I, too, grew up on the first-ever Zoombinis game. I actually recently played through it again almost 15+ years later. Everything from the sound effects to the visuals is seared somewhere deep in my neural wetware like a permanent ROM chip. Funnily enough, some of the puzzles still confused me! I guess my colorblindness certainly hasn't been magically cured over time...
That "Girdle" pronunciation is like nails on a chalkboard! The umlaut is an oo (or ue) sound. There is no "r" anywhere! As both a philosophy student and German speaker, whenever my professors pronounced it like that I shuddered in my seat.
I'm sure actual native German speakers could probably chime in, but I couldn't help but try to stop the spread of FUD around pronouncing poor ol' Gödel's name. :)
As a German speaker and (I assume) English speaker, you're likely aware that the sound represented by ö is not at all common in English. One can argue that it's not like "r", but it's a closer approximation of the mouth position and sound than others. The IPA for Gödel is /ˈɡɜːrdəl/ : the symbols don't map one-to-one with English orthography (then again, what does), but it's no accident that there's an r in there. And then there's the question of whether or not to pronounce names closer to how they're pronounced in their native tongue, or how they're more properly understood, or some other rational.
Thanks for the reply! I didn't know the standardized IPA was in fact with an "r." Strange though, because to me the umlauted-o sound is probably one of the easiest German pronunciations to do for an English speaker. Also, good point on the compiled/interpreted (using a programming analogy) divide in pronunciation of borrowed words. I do suppose there is plenty of evidence of butchered French terms already, so why not ruin some other language's beautiful sounds too! groaning laughter
Though, I should not be all that surprised. For my entire life in the U.S. people have pronounced my last name of "Wiese" as either "Wise" or "Why-se," both of which are totally incorrect (my family says "Weese" when anglicized). I much prefer the German pronunciation of my last name, though; too bad it's too much of a pain to explain the discrepancy between how it's spelt and what it sounds like to native English speakers. :P
As a philosophy major, at my university we do so in our "Advanced Symbolic Logic" class. However, the depth with which you engage with Gödel's theorem depends on the professor teaching it and their interests when designing the course (we have 2 specializing in mathematical logic who flip back and forth iirc).
To add to that: Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion 2 Developer, which I learned to make games with back in elementary school. It is strictly (although not exclusively) "no code." Hell, one of my favorite indie games of all time, Knytt Stories, was made in it.[1]
That document you linked is fascinating. It's especially relevant to me because I'm currently taking a class through my university's pharmacy department on drug discovery and development in the pharmaceutical industry. Just last week I wrote about PCP's origins as an aesthetic (similar to ketamine). This[1] is a good source on the topic.
Do you happen to know of other documents in a vein similar to the LSD one you linked? Pharmacology is one of many bizarre topics I endeavor to understand in my free time (this weird thing called "programming" also happens to be one).
Matthew, that document appeared on the first page of a Google search for Delysid, where it was the first result of 187,000 [https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&hl=en&source=hp&ei...]. I'd never heard of it until seeing the name in the comment I replied to. It's a one-off as far as my having others like it to send on. FWIW, as a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years experience/age 70) on three antidepressants (lithium/Wellbutrin/Paxil) for life after four severe episodes of major depression, I found it (the document) as fascinating as you did. P.S. This: https://mattwie.se/ is very cool.
That is an absolutely fascinating application that I've never considered before. One could design all sorts of experiments, not just exclusively spatial reasoning.
Imagine allowing a class of undergraduate students to participate in a version of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and draw their own conclusions as to potential flaws in its methodology.
Or, as a philosophy student: allow students to engage in a real life rendition of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, where a student "competes" against his or her classmates and various versions of text generation algorithms from simple Markov chain generators, to OpenAI's GPT-2 and beyond.
I'm sorry an incompetent professor left such a bad taste in your mouth, and on the field as a whole.
What's strange to me, is that my interpretation of the results of such an experiment wouldn't even lead to your professor's conclusion. The takeaway being the fallibility of sensory perception, where I might then prompt the class for a discussion of their intuitive refutations of empiricism before diving into the literature.
Unfortunately, being a philosophy major myself, I know all too well that a crap teacher can totally ruin a philosophy topic (let alone a topic of any subject). From my 4 years in philosophy classes of varying levels of difficulty, the common denominator between a fruitful time spent in class has been the willingness of the professor to engage with their students. Whether it's logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology, &c, the principal property of a quality professor is his/her dialectical ability.
Hell, that's how philosophy & theology was taught in the first universities! The professor would profess and then the students would engage their master in the subject at hand.
1.
claim that one has (a quality or feeling), especially when this is not the case.
"he had professed his love for her only to walk away"
synonyms: declare, announce, proclaim, assert, state, affirm, avow, maintain,
protest, aver, vow;
2.
affirm one's faith in or allegiance to (a religion or set of beliefs).
"a people professing Christianity"
synonyms: state/affirm one's faith in, affirm one's allegiance to, make a public declaration of, declare publicly, avow, confess, acknowledge publicly
"in 325 the Emperor himself professed Christianity"
From Latin "profiteri", to the form "profess-" meaning "declared publicly", and to "professor", then to Late Middle English as "professor".
So a professor's practice is probably closer to definition 2: "make a public declaration of" whatever one's skill or knowledge of a particular art might be.
Genuine question. What about the professor's statements were inaccurate or incompetent? Is the sample size really too small? Is the claimed conclusion about free will invalid? Or is the criticism just the dismissive tone toward the student?
The incompetence originates from the disregard of the parent commenter's question/concern. It's the result of not engaging in good faith with your student, not necessarily the conclusions drawn. As I mentioned in my original comment, the value in taking a philosophy class (especially as a student in a different field) is the chance to engage with both the professor and your peers; it serves as a veritable petri dish for developing one's ability to succinctly articulate and debate topics. If you're expected to sit in a philosophy class and just absorb the material without any contrary thought, something is seriously awry. It goes against the very nature of why humans pursued philosophy in the first place.
Furthermore, it seems strange for a professor of philosophy to so easily dismiss criticism out of hand. Of all subjects, a philosophy professor has a pedagogical imperative to entertain contradictory positions and explain why or why not one ought to follow a line of reasoning. In addition, the question about the merit of a small sample size could itself serve as a valuable aside in teaching fundamental notions in the philosophy of science.
Note: This is from the perspective of Western analytic philosophy, but the spirit of debate and discussion is no less integral to the continental tradition.
I mean N = 12 is incredibly small to make such a sweeping statement about all of humanity but further it implicitly accepts that 1. free will is demonstrable via the experiment, 2. the reaction wasn’t preempted by free thought leading to the decision, and otherwise, 3. you’re a bad philosophy teacher if you’re trying to prove philosophy with statistics, imo.
