too important to be left to bioethicists.

At the outset of his 2006 book, Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design, Jonathan Glover asks:

Progress in genetics and in reproductive technologies gives us growing power to reduce the incidence of disabilities and disorders. Should we welcome this power, or should we fear its

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Human Language—Human Consciousness

Jason King — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 03:58:34 +0000

The apparent differences between humans and apes are not biologically fixed, but they are biologically and culturally instantiated. Differences in maternal care patterns, which human and bonobo infants experience from the moment of birth forward, are responsible for the many of the behavioral distinctions that later emerge between the species. They are culturally instantiated and are open to change at any time. From these caregiver patterns emerge the different styles of human/ape consciousness.

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Does Consciousness Outstrip Sensation?

Jason King — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 14:52:44 +0000

Pretty much everyone agrees that some activities in the brain are never conscious. For example, it would be hard to find researches who think there can be conscious events in the cerebellum. Most researchers nowadays also deny that there can be conscious events in subcortical structures, though there is an occasional plea for the thalamus or the reticular formation. But what about the neocortex? Is any activity in that folded carapace a candidate for conscious experience? Does each cortical neuron vie for the conscious spotlight, like the contestants on a televised talent show?

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The Meat Eaters

Jason King — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 18:26:15 +0000

Would the controlled extinction of carnivorous species be a good thing?

Viewed from a distance, the natural world often presents a vista of sublime, majestic placidity. Yet beneath the foliage and hidden from the distant eye, a vast, unceasing slaughter rages. Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their

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Temes: An Emerging Third Replicator

Jason King — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:25:46 +0000

All around us information seems to be multiplying at an ever increasing pace. New books are published, new designs for toasters and i-gadgets appear, new music is composed or synthesised and, perhaps above all, new content is uploaded into cyberspace. This is rather strange. We know that matter and energy cannot increase but apparently information

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