Sapere Aude!

Is It Morally Permissible to Erase Bad Memories?

The anxiety provoked by the idea of “memory dampening” is so intriguing that even the President’s Council on Bioethics, convened by President George W. Bush in his first term, thought the issue important enough to reflect on it alongside discussions of cloning and stem-cell research. Editing memories could “disconnect people from reality or their true selves,” the council warned. While it did not give a definition of “selfhood,” it did give examples of how such techniques could warp us by “falsifying our perception and understanding of the world.” The potential technique “risks making shameful acts seem less shameful, or terrible acts less terrible, than they really are.”

But the mere possibility seems to have threatened an important convention for representing memory in relation to personal identity. These worries draw their force from a deep-seated attachment to two related beliefs: first, that we are, in some ambiguous but important way, the accretion of our life experiences; and second, that those life experiences are perfectly preserved even if our ability to remember them is far from perfect. When Alzheimer’s disease patients lose significant amounts of memory, dismayed friends often say that their very selves have crumbled or faded away and that in some literal way they are “no longer themselves.”

The thought here is not that people believe their memories are perfect — far from it. Common understandings of memory centrally involve the idea that memories are unreliable, fickle and capricious. But there is another belief about memory that has been articulated by many figures in memory research: that in some fundamental way, secreted within us are perfect records of past experiences, even if we might never access them consciously.

The concerns of the President’s Council naturally raised the question of how to distinguish psychic pain from physical pain, since it was this very distinction that the council failed to discuss explicitly. The council did not set itself against the use of physical anesthesia, even though there are well-known cases where pain is thought to serve a useful purpose. Yet physical anesthetics have some relevant common ground with the prospective memory technologies, and there is a long history of resistance to the idea of physical anesthesia on grounds similar to some of the arguments being mounted here. Skeptics argued that a loss of sensation would disconnect sufferers from a valuable experience (as in childbirth) and from information they needed to have. Before the advent of anesthesia, techniques that seemed to involve an intentional suspension of sensation could trigger alarm on a scale that now seems almost inconceivable.

via www.salon.com

Paul Pardi: Why Faith Claims Should Be 'Corrected': A Professor's Argument

t the heart of Boghossian's argument is the idea that students should leave a classroom more informed about the world than they entered it, and since faith claims aren't publicly testable, students who make them "shouldn't be given a seat at the adult table." Boghossian makes a distinction between a private belief that impacts only the person believing it (like the belief that peanut butter tastes good) and public claims that are supposed to have implications for the rest of us (like the claim that God disapproves of contraception). Beliefs about God and his activity are private beliefs that students are welcome to hold but these beliefs should not be a part of the educational conversation. If a student makes a public argument that is based on a private belief, professors should call these students out and help correct their thinking.

Boghossian is clear that the crux issue is not about the claims themselves. Rather, he focuses on addressing the processes one uses to get to those claims. Professors must "meaningfully discuss these issues and talk about the process one uses and the fact that certain processes are unreliable to lead one to the truth -- faith being one of those processes -- and have educators call people out on, quite frankly, delusion."

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Paul Stoller on Corporate Academia, Students, and Fatigue

Every semester over-worked students have a limited amount of time to study. Professors are "too busy" to refine their teaching or pursue their research, which usually improves the quality of instruction. Students and professors are trapped in increasingly corporate institutions of higher learning that are designed for processing products -- moving student bodies through institutional stages -- that produce positive institutional profiles.

Incessant institutional processing produces a great deal of end-of-the-semester student and professorial fatigue, a symptom that something important is missing from the mix of elements on our university campuses. Higher education should be more than a system for processing student bodies. Indeed, it should be the serious attempt to teach young people how to be in the world--an attempt that will set a course for the future.

If we recognize the fatigue for what it is, we should use the Winter Break to recharge our existential batteries and begin anew the pursuit of knowledge.

Here's a New Year's resolution for college students: make a habit of visiting your professors and discussing the world of ideas. Taking such a small step will not only be rewarding for students and professors, but will make the university a little less corporate and a little more humane, which means, that everyone benefits.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Stoller nails it.

The History of Christmas in Boondocks

Happy Festivus!

As football teams win, male students' grades lose | Inside Higher Ed

The lists of arguments for and against big-time college football programs are both long.

Supporters cite the revenue many programs generate, the binding effect the teams can have for alumni, students and others, and the increased attention the teams can bring to their institutions (which, scandals aside, is often publicity that money can't buy). The list of "cons" to counter those "pros" includes compromises in admissions (to enroll the best players) and academic rigor (to keep them eligible to play), misalignment of resources (like putting players up at hotels before home games when library hours are being cut), and the same publicity when scandal (inevitably?) erupts.

A new study released Monday by the National Bureau for Economic Research suggests adding one item to the latter list: Winning football teams make male students stupider.

Okay, that's not quite accurate. Male students don't actually get stupider if their football teams win more; their grades just drop.

via www.insidehighered.com

Appeals court rejects appeal of anti-gay student's challenge to counseling rules | Inside Higher Ed

A federal appeals court has upheld the right of Augusta State University to enforce standards of its counseling graduate program -- even when a religious student objects to requirements to treat gay people in a nondiscriminatory manner.

