Blogs
Philosophy Club
The Philosophy Club has had a rocky start this semester, but I think we can recover. I know that everybody has many time conflicts and whatnot, so if anyone has a suggestion of what day and time we should have the meetings, then please comment below. I'd like to get us into full swing this semester as quickly as possible, so I will be holding a coffee talk next week following everybody's suggestions. Thursdays are bad for me but any other day of the week after 6:45 works for me.
Today Elizabeth Grant came and we discussed the things we would like to get strarted this semester including: T-Shirts, Public Discussions, and Reading Discussions.
If you are unable to make it to a meeting but you have a good idea, I will be opening a public Forum on this website for the Philosophy Club and I'll make a link to it.
-Wayne
A deadline for the technological singularity?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120219191244.htm
...
"To me, this is the physical limit of Moore's Law," Klimeck says. "We can't make it smaller than this."
Although definitions can vary, simply stated Moore's Law holds that the number of transistors that can be placed on a processor will double approximately every 18 months. The latest Intel chip, the "Sandy Bridge," uses a manufacturing process to place 2.3 billion transistors 32 nanometers apart. A single phosphorus atom, by comparison, is just 0.1 nanometers across, which would significantly reduce the size of processors made using this technique, although it may be many years before single-atom processors actually are manufactured."
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73rd Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Philosophical Society
Members of the Philosophy Club and Individuals for Free-thought will travel to Austin on Friday, November 18 to attend the Southwestern Philosophical Society conference. You do not need to be a club member to attend. It is open for any student interested in attending this conference.
SouthwesternPhilosophical.com
When:
November 18-20, 2011
Where:
Radisson Hotel & Suites Austin-Town Lake
111 Cesar Chavez at Congress
Austin, TX
The latest SWPS 2011 Program can be downloaded here.
If you are interested in attending this event and would like more details please contact:
Megan Crawford-Grime, mcrawford@islander.tamucc.edu
Let's talk about God!
Kind of.
The philosophy club is having it's next Futurama meeting and we will be talking about god. Not God, but the concept of one. The goal of this will be to figure out what the ideal god would be pending it's relationship to it's creations.
I'm not going to debate the existence of god. That's the Individuals for Free Thought's department, and frankly I think it's a bit rude to force your beliefs onto other people. The goal here is to answer the following question:
Pending the exsitence of a god, what would the overall goal of this relationship to it be?
and I suppose also:
Would the presence of said god be a good thing in society, or a hinderance?
Come join the philosophy club in S&T 107 at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, October 26th for a night of metaphysical hypothesizing and Futurama. I for one am curious to see how this turns out!
What are your thoughts on this?
A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.
It took millions of years for vegetation to cover the sludge and toxic substances with a layer of humus, a layer of vegetation and a layer of oxygen, so that humans can live on earth.
And now ungrateful humans are bringing the sludge and toxic substances – which have been covered with tedious cosmic effort – back up to the surface.
In this way, through the misdeeds of the irresponsible human species, the end of the world is becoming the beginning of all time. We are committing suicide. Our cities are carcinomas.
We don’t eat what grows near us – we import food from far away, from Africa, America, China and New Zealand.
We don’t keep our shit. Our rubbish, our waste is flushed far away. We are poisoning rivers, lakes and oceans with it, or we transport it to complicated and expensive purification plants, or more rarely to centralized composting facilities. In other cases, our waste is destroyed. The shit never returns to our fields, and neither does it return to where our food comes from.
The cycle by which food becomes shit is functioning.
The cycle by which shit becomes food is broken.
Whenever we flush our toilets, with the conviction that we are performing a hygienic act, we are breaking cosmic laws, because in reality it is a godless act, a sacrilegious gesture of death.
When we go to the toilet, lock it from the inside and flush away our shit, we are trying to put an end to something. What are we ashamed of? What are we afraid of? We repress what happens to our shit, just as we repress death. The toilet hole appears to us like the gate to death; we try to get away from it as quickly as possible, forget as quickly as possible about the rottenness and decay. However, it is exactly the opposite! It is with shit that life first begins.
--Friedensreich Hundertwasser was an Austrian painter and architect known for his fresh and stunning insights.
