Philosophy Updates

[C C]

Seeing the consciousness forest for the trees
https://iai.tv/articles/seeing-the-consciousness-forest-for-the-trees-auid-2901?_auid=2020

EXCERPTS: The American public intellectual and creator of the television series Closer to Truth, Robert Lawrence Kuhn has written perhaps the most comprehensive article on the landscape of theories of consciousness in recent memory. In this review of the consciousness landscape, Àlex Gómez-Marín celebrates Robert Kuhn’s rejection of the monopoly of materialism and uncovers the radical implications of these new accounts of consciousness for meaning, artificial intelligence, and human immortality.

[...] The origins of our perplexity in making sense of experience itself can be traced back to Galileo Galilei, who programmatically excluded subjective experience from the purview of science...

[...] Such a strategy proved tremendously successful, giving rise to physics, then chemistry, next biology, and finally psychology. ... Four hundred years later, we can’t ignore the elephant in the room anymore: experience is what makes science possible and yet a proper science of consciousness seems unattainable. The Galilean knot remains untied. Today we call it “the hard problem”.

[...] Gathering under the same roof most of the greatest contemporary thinkers of one of the greatest questions one can ever try to answer, Kuhn’s landscape enacts the quasi-extinct art of true scholarship...

[...] The landscape comprises 10 major categories and it is organised in a gradient of “isms”, from die-hard materialist positions to mind-only propositions...

[...] Kuhn’s faithful description of each position without the urge to adjudicate deserves nothing but praise and gratitude. ... Rather than divide and conquer, let us unite and wonder... (MORE - missing details)

PAPER (Kuhn): A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications
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[TheVat]

Stern is a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who studies the evolution of the continental crust, and Gerya is a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who models Earth’s internal processes. Their conclusion may disappoint extraterrestrial enthusiasts: The likelihood that other technologically sophisticated societies exist is smaller than previously thought, because basic amenities we take for granted on Earth—continents, oceans, and plate tectonics—are cosmically rare

Sounds like an extension of Ward and Brownlee's work on the rare earth postulate. I was recently thinking about them when the topic of phosphorus shortages came up. Many planets don't have the requisite geologic processes to make certain minerals, essential for a biome, available. (well, essential for a biome as we know them) Thanks for posting this. Your updates on this thread are becoming a regular pit stop for me.

 

[C C]

“The dance between autonomy and affinity creates morality”

“The dance between autonomy and affinity creates morality”

MIT philosophy doctoral student Abe Mathew is both studying philosophy and questioning some of its deeply-held ideas.

news.mit.edu

Mathew asks that we think of autonomy and affinity as opposing forces — an idea he attributes to MIT philosopher, professor, and mentor Kieran Setiya. Autonomy pushes people farther from us, and affinity pulls people closer, Mathew says.

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What is love? A philosopher explains it’s not a choice or a feeling − it’s a practice

What is love? A philosopher explains it’s not a choice or a feeling − it’s a practice

What makes a relationship last when feelings fade or circumstances change? Can you force yourself to love someone you hate or don’t care about?

theconversation.com

But are these feelings, caused by chemical reactions in your brain, all that love is? If so, then love seems to be something that largely happens to you. You’d have as much control over falling in love as you’d have over accidentally falling in a hole – not much. As a philosopher who studies love, I’m interested in the different ways people have understood love throughout history. Many thinkers have believed that love is more than a feeling.

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How the Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness Works

How the Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness Works

schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com

A few months ago on this blog, I presented a "Mimicry Argument" against robot consciousness -- or more precisely, an argument that aims to show why it's reasonable to doubt the consciousness of an AI that is built to mimic superficial features of human behavior. Since then, my collaborator Jeremy Pober and I have presented this material to philosophy audiences in Sydney, Hamburg, Lisbon, Oxford, Krakow, and New York, and our thinking has advanced.

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Numbers game: Is math the language of nature or just a human construct?

Is math the language of nature or just a human construct?

