The value of the collegiate bull session

One of the better classes in a while happened last week when my class on terrorism got onto a series of interesting side issues, including

• autonomus robot soldiers
• artificial intelligence
• the nature of consciousness
• the connections between neural networks and spontaneous social orders
• the prospects for evolution of software at computer speeds
• the assumptions about human nature common to tragic and utopian views of politics
• the difficulty of transcending the fact/values divide (and Hume's Law)
• the difficulty of having a discussion about politics when dealing with contested concepts
• the relevance of the most recent research on evolutionary psychology for political philosophy
• (and other stuff)

We never did get to the original topic for the day, but who cares? I suspect everyone learned more that day than we would have ever covered in the "prepared" class. Sometimes the best thing a teacher can do is get out of the way. It can be more fun, too.