Anti-advertising part 2 - multinational moaning and activism!

Having said before that the subject has never really interested me before, there has always been one thing which irritates me whenever I encounter it - signposts to "Tesco superstore" along side thing such as "parish centre", "Battenhall" and "town centre" on traffic free cycle routes in St Peters and Warndon Villages in Worcester. After an interesting conversation on the subject I have learned that this seemingly officially recognized advertising is not the council taking money from shops in return for officially signposting them, but what is more likely is that when Tesco applied for planning permission to the council to build their stores, the council would have requested Tesco to fund or partly fund the building of a new network of cycle routs through the surrounding area, in an attempt to combat the increase in traffic levels caused by the presence of the supermarkets. This would undoubtably give them some influence on the signposting on these new routes. Therefore, the seemingly official advertising that has very effwctive placement for anyone not entirely familiar with their surroundings is more of a byproduct of the positive byproduct (traffic-free cycleways) of the supermarkets, if that makes any sense at all.

That's all really off topic mow I think about it. More on topic to the subject of this post is here. Anyone interested in giving me a hand with this? I think I have a very goof central Worcester location which should work for this. This won't make any sense if your reading this soon after I've posted it with no link above. I'm not going to go into much detail about this as 1. I have already written too much on this topic 2. I'm stuck with a tiny Blackberry keyboard which keeps writing thinmgs likew thjis and 3. I would be just repeating information that somebody else has informed the world about.

Anti-advertising part 1 - intro

I'm stuck in the Austrian Alps on an unwanted skiing holiday with the family at the moment, but thanks to the extreme generosity of my dad, I can post here at certain times as long as it is written down on paper. This means I'm not sure how long this post, as it takes around 5 minutes to scroll through the whole thing and it is impossible to compare it to previous ones. I decided it was probably quite and have therefore split it into 2 parts. Sorry if its a bit long and quite disjointed.

Following an interesting but brief conversation with some musical colleagues at half-term, and some accidental surfing to an interesting organization (I don't have the link here, but it was something like the anti advertising association), I have decided to write down my thoughts on advertising in general...

Until quite recently I've always though of advertising as a kind of necessary evil in the world - so often it's the reason why things can be offered to everyone for free, take so many of the great things we get for free on the internet, for example, all are supported by showing us advertising. If there wasn't advertising in newspapers, they would cost an incredible amount more, and probably wouldn't be economically feasible. What I failed to do however is to distinguish between 2 different types of advertising which probably have some kind of technical names, but I'm going to badly call 'avoidable' and 'unavoidable' advertising - I can't explain each very well in 1 word.
What I mentioned above is 'avoidable' advertising to various degrees where as classic examples of 'unavoidable' advertising are billboards at roadsides. This could be generally defined as advertising which is visible (and therefore having an effect) from public areas, such as roads and footpaths. (These influence our lives to the profit of the owners of the advertising locations who have given you nothing in return. This is fundamentally different to an advertisement in a website that you are benefiting from for free, for example, as you could think of it as paying for the the privilege of using the website in your sub-conscious and conscious consumer decisions. You could see this as almost being sold by the owners of the media you are using to the company which is advertising itself, and therefore could be losing some kind of value of yourself, but this getting theoretical and makes no sense at all, but is more intended to fulfill my new mission to lead us all to new interesting and weird chains of thought blah blah blah

self-obsession and the net

Reading through the last post on this blog, it seems to be I sound completely self-obsessed and only talking about myself. You could say is one of the major problems of the interative side of the internet in general - social networking sites, blogs, image sharing sites etc. - in the end, you end up spending much more time thinking about ourselves and our friends than we would do without the net. I'm not really sure of my view on this issue, and it is interesting to consider, but what I'm sure of is that a lot of social networking sites in particular encourage creativity more - maybe being able put a poster up somewhere that you are a drummer looking to play in a heavy metal band based in the west midlands for example - would be great, and encourage cooperation. Another thing I'd like to be able to do is to search for people with similar interests, and meet similar people who you otherwise wouldn't know about.

