The Denver Philosophy March Meeting at the Merc

Back at the Merc this month. Those of you treated badly by one of the wait staff need not fear - owner Marilyn Megenity called spontaneously to tell me she had been fired! Apparently several complaints were lodged against this gal by us and others and after trying to work with her, Marilyn gave up. She wanted us to know that she enjoys and respects us and wants us to have a good experience.

Well, this past month at Dave's house was a hoot. Dave was a fantastic host, providing food, drinks and comfortable atmosphere for discussion. I was in a huge rush when I left the house and didn't plan well at all - all I brought were two bottles of fizzy water and some spicy olives. I guess there's no accounting for taste and manners among Meetup Organizers.

Dave offered us three areas to meet in, plus the defacto hotspot of every party - the kitchen.

Upstairs in the dining room, folks discussed a topic which I think started off as 'philosophical topics in sci-fi and horror flicks' but which I later heard degenerated() into movie trivia. Who says philosophers don't know how to party?

There was another topic area voted in which met in the front room, but I'm not sure the group actually formed up. The topic itself was a little nebulous to me and at this point it escapes me entirely - if anyone met there feel free to chime in and I'll update this post.

Myself, I went to the downstairs room to talk with interested others about the topic 'what is meaning'? We brought up areas such as linguistic analysis, evolutionary neurobiology and representational worlds. One item we all seemed to agree upon, after batting it around, was that the idea of meaning presupposes representational worlds. Among other things, meaning appears to be a kind of reaction to something we've perceived as opposed to a first order perception; a perception about a perception.

For some reason, the example of a bunny came up very frequently, and we were (ab)using this poor thing to death on the subject of whether it could have 2nd order perceptions about its reality. I think Dmitri first brought the bunny up as a reflection on the experience of wild rabbits who live in his backyard, and his observations of them in reaction to predators such as foxes in the neighborhood. Do they have a representational world when it comes to reactions about trace scents of foxes that have been in the area? In other words, do they imagine possible attacks and plan to avoid them, or do they just have a reflexive reaction to certain threshhold limits of scent being reached insofar as they hightail it in the opposite direction?

From here we got into extended speculations about the evolutionary neurobiology of representational worlds, which I personally find lots of fun (again with the philosophers knowing how to party).

Well, if you could see yourself speculating all night long about a fictional bunny's plight in representational worlds of fox scents, you might find yourself among the like-minded at our next mental adventure in the Mercury Cafe'! Hope to see you there...