It turned out we didn’t have a destination for April as everyone was busy working and whatnot. Still, we headed off to Red Hot, a Brazilian BBQ place on Gouger Street, for dinner this month.

As usual, my friends got the local beer. Actually, I think they were Costa Rican beers but that’s by the by. I ordered a homemade lemon iced tea (apparently very popular in Hong Kong!?). It was very sweet, so the waitress took the glass off of me and mashed up the lemons in the bottom.

When it came time to order, my friends all got the all-you-can-eat meat. Every few minutes a waiter would come out with some kind of meat on a sword/skewer and carve a piece off for them. There were ribs, lamb, chicken breast, chicken heart (which everyone politely declined) and a whole lot of other meats too. Sadly no capybara though. I ordered prawns for $12 and quail for $8. I quite liked the quail, except it was very messy to eat.

Anywho, here’s the rundown:

Food: 7/10 - By all reports, the meats were very nice and I would definitely go back there just to try the all-you-can-eat. Naturally, I wouldn’t recommend the place to vegetarians. Not just because they carve the meat at the table, but there just aren’t many vegetarian options on the menu.

Value: 9/10 - The all-you-can-eat meat was about $32 and the meat was very nicely cooked. Likewise, the charcoal quail was also cheap. Drinks were reasonably priced.

Atmosphere: 6/10 - The walls were covered with pictures of Brazil but otherwise the interior was quite plain. The big drawcard was that the waiters carved the meat at the tables.

Not sure where we’re going next time, although Gouger Street has quite a few possibilities. Vietnamese perhaps?

The most recent stop on our round-the-world food adventure was Croatia. Last Monday we headed off to Morska Vila at Henley Beach for some fine Croatian fare.

Morska Vila is a pretty small restaurant, only a few tables inside and out, and fairly cheap too. I don’t think there was much on the menu over $20.  Most of the guys ordered the local beer and said it was good - though they’ve said that of all the beers so far; I suspect they’ll drink pretty much anything except some of the shittier Australian and American brews. We got a couple of fried cheeses to share to begin with. They were alright but the olives that came with them were the best I’d ever tasted - not too salty and just the right texture. I ordered the lamb meatballs for mains and they were quite good, although I found myself craving the chevachpi chevachipi Croatian sausages in Turkish bread that some of the other guys ordered.

Overall, it was a good - and cheap - night out. Here’s the rundown:

Food: 7/10 - The fried cheese and meatballs really hit the spot but there were only a couple of things on the menu that looked like my type of food.

Value: 8/10 - Again, most of the dishes were in the $12 - $20 range and I was pretty full by the end of the meal.

Atmosphere: 7/10 - It’s nice little place near the beach decorated with boats and paintings of semi-tasteful nudes. The staff were probably the firendliest so far.

Our stop for next month (actually this month) is already confirmed as Brazil.

From an evolutionary point of view, consciousness is a bit of a conundrum. I’m a pretty hardcore adaptationist so I’m of the opinion that complex traits are either adaptations or related to adaptations in some way (by being byproducts or vestiges of them, or, if they are not shared by a significant proportion of the population, by being defective versions of them). Consciousness doesn’t appear to be any of these things.

For something to be an adaptation, it needs to be visible to natural selection. That is, it needs to have an effect on the reproductive success of the individual. It’s easy to see how certain behaviour patterns could be adaptive - animals that avoid predators or learn from prior experience do better than those that don’t - but it’s not so easy to see why those behaviour patterns need be accompained by conscious exerience. If I accidentally touch the stove and draw my hand away from it this in itself is adaptive. The addition of the pain experience seems to add nothing to my survival and reproductive chances.

So perhaps conscious experiences are byproducts of adaptive behaviour, just as the redness of blood is a byproduct of its oxygen-carrying capacity. While this might explain the presence of conscious states, it doesn’t explain their character. To compare, the colour of blood is arbitrary; if blue blood could have evolved and done the job better then blood would be blue. Since the colour of blood, and of other internal bits and pieces, aren’t causally relevant to their function, we shouldn’t expect to see any correlation between their colour and their function. Arteries and intestines are both transport systems but arteries are red while intestines are grey. But this isn’t what we see with our conscious states. Similar stimuli create similar experiences - our experience of redness is a lot closer to yellowness than it is to sweetness - and our positive and negative experiences seem to act as behavioural levers.

