Cal State Channel Islands philosophy lecturer Jonathan Caravello has just been ACQUITTED of assaulting ICE/CBP last summer while protesting a brutal Ventura County cannabis farm raid! His defense argued he threw a tear gas canister away to protect protesters. The jury acquitted him in two hours.
Attention’s relevance problem Friday, April 10, 3:30-5pm COB1 265 (UCM main campus) Intuitively, attention serves to attune an agent to what is relevant. A distracted agent is one that attends to things that are not, in fact, relevant. But what is the standard by which something is relevant? Answers often point to specific internal states, such as goals or intentions, or to specific external states, such as tasks or settings. The story cannot be so simple: something task-, or goal-unrelated can be highly relevant, and staying “on task” in the face of such events is seen as an attentional failure: a hungry bunny that fails to notice the arrival of a bird of prey is missing something relevant. This suggests that what is relevant is not just dependent on an agent’s occurrent goals or tasks, but is dependent on a wide set of interests. My aim in this talk is first to motivate that this is the right way to think about relevance. My second aim is to spell out a number of consequences for attention. If what is relevant is dependent on a whole array of interests, then attuning an agent to what is relevant becomes much more complicated. I will argue that the problem at hand is one of unencapsulation, similar to the more familiar relevance problem for belief fixation. I will try to show that many activities that are typically labeled as distractions can actually be thought of as “relevance-checking” behaviors. This talk is intended for an academic audience.
Embodied cognition meets the attention economy Thursday, April 9, 5:30pm UC Merced on Main (1635 M Street, Downtown Merced) Herbert Simon’s credo that “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” is generally taken to be foundational for the attention economy, the economic system in which human attention is the scarce commodity: it is because there is too much information in our environment that attending has become so difficult. My aims in this talk are twofold: first I want to show that the attention economy rests on shaky conceptual foundations that are untenable in the light of contemporary cognitive science of attention. Second, I draw on principles from embodied cognition to provide an alternative diagnosis of our current situation. The problem is not so much an abundance of information, but an abundance of always available action possibilities, making selecting the relevant course of action much more difficult. This talk is intended for a general public audience.
For people in the Central Valley: there will be TWO talks by Dr. Jelle Bruineberg (Copenhagen) at #UCMerced this week. One is public and criticizes the idea that we face "too much information," and the other is academic/scholarly and focused on a problem for attention theorists. All are welcome!
In case people are interested, this comes from www.jstor.org/stable/30131..., which I am teaching in my Senior Seminar on Self and Non-Self this week. He is talking about "the African political scene" in the quote above, but it seems relevant to other places, too 👀
“Take our political problems…The idea that we might conceivably have something to learn from our traditional, non-technological, culture is not at all starry-eyed. Ideally, politics is applied ethics. But ethical wisdom does not necessarily increase with technological advancement."--Wiredu #philsky
𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘁𝘀
Society for Philosophy & Neuroscience seminar series:
Introduction to fMRI
Brain networks
Brain representations/decoding
Multi-scale genetics and individual differences
Lesion data/intracranial
Free for members.
#neuroskyence
Haha, nice. We have Brando (micro Pom with voice like he’s smoked packs of cigars), Bucko (lovely yellow dog that isn’t allowed on walks and so just looks through the window all day silently), Blanco Blanco (window barkers, one large, one small), and Buddy-o (big boy, nose under fence, escaped once)
Your result: neither, somehow. From https://millermanschool.com/
Welp
Folks, they found the seat of consciousness! #philsky
All right, live whatevering of Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case. Arguing for the bad guys is US Solitictor General John (voice is an immutable characteristic so let's show some respect) Sauer. For the plaintiffs it's ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang.
Great video!
There is some hope in their story, I think. And the place is beautiful, the people welcoming. I can recommend this book if you want to read more: www.goodreads.com/book/show/40...
The country had been governed by Romans, Moors, Spanish, and French all before a king and prince were killed in the last century, along with a number of political leaders. Some intellectuals were happy a dictator took over when he did, for the promise of stability. Luckily, they found a way out +
When I read more about the history, I realized how little I knew. A long running dictatorship ended in the 70s with the military forcibly reinstating democracy, with only a handful of people killed in the process (the Carnation Revolution). These people know about political turbulence and hardship +
I was just in Portugal to give a talk, and had some anxiety about being an American abroad. Folks, the people I met were incredibly kind. One shop assistant gave me her own adaptor (to keep) because they didn't sell any in her shop. A waiter told me he thought the US was just young and would learn +
I liked that detail too
Photo of the faculty of letters building in University of Coimbra at sunset
Visiting one of the world’s oldest universities doesn’t disappoint #Coimbra
Students who say “Mills” finally vindicated!
I imagine hiring committees often miss behaviors that would violate policy. They might require new hires to explicitly affirm that they abide by the code of conduct, to prevent this kind of problem. If so, they could say he was hired on false pretenses, which would be actionable, I think.
Of course, they would likely have a better case if the behavior occurred post hiring, and so while an employee
www.ugent.be/en/ghentuniv...
What do you think about the code of conduct point? Namely, the university explicitly restricts freedom of expression in this case (1.5: “do not spread ideas about racial superiority”). They say it can apply to “private conduct.” Seems obvious behavior prior to hiring could count if discovered later
Why are we justified marginalizing Nazis and other racist and sexist scientists?
(tl,dr: it's a paper thread: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28499/) #philsci #sts #philsky
The deadline for papers is this Sunday!
“He already showed that thought is a disease of the flesh, and indirectly bore evidence that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional development and a full recognition of the coil of things. Mental luminousness must be fed with the oil of life, even though there is already a physical need for it; and the pitiful sight of two demands on one supply was just showing itself here.”
Academics: new* insult just dropped.
*new since 1878
Excellent post on financial satisfaction and labor status for graduate students by Kino Zhao @kinozhao.bsky.social at APDA: apda.ghost.io/2025-survey-...
Short write up here: dailynous.com/2026/03/10/u...
👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
Very very serious war crime if this is correct
“For Netanyahu, the assassination of Khamenei is a major success. Facing crucial elections that could mean the possible end of his political life and maybe his imprisonment over four corruption charges, the short-term gain in popularity and votes is worth it.”
Some helpful insights here.
A photo of a sleeping cat on the lap of someone wearing what looks like comfy clothing, their legs propped up on a chair
Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed
An individual stands at a podium wearing academic robes, with a microphone in front. Several flags are displayed in the background.
Born #OnThisDay in 1935 was cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman FRS, who developed the feature integration theory of attention. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989. Read more about her life and work in Royal Society Publishing #BioMems. #WomenInSTEM https://bit.ly/48zDUe1