Philosophy lecture to focus on technology

Philosophy lecture to focus on technology

In celebration of Henderson State University’s 125th anniversary, Dr. Michael Lynch will deliver the Philosophy Club’s annual lecture at 7 p.m. Nov. 5 in the Lecture Hall at the Garrison Student Center. Lynch is a philosophy professor at the University of Connecticut and directs the university’s Humanities Institute.

In his talk, Lynch will address the connection we now have both to technology as well as to one another through our use of technology. He will also discuss how our use of the Internet as a source of information has changed the way in which we come to know and understand. Though Lynch enjoys technology and is interested in seeing how it’s used to make users’ lives easier, he sees some potential issues.

“We can all memorize facts, and now we are able to know more faster,” Lynch said. “Understanding is more than brute access to facts, though. It is the ability to connect the dots.”

The title for Lynch’s free lecture is “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data.” His book of the same name will be published in early 2016.

Lynch is the recipient of the Medal for Research Excellence from the University of Connecticut’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and has been a South by Southwest and TEDx speaker.