Scientists still debate whether our mathematical models of the universe objectively exist

www.salon.com

Simply put, it’s the idea that mathematics exists independently of human cognition and that we discovered math rather than inventing it. “Realism in Mathematics” was the title of Maddy’s first book, published in 1990, followed by “Naturalism in Mathematics” published in 1997, which explores mathematical naturalism. These days, she sees herself as having landed somewhere between the two extremes. “In the days of Galileo and Newton, it wasn't unreasonable to regard mathematics as the language of the Great Book of Nature,” Maddy explained in an email interview with Salon. “But over the course of the 19th Century, developments in both mathematics and science undermined this view.”

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Boltzmann Brains and Epistemology

Boltzmann Brains and Epistemology

Entropy can be calculated with a concept called multiplicity. The multiplicity is the number of indistinguishable possibilities that could cause the results we observe.

daily-philosophy.com

The assumption that minds can be explained through material processes leads to a paradox. There would be nearly infinitely many more Boltzmann Brains than there are brains that were created through a gradual process of evolution. [...] What does this mean for us? Is it reasonable to conclude that we are nothing more than fluctuations who will vanish in the blink of an eye? Are all our experiences, thoughts, and loved ones really just arbitrary patterns from electrons stored in the memory of an ephemeral brain? Most physicists and philosophers would answer no. But the question we must ask is, why can we reject this argument?

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A Metaethics of Alien Convergence

A Metaethics of Alien Convergence

An action is morally good if a hypothetical congress of a diverse range of developmentally expensive, behaviorally sophisticated social entities would tend to approve of it

eschwitz.substack.com

Some people think that moral realism and naturalism conflict, since moral truths seem to lie beyond the reach of science. They hold that science can discover what is, but not what ought to be, that it can discover what people regard as ethical or unethical, but not what really is ethical or unethical. Addressing this apparent conflict between moral realism and scientific naturalism (for example, in a panel discussion with Stephan Wolfram and others a few months ago), I find I have a somewhat different metaethical perspective than others I know.

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Elon Musk says he’s a ‘cultural Christian’ – why some leading thinkers are embracing Christianity

Elon Musk says he’s a ‘cultural Christian’ – why some leading thinkers are embracing Christianity

In a rapidly changing world, some conservatives are turning to Christianity for stability. But can they gain its societal benefits without full belief?

theconversation.com

EXCERPTS: The world’s richest person, Elon Musk, just announced that he’s a “big believer in the principles of Christianity” and “a cultural Christian”. Musk’s reasons are moral and political – he believes Christianity can boost both happiness and birthrates.

[...] In conservative intellectual circles, the receding tide of Christianity is turning. For some, the appeal is aesthetic. The prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, calls Christianity’s core claims “obvious nonsense”, but he still identifies as a “cultural Christian” because he enjoys hymns and cathedrals.

Others see moral value in Christianity. The British conservative commentator Douglas Murray calls himself a “Christian atheist”, rejecting key Christian beliefs, but valuing its moral ideas like the “sanctity of the individual”. US psychologist and media personality Jordan Peterson acts “as if” God exists because for him, it provides meaning, purpose and order.

Some see political value in Christianity. Dawkins values it as “a bulwark against Islam”. Musk thinks it can increase birthrates and prevent population collapse.

When writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity, she cited political reasons, claiming Christianity was the only way the west could combat “wokeness”, Islam and authoritarian regimes.... (MORE - missing details)

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VIDEO LINK: David Chalmers: A Philosophical Eulogy for Daniel Dennett

Remarks by David Chalmers in a memorial session for Daniel Dennett, at ASSC 27 (the 27th meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness) in Tokyo on July 3, 2024. Filmed by Van Royko and Marie-Philippe Gilbert for EyeSteelFilm.

 

[TheVat]

Dennett will be missed. I really liked his coinage of the term "intuition pump," and how such could sometimes lead people astray.

few months ago on this blog, I presented a "Mimicry Argument" against robot consciousness -- or more precisely, an argument that aims to show why it's reasonable to doubt the consciousness of an AI that is built to mimic superficial features of human behavior. Since then, my collaborator Jeremy Pober and I have presented this material to philosophy audiences in Sydney, Hamburg, Lisbon, Oxford, Krakow, and New York, and our thinking has advanced.