In short, if consciousness is adaptive, then conscious individuals should be fitter than non-conscious but otherwise identical individuals. But having conscious states doesn’t add anything causally relevant. This suggests consciousness is a byproduct. But if it is a byproduct, we would expect our conscious states to be arbitrary. For instance, if I felt pleasure instead of pain by touching the stove but my behaviour remained the same - I withdrew my hand nonetheless - this would be no less adaptive than if I felt pain.

So here’s the paradox:

(1) Natural selection ’selects’ adaptations based on differences between the causal properties of potential adaptations.

(2) There is no causal difference between conscious behaviour and otherwise identical non-conscious behaviour with respect to natural selection.

(3, from 1 & 2) There is no selective difference between conscious individuals and otherwise identical non-conscious individuals; consciousness is not an adaptation

(4) We should not expect that properties that are causally irrelevant to natural selection (byproducts) be tightly correlated with either each other, or propoerties that are causally relevant to natural selection(adaptations).

(5) Conscious states are tightly correlated both with each other and with behaviour.

(6, from 4 & 5) We should not expect that consciousness is a byproduct of an adaptation.

(7, from 3 & 6) Consciousness is not an adaptation, nor does it seem to be a byproduct of one.

I’m not happy to call consciousness a vestige or a defect (and similar arguments would probably apply anyway) so I’d like a way out of this dilemma but I’m having a hard time seeing one.

The latest philosophy carnival is on at philosophy, et cetera and I’m in it. Huzzah! Have a look around and if you like what you see then check out the carnival website for previous carnivals and more philosophical goodness.

Okay, the weekly features aren’t really working out because I’m just not imaginative in coming up with things. So no more weekly links or TTT. Still, there are a lot of good websites out there, particularly blogs. Here’s a few of my favourites:

First up, there’s the Scienceblogs conglomerate. You just have to take a quick look at my blogroll to see that most of them direct to the scienceblogs domain. What I like best about Scienceblogs is that the blogs there cover a broad range of sciences and they’re all in the one place.

Recently I stumbled across (not stumbled upon - I got rid of that application after a couple of days) a nifty little science fiction blog called io9. Thanks to io9, I’ve seen an interesting documentary about the world without people, read a couple Iain M. Banks books and am looking forward to quite a few movies this year.

Damn Interesting is another blog that I’ll have to put up on the blogroll. Where most of the blogs on Scienceblogs tend to talk about whatever’s current, Damn Interesting blogs about whatever they find interesting, whether it be current or old. Their posts on psychopathy and lucid decapitation are well worth a read.

Enjoy.

I thought I’d take some time to write down my views on ethics before they completely change as a result of writing an ethics thesis.

The nature of goodness and rightness:

Like utilitarians, and unlike Kantians, I think that goodness is necessarily prior to rightness. I think that goodness is a property of states of the world while rightness is a property of actions, more specifically those that alter goodness in some way (such as by maximising it, for instance). And while I think goodness describes objectively real properties, rightness only describes subjective attitudes. In short, I’m a realist with respect to goodness and a quasi-realist with respect to rightness (probably thanks to a visit from Simon Blackburn last year). Goodness seems to be a property of phenomenal consciousness; experiences that feel good are goodness.

Normative ethics:

The way I see it, there’s a continuum of normative frameworks ranging from extreme teleological ones, such as utilitarianism, where consequences are all that matters, to extreme deontological ones, like Kantian ethics, where consequences play no role. If a theory does not define rightness as a property of actions (like virtue ethics, in which rightness is more about being a better person, not doing the right thing) then it doesn’t lie on the continuum. But most modern theories do, so I think it’s a useful taxonomy.

Given my views on goodness and rightness, I subscribe to an extreme teleological view: consequences alone matter when judging the rightness of actions. It seems like a lot of ethicists equate teleological theories with maximising ones; that doing the right thing necessarily means bringing about the best consequences, and that this necessarily means creating the most goodness. Similarly, if a theory requires moral agents not to maximise goodness, then it necessarily requires them to follow rules that have nothing to do with the consequences of actions. So teleological theories are necessarily maximising ones. I disagee for two reasons:

1: Even when consequences alone are considered, doing the right thing needn’t mean producing the best consequences. This is the standard satisficer’s (as opposed to maximiser’s) view. Satisficing consequentialism comes in a variety of forms, most commonly those where there is some threshold before an action is considered right. My view is that rightness isn’t a simple binary thing where an action is either right or wrong, rather there are degrees of rightness such that it is somewhat right to produce good consequences but most right to produce the best.

