Walter Barta

University of Houston
Wharton County Junior College
  • Post-Punk's Melancholy Melody
    with Candace Miranda
    In Joshua Heter & Richard Greene (eds.), Post-Punk and Philosophy: Rip it Up and Think Again, Carus Books. 2024.
  • The Sovereign State of Salamanca
    with Paul Barnes
    In Brett Coppenger, Joshua Heter & Daniel Carr (eds.), Better Call Saul and Philosophy: I Think Therefore I Scam, Carus Books. 2022.
  • Chuckrates v. The Saulphists
    with Paul Barnes
    In Brett Coppenger, Joshua Heter & Daniel Carr (eds.), Better Call Saul and Philosophy: I Think Therefore I Scam, Carus Books. 2022.
  •  404
    In his article “If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens are also Rare”, Robin Hanson proposes the Grabby Alien Hypothesis, which proposes that extraterrestrial civilizations (ETIs) exist outside of our observable universe and are gradually expanding to fill the universe. The existence of such grabby aliens in our future expanding to fill all available niches puts a cosmic deadline on independently originating sources of life. This cosmic cutoff offers an explanation for why human ob…Read more
  •  190
    Attributions of certain speech-acts, like dog-whistling and wolf-crying, have an interesting complementary and antagonistic relationship that creates a kind of hostile dialectic and emergent divergence in political discourse. In the following, we will show how the wolf-cry and the dog-whistle are both epistemically difficult speech-acts to attribute, leading to asymmetric uncertainties in attribution. These uncertainties cause the attribution of wolf-cries and dog-whistles themselves to often be…Read more
  •  154
    Here we will argue that different kinds of friendships follow different kinds of scaling laws. First, we will review Aristotle’s three types of friendship. Second, we will review three different types of scaling laws. Third, we will show how the three types of friendship roughly map on to the three types of scaling laws. After this, we will discuss some of the consequences of the scaling laws of friendship. We hope that the use of these abstract scaling laws to describe social values will convin…Read more
  •  20
    Biting the Bullet on Toothlessness
    Southwest Philosophy Review 40 (1): 265-274. 2024.
  •  175
    Do the hard problem of consciousness and the simulation argument potentially resolve each other? Here we will argue for four possible views: that consciousness may be possible only (a) outside of, (b) inside and/or outside of, (c) inside of, or (d) interfacing with simulations. The first two of these views have been developed at length by David Chalmers and are used as jumping off points to introduce and develop the latter two views here. If any one of these views could be proven true, it would …Read more
  •  313
    An indeterminate version of Henry Sidgwick’s “Dualism of Practical Reason” may offer a solution to Derek Parfit’s “Repugnant Conclusion”. Here we will outline the problem of Sidgwick’s Dualism and how to resolve it within the framework of practical reason and the problem of Parfit’s Repugnance and why it is irresoluble within the framework of pure utilitarianism. Then we will argue how Sidgwick’s Dualism, under certain formulations of indeterminacy, specifically under those Indeterminacy Views a…Read more
  •  273
    The prestige of an academic institution may be determined as a function of affiliations with other academic institutions. Using digital tools to data-scrape, data-mine, and perform network analysis on university websites, an approximation of numbers of academic affiliations may be measured. Especially observing the alma mater institutions of the faculty of employed institutions, these numbers show the relative employment of alumni and a proxy metric for the relative prestige of their degree-gran…Read more
  •  163
    Digital Monology: The Authority of the Search Engine
    Media and the Moving Image at University of Houston. 2019.
    2019 Applied Technology Award for the Media and the Moving Image Awards at University of Houston. The Google algorithm, as a ranking and ordering structure, cannot be “objective” as long as the page-ranking mechanism produces social effects and always inadvertently and inescapably affects social priorities. Imitable units of information (memes) on the internet change according to the laws of exponential growth, like other social phenomena, which include Google rankings. Mathematically and graphi…Read more
  •  842
    Diminishing Marginal Utility is widely accepted as a law of human action, and therefor has become one of the primary premises of ethics, economics, and politics. In popular parlance, “diminishing returns” has entered into the cliches of common sense; in philosophical argument, it has achieved the status of an axiomatic assumption; and indeed, in terms of personal experience or folk psychology, it seems to largely hold true for goods in general over a range of consumption. However, a theory of di…Read more
  •  470
    The concept of the Utility Monster offers an influential critique of Utilitarian theories, forcing us to consider different theoretical fixes to escape monstrous implications (Nozick, 1999, pp. 26-53; Kennard, 2015, p. 322). However, many different breeds, a whole bestiary, of Utility Monsters are identifiable, and each breed reveals something slightly different about what we find monstrous. When dissected in depth, we observe that some breeds are probably acceptable, whereas other breeds are in…Read more
  • All the Modes of Story
    with David Mazella
    Abo Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-1830 12 (1). 2022.
    This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of womens participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that…Read more