Sunday, April 25, 2010

Neil's Head, Blogging

Now he's really gone and done it:



I presume he'll have more to say about his Blogging Heads experience later.

[Update by Neil] Just to get this all in one post, I'll put up some brief thoughts here. First, thanks to David Killoren and the nice Bloggingheads people for letting me do this. They've got the video divided into nicely labeled bite-sized chunks. So if you want to know where the part about bestiality is, go there and take a look.

This is my first time doing this sort of thing on video, and I'm still learning how to do it. One thing I'll keep in mind in the future is to keep my eyes on the camera rather than in my lap when I'm talking.

A lot of the first part of the video deals with this paper I'm writing that defends universal hedonism, the view that pleasure is the only thing that's good. I'd be happy to post the paper, if anybody's interested in seeing it. I was describing little bits of it in response to Jesse's questions, which probably gives people an odd idea of what it's about.

In the second part, there's a discussion of evolutionary psychology. Jesse is writing a book on religion from an evolutionary psychology point of view. The biologists I've known in academia have been fairly skeptical of evolutionary psychology and it's rubbed off on me, so we had a bit of a methodological dispute about how much you can get out of evolutionary psychology.

Anyway, if you watched the video and have some questions, I'll be happy to answer them!

1 comment:

Benjamin Rider said...

Very interesting. I've heard many of your arguments about hedonism and utilitarianism before, but you seem to have found a good way to frame the argument.