Emergent Tech

Relativism, Revolutionary Fictionalism, Moral Facts and #TheDress

[Disclaimer: this post is a brief, quickly-composed and so incomplete response to a number of tangentially-related events and essays from the last several days.  I have a lot more to say about all of them, including how they are not merely tangentially-related, but not now.] If you haven’t already, you should read yesterday’s Stone article in the…

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The “Real” and “True” You

Last week, my Philosophy and Film class took up the theme of “documentary truth.”  In preparation for our Tuesday night seminar, students were required to choose one film from a list of documentaries (Grizzly Man, The Thin Blue Line, Night and Fog, Bowling for Columbine, Capturing the Friedmans, Man on Wire, Super Size Me, Ghosts…

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The Uncanny Valley 8: Pet Robots

[This is a continuation of my (now numerous) reflections on the Uncanny Valley. You can read the previous seven installments here if you’re interested.] Late last semester, as a part of my department’s semi-regular Philosophy Film Series, we screened Mechanical Love, a 2007 documentary about the ever-evolving relationships between humans and robots. The film focuses…

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The Uncanny Valley 7: Sonzai-Kan

Every time I try to put away my obsession with the uncanny valley, some new robot or robot-story invades my world and reanimates that fascination all over again. Regular readers of this blog will know that I first became interested in robotocist Masahiro Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley back in October of 2010, when…

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The Uncanny Valley 6: Unreal and Unreal-er, or, Why a “Fake” Fake Isn’t Uncanny

I made a brief mention in my last uncanny valley post about the difference between “real” music, by which I mean music played on actual (i.e. “real,” material or physical) musical instruments by musicians (i.e. human beings with some skill on those instruments, availing themselves of said instruments without superadded technological assistance) on the one…

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The Uncanny Valley 5: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve written several posts about the “uncanny valley” on this blog. The theory of the uncanny valley is loosely based on Freud’s account of Das Unheimliche (the “uncanny”), a major trope of psychoanalytic theory and a favorite play-thing of literary, film and cultural theorists who borrow…

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The Uncanny Valley 4: Magic, Miracles, and the Necessary Third

As many of you know, I was a tad bit obsessed with a certain theory in robotics known as “the uncanny valley” several months back. I even delivered a philosophy paper this past Spring using the uncanny valley as one way of explaining our aversion to racial passing. (You can read my series of posts…

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The Uncanny Valley

[Update: This post is the first in an ongoing series about the Uncanny Valley.  Click here to read them all.] A couple of weeks ago when I was teaching Descartes’ Meditations, one of my students made reference to something called the “uncanny valley,” which I had never heard of before but which sounded really fascinating….

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The Uncanny Valley 2: Racial Appearances

[This is a continutation of my previous post on the uncanny valley. If you don’t know what the uncanny valley is, you may want to go back and read the previous post first.] In 1931, at the beginning of the dénouement of the Harlem Renaissance, conservative (some would say “reactionary”) African-American author George Schuyler penned…

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The Uncanny Valley 3: φύσις and τέχνη

As I recounted in my first post on the uncanny valley, I learned of this phenomenon from a student in one of my classes. I can’t remember the exact context of his bringing it up– it had something to do with our knowledge of the outside world as contested, and then proven, by Descartes in…

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