IdeaFestival

Five Questions - Dr. Pamela Gay, Astronomer

This "Five Questions" interview with Astronomer Dr. Pamela L. Gay, also known as Star Stryder, was completed this week. I want to publicly thank her for taking time out of her schedule to answer these questions by email.

If you have any interest at all in astronomy and the deeper questions that surround the subject, I encourage you to check out her blog as well as her contributions to Astronomy Cast. She, along with Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams, are two of my favorite bloggers on any subject.

Wayne

What attracted you to Astronomy?

Sometimes a person doesn't outgrow their childhood passions. I've been interested in astronomy as long as I can remember. My earliest memories include taking naps so I could stay up and watch images of Jupiter and Saturn being sent back by the Voyager missions, and watching the contrails of the space shuttle going in for a landing at Edwards while living in Southern California when small. I remember looking through my dad's small telescope. As I grew up, my astronomy hunger was fed by Odyssey Magazine, Sky and Telescope, Science Fiction, and eventually even trips to Space Camp. When I started college, I didn't think I had the math skills to be an astronomer, and I declared an International Relations major in James Madison College at Michigan State University, and started taking astronomy and honors physics and calculus classes because I figured I get an astronomy minor and seek jobs as a science advisor in the Federal Government. At some point my freshman year I realized that while I loved my IR classes for their content, my cultural peers were the science folks in my astronomy classes. I am a science nerd, born and breed. I was doing well in science classes, so I redeclared as an astrophysics major. I guess, I just never knew when to stop trying to understand the stars.

Five Questions: David Shaffer, game scientist

I became interested in David Shaffer's work reading the MacArthur blog, Digital Media and Learning.

Given my interest in philosophy, his use of the word "epistemology" in conjunction with gaming jumped out at me because, as a method of knowing, it fits a kind of embodied, embedded knowing that people ranging from dancers to studio furniture makers experience all the time. The notion that we know through doing is also challenging ideas about sentient, intelligent behavior long held, for example, by philosophers and scientists working in artificial intelligence. Gaming, or knowing through doing, is a way of approaching old problems afresh.

I recently posed a few questions to David, who graciously agreed to answer them for readers of IFblog.

The following is a continuation of an occasional email interview series, "Five Questions." Other interviews may be found in the "five questions" category in the category cloud on the blog.

Thanks David,

Wayne

1. What attracted you to computer gaming as an academic field?

What attracted me to the field was the fact that computers have created a world of global competition, where passing standardized tests only prepares you for standardized work that can be done for less money by someone a mouse-click away. The only good jobs in the digital age are for those who can think in innovative and creative ways to solve complex problems.

And that's just what good computer games can help children learn to do.

Five Questions: Steven Horst, Philosopher of Mind

Tagged "five questions" in the category cloud on the blog, this is the continuation of an interview series with people I find interesting. Scott Hubbard, who is the Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute, was first in the series.

Professor Steven Horst is the Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University, Connecticut. The embedded hyperlinks in the answers provided are mine.

Wayne

________

1. Prof. Horst, What attracted you to philosophy?

I have a page at my website entitled "The cartoon that inspired me to go into philosophy". Moses heard a voice from the burning bush. I got a cartoon. Go figure.

Seriously, though, I don't remember a time when I was not already, by temperament, a philosopher. I always wanted to get to the bottom of things, to get the biggest picture possible. And from an early age I tended to spot problems in how people argued for their ideas; seeing something argued badly always made me want to examine the matter more carefully. By my sophomore year in high school I started a "Metaphysics Club" and spent hours talking about conceptual, linguistic, and mathematical puzzles with my friends. Some of us were also fans of the Inklings (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and their friends), whose professional work was in linguistics and who also wrote about philosophical and theological topics.

My first philosophy course in college at Boston University was with Alisdair Macintyre, who is one of the best lecturers I've ever heard to this day. I think Alisdair (we're on a first-name basis now) became a kind of paradigm for how to think and speak clearly. Al Plantinga played a similar role for me in graduate school at Notre Dame. I'd single out three important junctures in my undergraduate experience after that first course. The first was a course in what is now called computational neuroscience with Steve Grossberg. (I'm probably one of the few people of my generation who knew about neural networks before "old fashioned AI"). A second was the discovery of J.L. Austin's How To Do Things With Words. I wrote a thesis on speech act theory. The third was an introduction to Husserl in a course with Erazim Kohak. This led me to conclude that if one really wanted to make progress in speech act theory, one had to turn one's attention to intentionality. This was 1982, and about this time Searle must have been thinking the same thing, because Intentionality came out the next year. From there, I was hooked on philosophy of mind. The decision to write a dissertation and then a book (Symbols, Computation and Intentionality, California, 1996) on the Computational Theory of Mind was a strategic one that Ken Sayre helped me to see was a good idea. Basically, cognitive science was a growth area in philosophy, and I had a kind of background in computers, neural networks and information theory that put me in a good position to write something original there.

Five Questions: SETI's Scott Hubbard

Scott Hubbard is The Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe, which was established at the SETI Institute in 1997. At my request, he graciously agreed to answer a few questions on Monday. Here are his replies. Any mistakes or misunderstandings in reporting his views are my own.

1) Could you explain for a moment your work at SETI? - As the Carl Sagan Chair I provide strategic direction and guidance to about 50 scientists engaged in the broad study of life in the Universe. Those include aspects of space science, planetary ring systems and so forth. My job is to help identify new areas of research, to help scientists diversify their research portfolios, to find funding opportunities and to create a sense of team work.