Cut and paste poem based on Judy Golding’s BBC-broadcast reminiscences of her father, William Golding, on the anniversary of his birth. My cut-n-paste job was inspired by (and is, in a sense, a shortened version of) the excellent Scottish musician, artist and writer Momus’ version, here:
My version is below (click to play – audio only):
A White Hosannah – Simon Thomas (found poem ‘read’ by Judy Golding)
Many thanks to my brother, Owen (a.k.a. Stanley Forbes), for introducing me to the great Huun Huur Tu, who are folk musicians from the Tyva Republic.
Here they are at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in August, 2006, demonstrating “sygyt” (or “whistle”), which is one of three different Tyvan throat-singing styles. The video is courtesy of tantsev and YouTube. It’s quite amazing, I think.
Wonderfully-titled and very interesting documentary on synaesthesia, courtesy of Google videos.
To see how this relates to the psychological/philosophical functionalist theory of consciousness, you might want to see this part of the essay I uploaded a while ago onto this site. If I’m right, synaesthesia might be a key way of testing (and refuting) functionalist theories of consciousness.
Note: the possible refutation itself comes from Jeffrey Gray et al’s series of empirical psychological papers from the early 2000s – you can get a flavour of these by typing in his name and “synesthesia” into a search engine. You could also read The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia by VS Ramachandran and EM Hubbard (April, 2003).
Katja Grace shares some brief but interesting considerations of the relationships between images and thoughts.
Anderson Brown has published a draft of a possible introduction to artificial intelligence, here.
Biologist PJ Myers condemns the moral witchhunts that lead to teachers (amongst others) being removed from their jobs not because of their (lack of) ability, but due to what they do or have done in their private lives.
You can also read a very interesting account, here, by an elementary school teacher who cannot find a job (despite her qualifications and experience) because of her past as a sex worker.
Chris Panza appears more than half-persuaded by the central argument for moral objectivism in Charles Taylor’s essay, Sources of the Self, which seems to turn on a phenomenological account of what it means to be human.
