From the archives - The Thinker

One of my favorite article from last year about the thriving philosophy mill in an unlikely place.
It vindicates the age old cautionary wisdom of "Don't judge too fast".
Of all places on earth, philosophy came out on top in the internal ranking at Auburn University in Alabama. Unlike our economists, they deduced there might be some issue with the ranking system and came up with new "formula" !! . Well, philosophy was at the top again. So the geniuses there, stopped the internal ranking all together. 


All this credit goes to one man Kelly Jolley, the dean of philosophy department and his unique ability to identify the right students: 


"Jolley is always on the lookout for students with a philosophical bent, and has urged his colleagues to recruit aggressively as well. While I was at Auburn, he introduced me to one of the department’s current top prospects for graduate school, a rising senior named Benjamin Pierce. Jolley told me that Pierce’s gift for reasoning was first identified a couple of years ago in an entry-level logic class. “If A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C,” the professor said, introducing the so-called transitive relation.

“Not in rock, paper, scissors,” Pierce volunteered.

Pierce is now majoring in philosophy. “We have high hopes for him,” Jolley told me with the pride of a football coach talking up a strong tackler with great open-field speed. I would bet that he ends up in a Top 10 graduate program.”

These students at Auburn must be very lucky to have this man as their guide. Teaching is a gift and especially teaching philosophy which cannot be taught but should be "thought" between two minds is a very unique gift.  Of-course being the man he is, he isn't quixotic.

"In Jolley’s ideal world, every student would catch the philosophy flame, but he knows this will never happen. He says that philosophy requires a certain rare and innate ability — the ability to step outside yourself and observe your own mind in the act of thinking. In this respect, Jolley recognizes that his detractors have a point when they criticize his approach to teaching. “It’s aristocratic in the sense that any selection based on talent is aristocratic,” he told me. “I know it offends everyone’s sense of democracy, this idea that everyone’s equal, but we all know that’s just not true.”

There aren't many people, who can speak their mind openly in this world obsessed with "political correctness".

I think, the truth is not everyone involves in self-reflection and even if they do, they tend to feed their cognitive dissonance with their self-reflection. Isn't that the height of cognitive dissonance?

The biggest answer I am waiting from Neuroscience (or from our genes) is what makes metacognition possible? 

Which part(s) of the brain is involved?  (I still have to checkout the fMRI studies on Buddhist monks and books by Andrew Newbrug and Antonio Damasio) 

The most important question is how can metacognition be possible when some one is least interested in it? Can metacognition be invoked by TMS ?

Isn't metacognition the great horse power for neuroplasticity ?

I am not a big fan of any "grand unified theory of everything". 

But lot of expendable human short comings, which we readily accept and live with, can be expended(duh!!) if neuroscience sheds some light on them.