Didn't find much new here - being skeptical of mimicry of consciousness as constituting actual consciousness is a pretty well established practice in AI and philosophy of mind.

 

[TheVat]

Just read the OP, thus realizing we are supposed to reply to posts here by starting new threads. So this, and previous post, may be deleted.

 

[C C]

Dennett will be missed. I really liked his coinage of the term "intuition pump," and how such could sometimes lead people astray.

At least making it into his 80s allowed him to surely get the bulk of his ideas and criticisms out there. Their circulation will continue to make him an influence long after he's gone -- a sort of intellectual afterlife.

Didn't find much new here - being skeptical of mimicry of consciousness as constituting actual consciousness is a pretty well established practice in AI and philosophy of mind.

That's arguably what Schwitzgebel is noted for -- bringing into focus things the community may already myopically know.

Even his crazyism thesis probably falls into that:

• Jul 14, 2011: I am inclined to think that crazyism is also a justifiable attitude to take toward the relationship between conscious experience and the physical world. All viable options are, when closely examined, strongly contrary to common sense, and none is decisively supported by the overall state of the evidence. On another occasion I hope to argue in defense of this. Right now, I am just sketching the possibility abstractly.

It might or might not be "obvious" that most if not all philosophical orientations trying to remedy consciousness would be crazy -- contrary to either some brand of common sense, a scientific materialist outlook, etc. But by making that explicit -- formalizing an _X_ or bringing it to the forefront -- it makes it a little more difficult to dodge around or neglect giving attention to.

That's basically what Chalmers did with the "hard problem". The mind/body conundrum had been around for centuries, but by explicitly fixating on "experience", he narrowed the trouble down to the real issue. Because when computers were introduced, for all intents and purposes cognitive properties like identifying and understanding ceased being a physical challenge (in general principle). It was a waste for philosophy of mind to banter about the "easy problems of consciousness" which were amenable to the scrutiny and thinking of engineers and neuroscientists.

Back in the 2010s, Schwitzgebel also explored the extended consequences of thought experiments like the "China brain". Like if someone believed _X_ school of thought, they usually didn't pursue it far enough down the road to see such colliding with a particular type of eyesore (China brain or whatever specific).

Just read the OP, thus realizing we are supposed to reply to posts here by starting new threads. So this, and previous post, may be deleted.

Input (appreciated) and some light discourse is no problem. Especially since this thread isn't really stimulating new topics. (In retrospect, that was pretty much a long shot, anyway.)
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[C C]

Why science will never explain consciousness
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/.../why-science-will-never-explain-consciousness

INTRO: This post was co-authored with Ralph Weir, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Lincoln. He is the author of "The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics: An Argument from Consciousness to Mental Substance" as well as academic articles on philosophy of mind, AI and human enhancement, metaphysics, and religion.

KEY POINTS: Phenomenal consciousness, unlike functional “consciousness,” isn’t definable in terms of physical processes. All science can do is correlate phenomenal consciousness with certain physical processes. Science can’t explain why these processes don’t operate “in the dark,” without phenomenal consciousness... (MORE - details)
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I wouldn't say "never". It's remotely possible that a simulation of the brain or an AI modeled strictly on such might have experiences in the future, and be able to report on them to humans. In that case, researchers could tweak its processing structure in various ways and it could provide information about what internally happened (also generate images and sounds representing its private manifestations). Taking that data, some theorists might eventually devise a paradigm and metaphysics that integrated and tentatively explained the effects in a predictable manner, eventually resulting in a science of phenomenal consciousness.
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[C C]

‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Test Hidden Assumptions About Reality

‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Test Hidden Assumptions About Reality | Quanta Magazine

Experiments that test physics and philosophy “as a single whole” may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.

www.quantamagazine.org

EXCERPT: Eric Cavalcanti is carrying the torch of a tradition that stretches back through a long line of rebellious thinkers who have resisted the usual dividing lines between physics and philosophy. In experimental metaphysics, the tools of science can be used to test our philosophical worldviews, which in turn can be used to better understand science. Cavalcanti, a 46-year-old native of Brazil who is a professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues have published the strongest result attained in experimental metaphysics yet, a theorem that places strict and surprising constraints on the nature of reality. They’re now designing clever, if controversial, experiments to test our assumptions not only about physics, but about the mind... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