2: Given both the account of rightness and that of extreme teleological theories given above, an action needs to fulfil two criteria to be considered ‘right’. (1) It needs to alter the good in some way and (2) it can only be judged in terms of its consequences. Maximisation is not the only way to alter the good, nor is the only criterion on which to judge consequences. The distribution of goodness works equally well. My view is that the rightness of an action depends both on the amount of goodness that is produced and on how equal the distribution of it is.

Agency and objecthood:

As I mentioned here, one can be a moral object without being a moral agent and vice versa. The key attribute of a moral object is phenomenal consciousness while a moral agent needs the ability to recognise this in others, imagine the consequences of actions and act according to a set of rules in order to bring about acceptable consequences. A moral agent does not need phenomenal consciousness to do this. Examples of moral objects are adult humans, young children and animals. Examples of moral agents are adult humans and philosophical zombies.

The role of intuition in ethics:

Should be kept to an absolute minimum. Intiution pumps (the majority of thought experiments in ethics) appeal to a moral sense whose purpose has more to do with gene replication and less to do with doing the ‘right’ thing. Of course, I believe that ‘rightness’ is just an expression of one’s attitudes, so how do I reconcile this with the idea that intuition pumps are useless?

First off, normative theories - any normative theory - ought to be self-consistent. Yes, the view that we ought to act rationally is just an expression of my attitude but surely if you’re using reason to come up with a normative theory in the first place, you ought to make sure it’s a reasonable theory. Trying to make a self-consistent theory conform to our intuitions assumes that our intuitions are self-consistent as well. I doubt this is the case but if they are then I suspect any moral theory that seeks to be consistent with them would be one that emphasises gene replication. Since evolutionary ethics is intuitively off-putting, this suggests that such a theory would have to be quite sophisticated or that our intuitions are not self-consistent.

Second, intuitions vary between people. I’m not likely to have the same intuitions as a utilitarian and I cannot imagine why Kantians think the way they do. Most intuition pumps appeal to our sense of rightness. The elicit such varied reactions because rightness is an expression of attitudes.

Third, even our intuitions about goodness are flawed. Rules like the Golden Rule assume that others want to be treated as we want to be treated. Our ability to place ourselves in other’s shoes is limited, especially when the others in question are very different from us. Still, I think that thought experiments that appeal to goodness are the most likely to be useful.

So to sum up, phenomenal consciousness is the most important thing in ethics. Without it, nothing would have value. Most of my views stem from this fact, and the subjectivity that it implies; there are a myriad of individual viewpoints each of which deserves to be taken into account, though not by a crude utilitarian aggregation that obliterates the very perspectives it is trying to consider. Moreover, there is no panpsychic universal viewpoint. The lack of such a perspective seems to me to rule out the possibility that rightness is objective.

Sometime this afternoon this blog had it’s thousandth visit. Even though a lot of blogs would get that many in a day, and my reasons for writing it are more for my self than to attract readers (mainly to work on my writing skills and get ideas clearer in my head), I’m pretty happy about it.

Last Monday we packed our bags and headed to Zagol House for what was my first taste of African food.

Instead of eating the dish we ordered, we picked dishes off the menu to share. The staff bought us out a pancake each. This was what we used to eat instead of cutlery. They were basically pancake-shaped but were more like flat sour crumpets. Then the dishes came, lamb, beef, chicken, vegetarian - and all quite spicy. Not hot spicy, just spicy spicy. We spent a while figuring out the most efficient way to eat the dishes and eventually settled on breaking a bit of pancake off, spooning the dish onto the pancake and wrapping it up in it for eating. There was one green-looking dish with mincemeat and spices that was very nice but I can’t remember what it was called.

Perhaps the biggest problem, and this was the same at Ghengis Khan and Zapata’s, was that there were no drinks specific to the region. Unless you’re a beer drinker, of course. My friends were satisfied with the beers at all three places but since all beer tastes like vegemite-water filtered through a gym sock I didn’t want to risk it.

Anyway, here’s the rundown:

Food: 8/10 - There was a decent range of dishes and I liked all the ones I tried.

Value: 8/10 - Most dishes were between $12 and $20. The vegetarian dishes were very nice and, being vegetarian, toward the cheap end of the price scale.

Atmosphere: 8/10 - I don’t know whether Ethiopians really eat with their fingers but I’d like to believe they do just so I can justify saying that it felt more authentic.

Would I go back there? Probably. It’s just down the road from the Governor Hindmarsh hotel so a dinner and a concert seems like a pretty good idea.

Next month it looks like we’re going to a Croatian restaurant somewhere. Never tried Croatian before either so I’m looking forward to it.

