The weekly post for any sort of announcement to do with philosophy. The previous MMB, which contains several interesting announcements, is “here”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/004693.html.

Why exactly do people underline large passages of _library_ books? Why, in particular, did one of the two people to previously borrow the book I’m currently working on underline large (and often random-seeming) passages _in pen_? It can’t be that much use for going back to. A notebook telling you which are the key pages/passages would do that, and the text that you’re meant to highlight is harder to read once it has pen lines all over it. If you really want to (a) remember a passage and (b) record it in a way that you can go back to, the answer is to type out the passages into a Word document. So this practice seems imprudent as well as inconsiderate.</rant>

Juan Comesana pointed me to “this discussion”:http://digg.com/science/Are_you_Living_in_a_Computer_Simulation__2 of Nick Bostrom’s “Simulation Argument”:http://www.simulation-argument.com/matrix.html at “digg.com”:http://digg.com/. I haven’t read through all of the comments, and I think Zeno’s paradox would prevent reading _all_ of them in any case. But they don’t seem to have got to “my reply”:http://brian.weatherson.org/sims.pdf, and I wouldn’t be a real blogger if I didn’t take this opportunity for self-promotion.

It’s been a while since I wrote it, but I think my reply holds up OK. If I was doing it now I’d make much more of the evidential internalism assumption in Bostrom’s argument. It is very intuitive at first that we have the same evidence as a BIV. I guess if it wasn’t I guess these sceptical arguments wouldn’t have the pull they actually do. But I don’t think that a purely phenomenal account of evidence actually has much to be said for it on reflection. It seems to be constitutive of the notion of evidence that evidence is a guide to the truth. So even if _our_ evidence is constituted by our phenomenal states (which I doubt), we shouldn’t think that a BIV’s evidence is constituted by _its_ phenomenal states, because its phenomenal states don’t give it any information about how the world is. So we don’t have the same evidence as a BIV, so nothing about its doxastic/epistemic state is relevant to our doxastic/epistemic state. And that’s even ignoring the worries about indifference that I set out (at interminable length) in “that paper”:http://brian.weatherson.org/sims.pdf and in “the paper on Elga’s indifference principle”:http://brian.weatherson.org/evil.pdf.

I really will start writing substantive things for the blog again one day. Until then…

* “Clayton Littlejohn on the New Evil Demon Argument”:http://www.geocities.com/cmlittlejohn/reldemfin.pdf (PDF)
* “Allan Hazlett reviews essays on The Matrix”:http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=5481
* “Peter Ludlow’s Wikipedia Page”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Ludlow; and finally
* Perhaps “Etan Thomas”:http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/blackhistory/news/story?id=2343032 should be the Pride of Syracuse

And a couple more, now that Ludlow’s Wikipedia page has gone tamer

* “Slate on Experimental Philosophy”:http://www.slate.com/id/2137223/
* “Inside HigherEd on Going Academically AWOL”:http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney