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Each day is filled with work. My work is fun, but there are still decisions to make and a path to stay on. There are meetings to schedule and deadlines to meet. It can be a constant process of thought and movement.
I have stopped for the day. I stopped to look over my idea book and enjoy the summer breeze. The are ideas everywhere and sometimes you cannot find the ones that are in the calm of the day if you don’t stop to look and listen.
My doggie stands guard to protect me from squirrels, my other doggie wanted the cool of the air in the house. I listen to the wind kicking up. I hear cars from a nearby street. I feel sure that the birds are discussing what’s for dinner. My feel are hot in my sneakers that are still on since my morning walk. My daisies look like they are reaching for the sky. The weeds are tall on the north side of my house. My thoughts travel to what to make for dinner. (I resist that thought for now). My daughter turned 35 today! That makes me smile as I remember her entrance into this world and her loud voice!

All of these are but fleeting thoughts. Sometimes a fleeting thought will make into a story, but you must take the time to stop, look and listen.

Now I dive into my idea book!

Kinda cool to think that nearly everything in the world started as a spark in someone's head. What will you create with your sparks?

Tell us about the fantastic-futuristic inventions you're planning to unleash on the world when you get older...

The Sparks Question Mark

1.  Play World of War Craft. If you play WOW then your life is basically screwed up for even playing this!
2.  Play Runescape. Playing this game just to think you’ll get new friends, and people on your friend list are actually your friends which they’re not.
3.  Playing Maple Story. Playing this for hours a day just rots your brain and Maple Story is all you can think of.
4.  Hack. Think that you’re the world’s greatest hacker when you’re not!
5.  Magic. Thinking that you can cast spells, and also that you’re a powerful wizard that is five-thousand years old, when you are only thirty-three still living in your mom’s basement.
6. Chuck Norris jokes. Telling Chuck Norris jokes that suck!
7. Watch anime. Watching anime shows, and thinking that they’re the greatest ever when it sucks!
8. Own a segway. Ride a segway every where you go just to show off you wheels.
9. Collecting trading cards. Carrying your Pokémon and yu-gi-oh cards to duel other losers for entertainment!
10.  MySpace. Going on MySpace 24/7 and thinking you’re actually friends with the person on your friends list.

1.  Play World of War Craft. If you play WOW then your life is basically screwed up for even playing this!
2.  Play Runescape. Playing this game just to think you’ll get new friends, and people on your friend list are actually your friends which they’re not.
3.  Playing Maple Story. Playing this for hours a day just rots your brain and Maple Story is all you can think of.
4.  Hack. Think that you’re the world’s greatest hacker when you’re not!
5.  Magic. Thinking that you can cast spells, and also that you’re a powerful wizard that is five-thousand years old, when you are only thirty-three still living in your mom’s basement.
6. Chuck Norris jokes. Telling Chuck Norris jokes that suck!
7. Watch anime. Watching anime shows, and thinking that they’re the greatest ever when it sucks!
8. Own a segway. Ride a segway every where you go just to show off you wheels.
9. Collecting trading cards. Carrying your Pokémon and yu-gi-oh cards to duel other losers for entertainment!
10.  MySpace. Going on MySpace 24/7 and thinking you’re actually friends with the person on your friends list.

Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to return the discipline of philosophy to a focus on questions about how people actually think and feel. In Experimental Philosophy we get a thorough introduction to the major themes of work in experimental philosophy and theoretical significance of this new research. Editors Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols have been kind enough to explain this all in simple terms below.  Joshua Knobe is an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Shaun Nichols is in the Philosophy Department and Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona. He also is the author of Sentimental Rules and co-author (with Stephen Stich) of Mindreading. Be sure to check out their Myspace page and their blog.

The reason the two of us first started doing philosophy is that we were interested in questions about the human condition. Back when we were undergraduates, we were captivated by the ideas we found in the work of philosophers like Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Hume. We wanted to follow in their tracks and think and write about human beings, their thoughts and feelings, the way they get along with each other, the nature of the mind.

Then we went to graduate school. What we found there was that the discipline of philosophy was no longer focused on questions about what human beings were really like. Instead, the focus was on a very technical, formal sort of philosophizing that was quite far removed from anything that got us interested in philosophy in the first place. This left us feeling disaffected, and a number of researchers at various other institutions felt the same way.

Together, several of these researchers developed the new field of experimental philosophy. The basic idea behind experimental philosophy is that we can make progress on the questions that interested us in the first place by looking closely at the way human beings actually understand their world. In pursuit of this objective, practitioners of this new approach go out and conduct systematic experimental studies of human cognition.

For example, in the traditional problem of free will, many philosophers have maintained that no one can be morally responsible if everything that happens is an inevitable consequence of what happened before. But the entire debate is conducted in a cold, logical manner. Experimental philosophers thought that maybe the way people actually think about these issues isn’t always so cold and logical. So first they tried posing the question of free will to ordinary people in a cold abstract manner. After describing a universe in which everything is inevitable, they asked participants, “In this Universe is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions?” When the question was posed in this way, most people responded in line with those philosophers who claimed that no one can be responsible if everything is inevitable. But the experimentalists also wanted to see what would happen if people were given cases that got people more emotionally involved in the situation. So they once again described a universe in which everything that happens is inevitable, and then they asked a question that was sure to arouse strong emotions. It concerned a particular person in that Universe, Bill: “As he has done many times in the past, Bill stalks and rapes a stranger. Is it possible that Bill is fully morally responsible for raping the stranger?” Here the results were quite different. People tended to say that Bill was in fact morally responsible. So which reaction should we trust, the cold logical one or the emotionally involved one? This is the kind of question that experimental philosophy forces on us.

But that’s just one example. If you want to learn about more of the experimental studies that have been done, you can take a look at the recent articles on experimental philosophy in the New York Times and Slate.

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No new art today but a WONDERFUL new artist to check out. (Well, she's new to me.)
Marsha Robinett does absolutely gorgeous black and white work.
Her blog is full of great tutorials and I was especially interested in this post about her art materials.

I found her through another artist friend's blog, Cindy Haase, who does beautiful colored pencil work AND crafty things.

Get your fresh coffee and prepare to sit a spell... Read the rest of this post