a post out of nowhere

somehow, thought i'd post something on this as-good-as dead blog. boredom, perhaps...

anyway, i just gave my last tutorial of the year today. it was a make-up tutorial, cos of last week's deepavali holiday. nice to see the people turn up for this tutorial, so near the end of the sem (well, perhaps it's for fear that i'll deduct their participation marks). jason and a girl from another class came too, presumably to soak in the philosophical ambience, whatever that is...

before the lesson, jason took it to be his task to point out that this would be my last time teaching EVER in nus, if I don't take a Ph.D and come back in years to come. not that this made the tutorial more significant, since i'm just a regular tutor - not as if it was Plantinga's last time teaching or something. now if that happened, it'd be an event worth witnessing, a tale worth collecting for posterity.

so, i launched into the problem with customary glee - the zombie argument against physicalism. after some conceptual groundwork, i presented the argument in it's full glory and did the usual - split them into groups and await their bemused/pained responses. haha-at least that's what some of their expressions conveyed.

as it turned out, most of them could not figure out a way past the argument, despite valiant attempts. one group was particularly amusing, as they started off their answer with something like:

them: We can conceive of a round circle! [and thus you can conceive of impossible things, denying one of the premises of the argumet]
me: oh..... (feeling surprised that they could conceive this)
them (smiling): well, we can't honestly conceive of it, actually...
me (with a straight face): ah.... (pause) well, your, erm, honesty is... admirable.
(laughter around the class)

good to see some good old honest answers, though. as it were, they seemed rather convinced of the argument's conclusion - that consciousness cannot be logically reduced to physical states. and I was happily giving more examples and taking my time to round up the tutorial, thinking that there probably wasn't going to be a next class, when the tutor for the next class popped in with the customary, "hello, sorry, i have a class..."

argh. and so i ended in kind of a rush. no dramatic flourish, no earth-shattering pronouncements, just a simple remark on the significance of physicalism being false. 5 short and hurried tutorials for a whole sem, on something as deep as philo is just too little.

as we streamed out of the class, some students stayed back to talk further outside class, one student raised a good suggestion about the argument... after which i headed back to the philo grad room via a longer route, in order to avoid a lethal and dangerous creature which was on the normal path - in fact, a creature than which no worse can be conceived... a GIANT M---! well, that's another story for another time...