The Era of Predictive AI Is Almost Over (philosophy of AI)

The era of predictive AI Is almost over

“Language models are just glorified autocomplete” has been the critics’ refrain — but reinforcement learning is proving them wrong. New breakthroughs could follow.

www.thenewatlantis.com

Current language models are still making next-word predictions based on their statistical representations of the Internet. But as the approaches outlined here play an increasing role in the development of language models, this description will become increasingly unhelpful, and eventually it may fall apart altogether. ... it may become more appropriate to think of future language models as the product of several AIs reasoning together and conversing among themselves ... We do not know where this path will take us...

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The difficulty of defining death (eschatology)

You can die while your body lives | Lukas J. Meier

What is death? Lukas Meier argues that what matters is the death of the psyche, not the organism – so brain-death just is, for our purposes, death.

iai.tv

Do we know what death is? For centuries, death was diagnosed when the heartbeat ceased, but heart machines now mean that a patient can survive even after their heart stops. The focus then shifted to brain-death, yet brain-dead patients’ bodies can continue to function – a brain-dead female can even carry a pregnancy to term. So brain-death is not the death of the human organism. Lukas J. Meier argues that this suggests we should stop thinking of death as biological, and instead see it as psychological: what really matters is not the death of the organism, but the death of the psyche...

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The Phantoms Haunting History (philosophy of history)

The Phantoms Haunting History | NOEMA

To survive in a chaotic world, the discipline of history may need to evolve into something quite unpalatable to many historians: a form of narrative that politicizes the present.

www.noemamag.com

The impulse to revise history arguably grows ever stronger. There is, after all, a reason that these outlandish ideas never really seem to die. The uncomfortable truth is that the questions they pose about historical orthodoxy do gesture toward some long-standing discomforts within the discipline — and, outside it, an enduring distrust of “experts” among those enlivened by conspiracies, hidden “histories” and veiled “truths.” It turns out there is a phantom haunting Western historiography...

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The most serious objections to the arguments of Wittgenstein’s "Tractatus" are found in the work itself

A.W. Moore · A Tove on the Table: Versions of Wittgenstein

Many books include passages which, despite their authors’ best efforts, simply do not make sense. Wittgenstein may be...

www.lrb.co.uk

One of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century. [...] The suggestion seems to be that, by drawing the limits of what can be represented in thought or language, Wittgenstein has also indicated what cannot be represented in thought or language; what lies outside the world of facts; what is of value. But to what extent has he succeeded in drawing the limits of what can be represented in thought or language?

Strikingly, some of the most serious reservations about what he achieved can be found in his own later work, and especially in his second great masterpiece, "Philosophical Investigations", published posthumously in 1953. Even more strikingly, and notoriously, some of the most serious reservations about what he has achieved are to be found in the "Tractatus" itself. Or so it seems. I have in mind that penultimate proposition, in which he renounces what has gone before as nonsensical. We shall need to come back to this...

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Back When Women Were Told to ‘Write Like a Man’ (NY thought orientations)

Back When Women Were Told to ‘Write Like a Man’

For the midcentury New York intellectuals, Ronnie Grinberg writes in a new book, a particular kind of machismo was de rigueur — even for women.

www.nytimes.com

Those intellectuals were mostly men, and they were mostly Jewish. They have also been amply written about, not least by the men themselves, in their memoirs. [...] What Ronnie Grinberg calls “the ideology of secular Jewish masculinity” was forged from the specific experience of growing up outside the American mainstream. Protestant ideals of manliness venerated athleticism and physical prowess ... Antisemitic stereotypes “had long cast Jewish men as weak, passive and effeminate,” Grinberg writes.

After World War I, a young generation of American-born Jewish men found a way to carve out a space for themselves by merging a Jewish emphasis on learning and scholarship with an American emphasis on swagger. “It was new,” Grinberg writes, “both uniquely American and uniquely Jewish.” Ground zero for this budding subculture was City College of New York, with its free tuition and absence of quotas, along with a student body that in the 1930s, for example, was 80 to 90 percent Jewish...