Overall, I believe that where the net brings people together and increases creativity and community development, it's great, but when it causes people to become engrossed in their own groups of friends, it is less so.

Free Will

Before I go into this topic, I want to make a disclaimer, that all of the below is not fact, and infact it's quite possibly all bollocks, as i can't be bothered to find somebody who has said the same things as me and reference them, as I don't actually have anything to reference to. Also all the facts are wrong probably, and highlights the fact that I need to do more revision on structure of animal cells and other boring sciencey stuff. If you're interested in the slightest in what I write here, or any post I probably do in the future then you're probably much better off reading someone else's writing on the subject.


The subject of free will always fascinates me, as I can fully understand the logic behind the hard determinist argument against it. Here is the first line of Wikipedia's definition of free will:

The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions.

I would say that free will is basically the belief that you can choose what to do, so I chose to eat marmite on toast rather than jam on toast this morning for example. Instinctively most people feel that they have free will most of the time, so I tend to focus on the arguments against to make life more interesting. In proving the arguments against I prefer to start big. There are extremely detailed predictions of the planets moving in the solar system, the reason being is that the movement of the planets is very simple and predictable. You would accept that one planet is not simply going to decide to stop moving or float away. Now why is this? The reason is that the planets are tied up to the laws of physics, and they aren't single living organisms (more on this some other time), and many of them seem to have no life at all - they don't think.

But what is thinking? Before we get down to that, let's agree on the facts. Thinking is done by the brain, and bits of the brain that do the thinking are the brain cells. We can look into a single brain cell with lots of detail, as it follows the basic animal cell structure with a nucleus, cell membrane etc. Now we can predict what a single brain cell will do, as it is very simple, a bit like the planets in the solar system. It is when you have the amount of these cells which make up the brain of an animal that the cells as a whole become much more much complicated and advanced. This now is a brain, the very brain which controls all of our body and which we use to control ourselves and make decisions. But surely, if we can predict what a brain cell does, we could predict what multiple ones would do together, and eventually what the whole brain does? If something is predictable, then it has to happen and there is no choice about it, like the weather for example. So surely what happens in the brain has to happen? This would mean that we can't choose whether we will have marmite or jam in the morning, it has to happen, as it can be predicted.
For some reason, however, you have the illusion that you can choose what to do. There is an argument that your "mind" is separated from your brain, and that that exists somewhere else, but there isn't any proof for this, and it doesn't seem physically possible that there is an invisible link between our bodies (and brains) and minds somewhere, be that in the physical world, or something different. If someone were to program every single molecule and atom in the universe and predict the future from this however, they would encounter a paradox where if they knew what was going to happen, they could change it, which would be impossible. Someway or another they wouldn't be able to work this out.

Somebody who believes that we don't have free will is often refered to as a fatalist or a hard determinist, not to be confused with determinism, where the belief is that everything is set out, and that if you choose not to follow this then some way or anther it will happen anyway.


The main problems with the theory are society related ones however. So much of things that we learn are correct and good for society are related to free will - not to drink and drive for one example. The whole belief of not having free will is extremely pessimistic and negative as well, 2 things I personally don't believe are good for people and society as a whole (but why care, if everything that happens is going to happen anyway?). The way I think of the whole idea, is that you might as well enjoy life, and so almost pretend to have free will. Most of the time I forget about the subject anyway, so it's not a problem for me personally.


There are other theories about how we could have free will and consciences etc, for example the theory of multiple universes, but none of these are scientifically proved as much as simply not having free will. So to summarise, I don't really care about this stuff in my everyday life, so I don't let it change anything, (not that it would) and I don't recommend anyone else does, it's just interesting to think about from time to time.

Introduction

Alright then, to kick this off - this is the first post so isn't really representative of the desired nature of this blog, but my aim is for somewhere to write down things that interest me at the moment, in terms of philosophy, ethics, psychology etc where anyone with some strange interest can see them. My aim is to create a new post 2-4 times a week - once or twice at the weekend and once or twice during the week, but thats only my aim. I'll try not to put anything to personal or off topic, but I'm often not great at judging that kind of thing, so just go along with things and chill!