Breaking: CatCam Movie has nothing to do with philosophical puzzle

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Cute!  But probably just that.

I still have no idea what it's like to be this cat.

Some bold claims from John Horgan over at his Scientific American blog: “The CatCam also reminds me of the classic 1974 essay “What is it like to be a bat?,” in which philosopher Thomas Nagel ponders the solipsism problem. No sentient creature, Nagel points out, can really know what it is like to be any other sentient creature, because each of us is sealed inside the prison of his or her own consciousness. We can only observe each other—and other animals, such as bats—from the outside. Nagel notes that “in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us.” The same could be said about any human’s attempt to understand what it is like to be any other human.  The CatCam, which Perthold now sells, helps us know, or intuit, what it is like to be a cat” (indignant emphasis mine).

No, but it does help us answer that other perennial question: What is it like to be a camera strapped to a cat’s head? I can finally sleep at night!

Why do good people do bad things?

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NPR has a piece here challenging the common assumption that people do bad things because they’re, well, bad people.  The alternative? People do bad things (at least partly) because (a) They’re frequently “blind” or insensitive to the moral features of a situation, and (b) They want to help each other, and sometimes helping someone involves doing a bad thing.