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Stealing the Show (philosophy of theater)

Why Conservatives Killed America's Federally Funded Theater

Charlie Tyson reviews The Playbook by James Shapiro, which surveys the political history of the Federal Theatre Project.

yalereview.org

EXCERPTS: Ever since democracy and theater emerged together in ancient Athens, thinkers have debated the relationship between these two risky and precious human practices. The philosopher (and former dramatist) Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that theater corrupts public virtue and tempts citizens into dissipation. The playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht believed, by contrast, that the interventions of drama could make the world more just.

Democracy and theater both involve collective assembly, conflict, and a willingness to perform before the eyes of others. [...] Actors and politicians alike rely on that fickle entity ... For whether in a darkened playhouse or at a blaring political rally, one can never be sure whether the public rules or is being ruled.

The Federal Theatre sought to democratize the dramatic arts. But it also tried to use theater to invigorate democracy, which is where the program ran into trouble. [...] Some of its productions -- plays dealing with race, labor, inequality, and other charged topics -- had an undeniable left-wing tilt. From playhouses around the country, whispers of “communism” reached Washington like poison poured into the ear...

[...] Southern Democrats were revolting against President Roosevelt and aligning themselves with the Republicans. Even Roosevelt’s vice president, John Garner, a whisky-drinking Texan known to his contemporaries as “Cactus Jack,” was trying to undermine Roosevelt’s agenda.... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

What happens in a mind that can’t ‘see’ mental images

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images | Quanta Magazine

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.

www.quantamagazine.org

EXCERPTS: In that moment, Shomstein, who’s spent years researching perception at George Washington University, realized she experienced the world differently than others. She is part of a subset of people — thought to be about 1% to 4% of the general population — who lack mental imagery, a phenomenon known as aphantasia. Though it was described more than 140 years ago, the term “aphantasia” was coined only in 2015. It immediately drew the attention of anyone interested in how the imagination works.

[...] Because many people with aphantasia dream in images and can recognize objects and faces, it seems likely that their minds store visual information — they just can’t access it voluntarily or can’t use it to generate the experience of imagery. That’s just one explanation for aphantasia. In reality, people’s subjective experiences vary dramatically, and it’s possible that different subsets of aphantasics have their own neural explanations... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

A Question of Time: Why AI Will Never Be Conscious

A Question of Time: Why AI Will Never Be Conscious

Humans and other animals are conscious because the brain changes as part of the environment from one moment to the next. Artificial intelligence on computers always stays the same.

www.psychologytoday.com

Some scientists and philosophers have the opinion that artificial intelligence could one day become conscious. A computer remains the same physical structure from one moment to the next. A living organism, in contrast, is never the same entity from one moment to the next. Every moment we consciously feel is extended in time, describable as a continuous flow of events in the experienced moment of our embodied existence.

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Who Will Represent Humanity in Interstellar Space?

Who Will Represent Humanity in Interstellar Space?

In a recent Paradigm podcast interview, Matt Geleta asked me who should represent Earth in interstellar space? He reckoned that humans…

avi-loeb.medium.com

In a recent Paradigm podcast interview, Matt Geleta asked me who should represent Earth in interstellar space? He reckoned that humans cannot survive the long trip and so humanity will likely use an avatar with artificial intelligence (AI) as its flagship towards a possible encounter with aliens in interstellar space. In that case, which humans should the AI system replicate as a representation of humanity? [...] However, the space launch of an advanced AI system may take much longer than the time required to produce it on Earth. The root of the hurdle is in the required power supply...