While the ruling may be appealed, it represents a strong victory for advocates of counseling standards that require that students be trained to treat a range of clients in supportive, nonjudgmental ways. The student who sued Augusta State, and already lost in a lower court, maintained that her First Amendment rights were violated when the university required her to complete a "remediation plan" over her willingness to treat gay people.

She had stated her intent to recommend "conversion therapy" to gay clients and to tell them that they could choose to be straight. (A wide consensus among psychology and sexuality experts holds that people don't select their sexual orientation and that encouraging people to change their orientation can be seriously harmful to them.)

The student, Jennifer Keeton, argues that her religiously motivated beliefs are being challenged by Augusta State's policies -- and that a public university may not do so. Keeton was expelled when she declined to participate in the remediation plan, and she asked a federal district court and the appeals court to order her reinstatement in the program.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found that Augusta State had legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons to enforce its rules. The counseling program's accreditation depended in part on adhering to a code of conduct, and faculty members believed it was their responsibility to train students to work with a wide range of clients, the court found. The decision placed the counseling department's actions at Augusta State in the broader context of faculty members training professionals who must pay attention to the ethics of various fields.

"Just as a medical school would be permitted to bar a student who refused to administer blood transfusions for religious reasons from participating in clinical rotations, so ASU may prohibit Keeton from participating in its clinical practicum if she refuses to administer the treatment it has deemed appropriate," says the decision.

via www.insidehighered.com

Gingrich Throws More Red Meat to Republican Base

WASHINGTON -- With just weeks to go before the Iowa Caucus, Newt Gingrich has turned his presidential campaign into a veritable megaphone warning about the dangers and elitism of America's judicial system. The former House Speaker held a half-hour phone call on Saturday during which he pledged to abolish courts and eliminated activist judges he believed were either outside the mainstream or infringing too deeply on the commander in chief's authority.

On Sunday, he followed that up by saying he would be willing to arrest a judge who he thought was out of line.

"If you had to," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation" when asked if he would send a Capitol Hill police officer to round up a judge, "or you would instruct the Justice Department to send the U.S. Marshal." His preference, he added, would be to impeach the judge in question.

That Gingrich is willing to resort to these measures isn't necessarily surprising to longtime watchers of the former Speaker. He has made criticism of the judiciary a rallying point for many years, peppering speeches to conservative audiences with calls to simply get rid of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and U.S. District Judge Fred Biery in San Antonio. As his prospects of actually winning the Iowa Caucus have improved, the rhetoric isn't being tempered. If anything, it's getting more fiery.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Christopher Hitchens: Remembering The Legendary Writer And Orator (VIDEO)

Christopher Hitchens was a journalist, an author, an atheist, a smoker, a drinker, a provocateur, a husband and a father. His death on Dec. 15 at the age of 62 was a surprise to many of his friends and fans, even though they knew he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2010.

"We were friends for more than 30 years," Christopher Buckley said, "which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough."

For those who are unfamiliar with his work, this collection of Hitchens' speeches and interviews will provide an excellent portrait of the man and his very powerful words. Or click here to read his final essay for Vanity Fair.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

News Bulletin: Ron Paul Is a Huge Racist -- Daily Intel

With Ron Paul ascending in Iowa, winning the hearts of independents, and even the endorsement of Andrew Sullivan, it’s worth pointing something out: Ron Paul is not a kindly old libertarian who just wants everybody to be free. He’s a really creepy bigot.

Around four years ago, James Kirchick reported a lengthy story delving into Paul’s worldview. As Kirchick writes, Paul comes out of an intellectual tradition called “paleolibertarianism,” which is a version of libertarianism heavily tinged with far-right cultural views. The gist is that Paul is tied in deep and extensive ways to neo-Confederates, and somewhat less tightly to the right-wing militia movement. His newsletter, which he wrote and edited for years, was a constant organ of vile racism and homophobia. This is not just picking out a phrase here and there. Fear and hatred of blacks and gays, along with a somewhat less pronounced paranoia about Jewish dual loyalty, are fundamental elements of his thinking. The most comparable figure to Paul is Pat Buchanan, the main differences being that Paul emphasizes economic issues more, and has more dogmatically pro-market views.

How, then, has Paul become a figure of admiration among social liberals?

One reason is that nobody is attacking him. Paul is (correctly) considered to have no chance to actually win the GOP nomination, so debate moderators have not bothered to research his past, instead tossing off generalized questions that allow him to portray himself on his preferred terms.  The Republican Establishment is focusing all its fire on Newt Gingrich, and indeed, Paul’s rise in Iowa would greatly aid Mitt Romney’s campaign by preventing an acceptable alternative from emerging from the state with momentum.

In this atmosphere, Paul has been able to cast himself in the most flattering light. Since 2008, he has managed to rally Republican (and even non-Republican) opposition to the failures and excesses of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

via www.nymag.com