神就是爱

许多的时候,我们爱人是为了讨人的喜悦,得人的报答。当付出的爱得不到应有的回报时,我们会灰心、埋怨和绝望……     

What God might be

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - As Plato suggested, the cosmos may exist because this is ethically necessary. It then might well consist of infinitely many minds, each itself...     

Gamelike features might not improve data

Many psychological experiments require participants to complete lots of trials in a monotonous task, which often induces boredom. An increasingly popular approach to alleviate such boredom is to incorporate gamelike features into standard experimental tasks. Games are assumed to be interesting and, hence, motivating, and better motivated participants might produce better data (with fewer lapses in attention and greater accuracy). Despite its apparent prevalence, the assumption that gamelike features improve data is almost completely untested. We test this assumption by presenting a choice task and a change detection task in both gamelike and standard forms. Response latency, accuracy, and overall task performance were unchanged by gamelike features in both experiments. We present a novel cognitive model for the choice task, based on particle filtering, to decorrelate the dependent variables and measure performance in a more psychologically meaningful manner. The model-based analyses are consistent with the hypothesis that gamelike features did not alter cognition. A postexperimental questionnaire indicated that the gamelike version provided a more positive and enjoyable experience for participants than the standard task, even though this subjective experience did not translate into data effects. Although our results hold only for the two experiments examined, the gamelike features we incorporated into both tasks were typical of—and at least as salient and interesting as those usually used by—experimental psychologists. Our results suggest that modifying an experiment to include gamelike features, while leaving the basic task unchanged, may not improve the quality of the data collected, but it may provide participants with a better experimental experience.     

Ekman's basic emotions: Why not love and jealousy?

Paul Ekman's view of the emotions is, we argue, pervasive in psychology and is explicitly shaped to be compatible with evolutionary thinking. Yet, strangely, jealousy and parental love, two emotions that figure prominently in evolutionary psychology, are absent from Ekman's list of the emotions. In this paper we examine why Ekman believes this exclusion is necessary, and what this implies about the limits of his conception of emotion. We propose an alternative way of thinking about emotion that does not exclude jealousy and parental love.     

God is not a person (an argument via pantheism)

This paper transforms a development of an argument against pantheism into an objection to the usual account of God within contemporary analytic philosophy (’Swinburnian theism’). A standard criticism of pantheism has it that pantheists cannot offer a satisfactory account of God as personal. My paper will develop this criticism along two lines: first, that personhood requires contentful mental states, which in turn necessitate the membership of a linguistic community, and second that personhood requires limitation within a wider context constitutive of the ’setting’ of the agent’s life. Pantheism can, I argue, satisfy neither criterion of personhood. At this point the tables are turned on the Swinburnian theist. If the pantheist cannot defend herself against the personhood-based attacks, neither can the Swinburnian, and for instructively parallel reasons: for neither doctrine is God in the material world; in the pantheist case God is identical with the world, in the Swinburnian case God transcends it. Either way both the pantheist and the Swinburnian are left with a dilemma: abandon divine personhood or modify the doctrine of God so as to block the move to personhood.

     

不可用革命领袖造神

日前,我随团到井冈山旅游,亲身感受到确实是革命圣地不虚此行。毛、朱、周等老一辈创业者艰苦卓绝的革命圣迹,每到一处便令我感动不已!可是,有一件小事却让我不能理解,至今萦绕心头总是不能抹去。这里纪念品很多,我也买了不少,其中有一枚“护身符”,却是一枚纪念毛泽东诞辰110周年的伟人像金属卡片。买是买了,而且不贵,一元钱一枚。但是这枚“护身符”却在我脑海中引发一个问号:刚刚走下神坛的毛泽东为何今天又成为神了?由此,我想起曾经在前几年读过的一些无神论著作。