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What plant philsophy says about plant agency and intelligence

What plant philosophy says about plant agency and intelligence | Aeon Essays

The stunningly complex behaviour of plants has led to a new way of thinking about our world: plant philosophy

aeon.co

EXCERPT: The new plant philosophy has emerged partly in response to this work in the plant sciences, and especially to the new paradigm, because the series of concepts that mark out the new paradigm as new – agency, intention, consciousness, and so on – are already the topic of considerable and long-standing philosophical debate. As soon as attention is focused on plants, broader issues emerge. For it is not just that philosophy is interested in plants; we discover that plant life, or the specificity of plant being, challenges some of the cherished assumptions that have dominated the Western tradition for centuries, if not millennia. Plant philosophy is about more than plants. It is also about how the peculiarities of plant life challenge us to think about our own being in new ways.

To some, the very idea of ‘plant philosophy’ may seem absurd, like some sort of newfangled fad, and certainly you won’t find an entry for it in any recent dictionary of philosophy. But, in fact, there is a relationship between plants and philosophy that is nearly as old as the history of Western philosophy itself... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Hug the Robot? AI and the Humanities

Hug the Robot? AI and the Humanities

A Symposium Featuring Hollis Robbins, Martin Puchner, Shadi Bartsch, Henry Oliver, and James Pethokoukis

www.millersbookreview.com

It’s easy to pit the humanities against STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math. Nothing prompts the squareoff like AI, particularly large language models (LLMs). But what about potential partnerships between AI and the humanities?
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Philosophy is crucial in the age of AI

Philosophy is crucial in the age of AI

Philosophy has been instrumental to AI since its inception.

theconversation.com

To begin to answer this, it is worth stressing that philosophy has been instrumental to AI since its inception. [...] It might be said, however, that even if such good old fashioned symbolic AI was indebted to high-level philosophy and logic, the “second-wave” AI, based on deep learning, derives more from the concrete engineering feats associated with processing vast quantities of data. Still, philosophy has played a role here too. [...] Finally, let us briefly ask, how will AI affect philosophy?

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Philospher Peter Godfrey-Smith: ‘To some extent, our planet would be better off without humanity’

Philospher Peter Godfrey-Smith: ‘To some extent, our planet would be better off without humanity’

With the bestselling Other Minds, the philosopher dramatically changed our view of octopuses. Now, concluding his trilogy about the evolution of intelligence, he shows how animal life has shaped the planet itself

www.theguardian.com

Among other things, Godfrey-Smith’s book is an unusual philosophical study of what he calls “a history of organisms as causes, rather than evolutionary products”. Because evolution by natural selection is a random process that leads to unpredictable developments, there is a tendency to see each new species of life it produces as an effect, an outcome, a product of nature. Godfrey-Smith is more intrigued by the other side of the coin, the manner in which these life forms shape the environment and very landscape around them...

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What’s the matter with moral fundamentalism?

What’s the matter with moral fundamentalism?

Inspired by fellow philosopher Anthony Weston, I often ask my ethics students to create a diabolical toolkit of rules that would torpedo public dialogue. The idea here, I explain, is to spell out rules that would maximize the distance between “us” and “them,” ensuring that possibilities for...

blog.oup.com

Inspired by fellow philosopher Anthony Weston, I often ask my ethics students to create a diabolical toolkit of rules that would torpedo public dialogue. [...] Gradually some of the fun fades as we reflect on our diabolical toolkit.

Many of my liberal-identified students interpret the activity as a sendup of conservatives. Their imagined toolkit-users sport “Make America Great Again” hats and threaten DEI advocates. Meanwhile, many of my conservative students interpret the activity as damning liberal wokeness, virtue signaling, and cancel culture.

[...] In my own writings on moral philosophy, I’ve come to call this cluster of toolkit-like habits “moral fundamentalism.” I’ll very briefly explore four questions about it...

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A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

A blog about imperfect cognitions, such as delusional beliefs, distorted memories, confabulatory explanations, and implicit biases.

imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com

What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results.

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Exploring The Boundaries Of Consciousness

Exploring The Boundaries Of Consciousness | NOEMA

A journey into the mystical hillsides of Nepal in search of answers to questions about which beings we can call conscious.

www.noemamag.com

Famously, the French philosopher René Descartes argued that consciousness requires language, and hence that it’s unique to humans. Few would endorse Descartes’ view now, and most contemporary theorists take seriously the idea that consciousness is found not just in mammals but in many other taxa as well.

