Jesus appears in pot of marmite

I spotted a story in the news this week about a Welsh family who found the image of Jesus on the lid of a pot of sandwich spread. What do you think?:

I know that God moves in mysterious ways, but this is a bit too mysterious for my liking. It appears to be a case of a perceiving something that you want to in an otherwise random assortment of shapes. The family, themselves, appear to take comfort in the appearance of the image, saying "We've had a tough couple of months; my mum's been really ill and it's comforting to think that if he is there, he's watching over us."

After a quick perusal of google I have realised these kinds of sightings are a lot more common than you might think. In recent years Jesus' face has appeared on, among other things, a beer bottle, a fish stick, a shower curtain, a nebula, a pancake and a tortilla:

Pareidolia 

Philosophy Postcards

As tweeted by Richard van de Lagemaat on his TOK Tweet this week, here is a series of images by graphic designer Genís Carrerasin in which he uses simple images to describe many philosophical concepts covered in TOK. In describing his work, Carrerasin says “I wanted to make philosophy look better, to feel more contemporary and relevant. For me shapes and colors are a way to communicate, a way that can break through language and age barriers. As a graphic designer, this is the only way I knew.”

Best viewed full screen in order to make out the written definitions.

Tok postcards from Michael Smith

Different Kinds of Minds

Japanese History Lessons

Here's a BBC article (written by a former IB student) about history teaching in Japanese schools. She suggests that students' perception of events during the Sino-Japanese War and Second World War may have serious effects on international relations in the region, and therefore history teachers have considerable responsibility in shaping future events as well as accounts of those in the past. As in many countries, history teaching has become very politicised, and debates seem to be raging between the authors of different textbooks about how history should be presented in the classroom.

Japanese History Lessons 

Perception

- Neil Degrasse Tyson

Perception and Art

Eric Kandel (born November 7, 1929) is an American neuropsychiatrist. He specialises in research into the nature of memory, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000. Here he talks about the links between art, perception, emotion and biology:

Scepticism

Scepticism, or skepticism (if you are in the U.S.), derives from the Greek work skeptomai, which means to think or consider. It is generally used to denote doubt or incredulity about particular ideas, or a wider view about the impossibility of having certain knowledge. This uncertainty is a philosophical position, and philosophical scepticism refers to the systematic doubt and testing of ideas.

Recently, sceptics (or skeptics) have become synonymous with two particular groups of people: those who doubt the accepted scientific consensus (for instance "climate change sceptics") and those who question these questioners (James Randi, for example, refers to himself as a skeptic). It's interesting that two completely disparate sets of thinkers could give themselves the same label.

In this (rather long) podcast a group of academics discus the philosophical origins and importance of scepticism in developing knowledge and belief.

The Power of Smell

Why Smells Unlock Memories

Is Seeing Believing?

Vision Research

Introduction to Sense Perception

I rediscovered this document I made a long time ago as a cover lesson when I was going to be absent. After reading it again, I thought it stands up quite well as an introduction to sense perception and a means to start thinking about various aspects and problems of perception. I made it for my own students who are all bilingual and fluent in English and Spanish.
Perception Intro

The Limits of perception

Glossary of Philosophy

Enlightenment Rationalism Empiricism The Encyclopaedists Analytic synthetic distinction Logic Determinism Kant	Romanticism Rousseau Schelling and Coleridge Hegel Idealism Vs. Materialism Hegel's Dialectics Marx's Dialectical Materialism Schopenhauer & Nietzsche	Analytic Philosophy Bertrand Russell Wittgenstein: Tractatus Wittgenstein: Language Games The Private Language Argument Richard Rorty Timeline	Existentialism Kierkegaard: The solitary wanderer Martin Heidegger Edmund Husserl Sartre: Existence precedes essence Albert Camus
God Proofs of God's Existence: Argument from design Ontological argument Cosmological argument Pascal's Wager Kierkegaard Marx Nietzsche The Death of God	Mind Plato Aristotle Leibniz Epiphenomenalism Dualism Descartes Identity Theory Spinoza Behaviourism Ryle Ghost in the machine	Natural Science Popper Kuhn Feyerabend Science in the post- modern world	Moral philosophy Kant's Categorical Imperative Utilitarianism Nietzsche: The genealogy of morals Sartre and Bad Faith

Can you see time?

