No time for posty-posty; I’m finalising the smaller, slimmer, less carbon-costing coursebook for the Critical Thinking course I teach (which is now booked with people on the wait list, so no need for me to advertise it any further) as well as getting the first lecture ready for the Medical Humanities paper I start teaching (again) in just under a week’s time. It’s busy-busy-busy and I’m really only popping online to change the Event Calendar to reflect that the next episode of ‘The Dentith Files’ (where the Freemasons get what was always coming) has been delayed a week. Something about people going away on holiday, yadda yadda. Probably Them conspiring against me.
So, in lieu of content, here’s some research topics for the future, from an unfinished Brainstab post:
The Ethics of Parallel Universes – (You could quite happily replace ‘Parallel’ here with ‘Artificial’ or ‘Possible…’)
Imagine a world where Objectivist Ethics was actually true… I know, impossible, but bear with me; it’s a bit of a jokey example but it does highlight a possible use for parallel worlds; speciate out your ethics, apply them to your sets of worlds and, well, what you do afterwards is probably up to you.
Counterfactual Geography
What would the world have been like had, say, the continents existed in different places (I realise that Geography as a discipline is a lot more than maps, but, well, no one outside the discipline thinks it is anything other)? This started off as being an example of the kind of topic even philosophers wouldn’t touch, but on closer inspection this is, actually, an interestint topic. We already know that counterfactual history is interesting (even historians engage in ‘What if’ scenarios so to show their expertise in a time period) so it really isn’t surprising that counterfactual geography could be informative. Imagine if Africa and Europe, during the migration of Homo sapiens sapiens, had had no connecting landmasses? What if the crossig between Asia and North America had never formed? Oh the fun I could have with this topic.
I was going to say that Counterfactual Geology would be an example of a pointless topic, but as it seems to be in use in regards to the whole Creationism debate it may have some merit after all…
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Something a bit related (but not really.)
Indeedy. I’m not sure whether I find it funny because it’s true or because I’m a New Zealander…