[...] Defining consciousness in terms directly amenable to scientific investigation risks substituting the phenomenon in which we’re interested for something else. To ensure that it’s consciousness we’re studying we need to start with consciousness as it occurs within ourselves. But that approach threatens to be unacceptably anthropocentric, for it risks assuming that those features that characterize human consciousness must also characterize non-human forms of consciousness...

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Interview of philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau

What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? features in-depth autobiographical interviews with philosophers

www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com

EXCERPT: In general, how have all of the world events—9/11, Iraq, Trump, COVID-- that have happened since you were in grad school informed your philosophical views? Is metaethics political? In general, if you want to change the world, or minds, is philosophy the way to do it? If not, what is philosophy for, exactly?

9/11 was very much on my mind when I wrote my second book, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? I took for granted that the bombers had done something morally horrific, and sought to show that anyone who shared that view should regard morality as objective. I wrote that in (for me) record time, less than a year, in 2-hour windows after the kids went to bed. It was 2003 and I was naïve enough to think that the book, pitched to non-philosophers, would actually have some influence in the wider world.

So, is metaethics political?

Not discernibly. But then my powers of discernment are not that fine. If you want to change the world and have a philosophical bent, you can take the chance that you’ll be among the very rare philosophers whose ideas have been picked up, not mangled by political leaders, and implemented on a broad scale. A much better bet: if you are beset by philosophical questions and have the great luxury of being paid to spend a chunk of your time trying to answer them, then go for it. If you want to change the world in a big way, then unless you’re the next Peter Singer, best to either reduce your ambitions or leave academia and kickstart your political career. (MORE - details)
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[C C]

Belief in God has been overwhelmingly linked with do-gooders

Belief in God Has Been Overwhelmingly Linked with This Specific Behavior - The Debrief

Researchers from the University of California, Merced, have found a link between a perceived belief in God and this particular behavior.

thedebrief.org

INTRO: People are more likely to associate the performance of good deeds with a religious person, and specifically a belief in God, according to researchers from the University of California, Merced.

Previous studies, dating back over a decade, had shown a bias linking atheists with less prosocial behavior and more immoral behavior, something also confirmed in the recent research. However, the scientists behind the latest study say the link they found between the performance of good deeds and a perceived belief in God was significantly higher.

“Though we also found that people intuitively link atheism with immoral behavior, people appear to associate believing in God with being generous, helpful, and caring to a much greater extent,” explained Colin Holbrook, a professor in the university’s Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences and a co-author on the paper detailing the findings.

Although statistically significant and with results displayed on a global scale, the researchers caution that their study only found a link between perceptions that those who believe in God are more likely to commit good deeds. Whether or not they are actually more likely to do so is still an open question... (MORE - details)

PAPER: Intuitive moral bias favors the religiously faithful
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Cynic's Corner: Apparently all the secular social justice offshoots from the French Revolution to Marxism to Critical Theory are still sailing over our heads in terms of what they piggyback on, despite well over two centuries of radical revolt and activism. The difference between religious beliefs and moral crusading non-theist beliefs is that the former personifies concepts and principles, whereas the latter stops short a step and reifies its invented ideology as an abstract fact lacking those anthropmorphic or zoomorphic characteristics. (Self-righteous reverence of an _X_ either way. )

Max Stirner: That is why they [collectivists/socialists] are continuations and consequences of the Christian principle, the principle of love, of sacrifice for something universal, something alien. [...] Since they’re enemies of egoism, they are therefore Christians, or more generally, religious people, believers in ghosts, dependents, servants of whatever universal (God, society, etc.). --The Ego and His Own
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[C C]

The physics of time doesn't contradict experience

The physics of time doesn't contradict our experience | Matt Farr

It is often argued that the physics of time contradicts our experience. In response to Avshalom Elitzur, Matt Farr challenges this view by claiming that we need not fear that modern physics gets anything wrong about our subjective experience of time.

iai.tv

It is often argued that the physics of time contradicts our experience. In response to Avshalom Elitzur, Matt Farr challenges this view by claiming that we need not fear that modern physics gets anything wrong about our subjective experience of time.