People with a condition known as synaesthesia apparantly can. This is caused by an unusually high number of connections between two areas of the brain's sensory cortex, making the perception of space and time inseperable. The article below describes how synaesthetes perceive the world around them. You can also visit the website of the UK Synaesthesia Association here.

I was interested to read in the article that synaesthetes have a heightened sense of empathy. In the same way, therefore, that some could argue that autistic people have a different take on ethics (as I posted previously), the same could be said for people with synaesthesia.

In this audio clip, the synaesthetic woman mentioned in the article, Holly Branigan, tries to describe how she 'visualises' time.


Synaesthesia

Slips of the Ear

'Slips of the ear' are problems of perception (or 'auditory illusions') relating to how the brain misinterprets aural information. If something we hear doesn't really make much sense, the brain tries to give it meaning and this frequently leads to misunderstandings of what was meant to be conveyed. Here is a (humorous) example:

These problems are especially prevalent in people who are learning a foreign language and have not developed a sufficient vocabulary or level of language use to spot differences between words with similar sounds. Here is an interesting academic paper on this subject: Slips of the Ear

Kusumarasdyati (2006) 'I'm orangeful' or 'I'm already awful': slips of the ear performed by learners of English as a foreign language. In Peter Jeffery (Eds) Creative Dissent: Constructive Solutions (pp.1-9) Australian Association for Research in Education, Parramatta, Sydney, Australia.

What is Consciousness?

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net

Planet of Snail

Planet of Snail is an award-winning documentary about Young-Chan, a South Korean blind and deaf man. It follows his loving relationship with his partner Soon-Ho and shows how he communicates and perceives the world around him through only the sense of touch. It is a modern parallel of the life of Helen Keller.

Autism, Empathy and Ethics

I posted a video recently in an attempt to show the link between ethics and empathy. If you define ethics along the lines of the practical application of morals in society (as we have in the class), then it follows that without some form of empathy (to understand the effect of your actions on others) you are unable to employ a true ethical code.

A common (mis)conception is that people with autism lack the ability to empathise. I'll admit to being guilty of thinking like this in the past. If this is true then it could be argued that autistic people lack the ability to be ethical. In her blog existence is wonderful, Anne Corwin (who has herself been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome) shows this is a fallacy, and that while autistic people perhaps have a different take on empathy, they cannot be catagorised as non-ethical. She makes the point that the act of labelling and categorising people is, in itself, very harmful.

This makes me think that coming up with a useful and usable definition of ethics is much more difficult than you might think. Incidentally, if you are interested in seeing the autism-spectrum quotient test that she refers to in the article, I have found a copy of it here.
Autism and Empathy

Empathy and Ethics

Is Fake Art Really Art?

Fake art

Using Statistics

Hans Rosling is professor of global health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute. He began his career as a physician, spending many years in Africa tracking a rare paralytic disease (konzo) and discovering its cause: hunger and badly processed cassava. He co-founded Medecins sans Frontiers (Sweden), and has written a respected textbook (Global Health: An Introductory Textbook, Studentlitteratur AB, Sweden, 2006).

His work is grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), and he has developed interesting and innovative methods of displaying his data through which he is able to appeal even to the most hardened statistic-phobes. He is able to clearly show the importance of collecting and understanding real data (in the mathematical sense) in order to understand the current situation and properly plan for the future.

Much of his current work focuses on the developing world, which he shows is no longer worlds away from the west. In this TED talk he shows that the First and Third Worlds are on the same trajectory toward health, prosperity and longer life, and many countries are moving towards this goal twice as quickly as the west once did. He feels the obstacles to true understanding of the situation are merely problems of perception and our preconceived ideas.