Preparing to write my thesis involves a lot of writing. Mainly this involves borrowing books from libraries and downloading journal articles that are only available to people at uni but there’s also a lot of good stuff on the internet as well.

There are two good philosophy encyclopaedias on the internet, the Stanford and the Internet. Last year I tutored some high-school students and I was often asked where to find information on particular topics. Usually I directed them to the relevant wikipedia article first and if that didn’t have enough info (or wrong info) then I’d suggest the Internet Encyclopedia, and then the Stanford. Even though the Stanford Encyclopedia is probably the best, the Internet Encyclopedia is slightly easier to read.

Speaking of students asking questions, the Ask Philosophers website is also quite good. I submitted a couple of questions a few years ago and they were both answered within about three weeks.

Then there’s the many good philosophy blogs. David Chalmers has a comprehensive list, although it’s a little dated. One of my favourites is Richard Chappell’s Philosophy, et cetera. Evolving Thoughts, PEA Soup, Adventures in Ethics and Science, Atheist Ethicist and Issues in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science and Mind are also worth a read.

Every couple of weeks the philosophy blogs hold the Philosophy Carnival. This is where one blog links to posts submitted by other philosophy bloggers. It’s a good way to find new and interesting philosophy blogs.

This week I’ve got my top ten Aussie commercials for you. This is my first time embedding youtube videos so I went a bit crazy and found videos for all of them. That means that if you’re on dial-up you might want to skip this post. It also means I’ve only added commercials for which there is a youtube video - no ads for Goulburn Valley Fruit Snacks. Anyway, here’s the list and a brief explanation why I find each ad so damn funny.

10: Sudafed - Large Wooden Horse

This ad started a couple of years ago and they still show it every now and then.

Comedy gold moment: 18 seconds in

Guy wearing armour - “It’s a very heavy horse, m’lord.”

Emperor - “It must be made of very heavy wood.”

9: Nandos - Nando fix patches

A lot of the ads here appeal to me simply because they’re bizarre. This is one of them.

Comedy gold moment: 17 seconds in - Mr. Smug Hostage.

8: Carlton Draught - Big ad

I also like self-referential ads. This one hopes that such an expensive ad will sell some bloo-ooo-dy beer. Since I don’t drink beer it’s appeal is wasted on me.

Comedy gold moment: 44 seconds in - Mr. Waving Hand in Front of Face Guy.

7: Bigpond - Rabbits in China

You just know I’m gonna do this when I have kids.

Comedy gold moment: 27 seconds in

Dad - “Too many rabbits… in China”

6: Bravia - Bunnies

Okay, so this one’s not funny and it’s not Australian but it is on Australian telly so it counts. It’s one in a series of ads for Bravia TVs (this one’s also excellent) and it the amount of planning that must have gone into it is staggering.

Comedy gold moment: none, but I like the bunny-whale at 1 minute in. 

5: Commonwealth Bank - Michael Bay

Okay so this ad’s mostly crap but it’s saved by this:

Comedy gold moment: 35 seconds in

Ad Exec - ”You know Michael Bay here kicked a lot of his own money to put that thing together.”

Michael Bay - “I used seven helicopters.”

4: Snickers - Get some nuts

Because it’s got Mr. T in it, that’s why. Actually, I’d like to see more celebrity endorsements. I’d buy anti-wrinkle cream from Michael Dorn, for instance.

Comedy gold moment: 20 seconds in - Mr. T growls as he throws the snickers bar at the guy. The snickers bar bounces off the guy’s head.

3: Farmer’s Union Iced Coffee - We are with you all the way

South Australia is probably the only place in the world where iced coffee outsells coke. I’d like to think that ads like this help but they probably have little effect. This one chronicles events in Australian and world history.

Comedy gold moment: 28 seconds in - “and Trevor’s underarm!”  Even though it refers to something to do with cricket, it still strikes me as bizarrely out of place.

2: Carlton Draught - Made from beer

It was hard to choose only two Carlton Draught ads, there’s also an excellent third ad about canoes.

Comedy gold moment: 28 seconds in - “More horses!” 

1: Lamb - Fragrance for spring

Every year, around Australia day, some meat association puts together and ad to encourage people to eat lamb. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re crap. This one advertises lamb as though it were a perfume. Incidentally, Gwen Stefani has a perfume called L.A.M.B. Whenever I see that ad I think of this one.

Comedy gold moment: 19 seconds in

Voiceover guy with some kind of European accent - “Lamb, a fragrance for spring.”

That’s it for now.