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Derrida vs Searle: The obscure object of language

Derrida vs Searle: The obscure object of language

iai.tv

The legendary exchange between Derrida and Searle on the nature of language remains a symbol of the chasm between the so-called Analytic and Continental traditions of philosophy. But beyond highlighting the blind spots of an understanding of language that excludes literature, irony, jokes, and the subconscious, the exchange also underlines the refusal of analytic philosophers to seriously engage with the other side, writes Peter Salmon.

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The right to no sex: a case for celibacy

The right to no sex: a case for celibacy

Celibacy is commonly associated with cloistered religious groups, or more recently with extremist incels. Yet in a world where 'Yes' to desire has dominated narratives of sexual liberation, Lisabeth During invites us to reconsider the radical potential of 'No' and examine how celibacy challenges...

iai.tv

Celibacy is commonly associated with cloistered religious groups, or more recently with extremist incels. Yet in a world where 'Yes' to desire has dominated narratives of sexual liberation, Lisabeth During invites us to reconsider the radical potential of 'No' and examine how celibacy challenges norms and offers unique avenues for political dissent.
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[parmalee]

Derrida vs Searle: The obscure object of language

Derrida vs Searle: The obscure object of language

iai.tv

The legendary exchange between Derrida and Searle on the nature of language remains a symbol of the chasm between the so-called Analytic and Continental traditions of philosophy. But beyond highlighting the blind spots of an understanding of language that excludes literature, irony, jokes, and the subconscious, the exchange also underlines the refusal of analytic philosophers to seriously engage with the other side, writes Peter Salmon.

I don't wanna do a free trial that I'm gonna have to remember to cancel in 7 or 10 days, but I want to know what this Salmon guy has got to say. What do I do?

“With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. – John Searle

No he doesn't. Searle is just cranky, always has been. There are certainly people about whom that can be said, but Derrida wasn't one of them. Alternately, if he did say that, he was simply making a point--and not a terribly "obscure" one (well, yes and no, but with commonly understood meaning of "obscure": no).

And the irony and jokes are essential. Why have Anglos always had such a stick up their ass about this? Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Clown_Cried ) is scheduled to become available in 2025. I can almost guarantee that Searle couldn't care less. Sad.


Edited to add this nonsense, because why not? : I had this French girlfriend once who was horrible--she criticized the way I walked and frequently complained that I was too skinny--but also beautiful. Almost objectively so--that is, by the measures of a large percentage of peoples historically. Anyway, she often tried to explain these little jokes and word-play in Derrida that completely flew over my head. Humor very often is untranslatable. Perhaps said jokes shouldn't be critical to an understanding of the text generally, and I do not believe that they necessarily are critical (also, having to explain humor is inherently problematic), but when I finally did get some of the jokes it was revelatory.

 

[C C]

I don't wanna do a free trial that I'm gonna have to remember to cancel in 7 or 10 days, but I want to know what this Salmon guy has got to say. What do I do? [...]

Okay, adding the 2020 "suffix" to the end of those URLs seems to work for now. Better hurry, though, because they might retaliate.

All the links below have been modified.
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Derrida vs Searle: The obscure object of language

Derrida vs Searle: The obscure object of language

iai.tv

= = = = = = = = = = = =

The physics of time doesn't contradict experience

The physics of time doesn't contradict our experience | Matt Farr

It is often argued that the physics of time contradicts our experience. In response to Avshalom Elitzur, Matt Farr challenges this view by claiming that we need not fear that modern physics gets anything wrong about our subjective experience of time.

iai.tv

= = = = = = = = = = = =

The right to no sex: a case for celibacy
https://iai.tv/articles/the-right-to-no-sex-a-case-for-celibacy-auid-2591?_auid=2020
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[Magical Realist]

Sean Carroll giving us the low down on the "time is an illusion" thesis...

is the passage of time an illusion - Google Search

 

[parmalee]

Okay, adding the 2020 "suffix" to the end of those URLs seems to work for now. Better hurry, though, because they might retaliate.

Thanks.

OK, here's my succinct appeal to Searle for making more of an effort to take Derrida seriously. Derrida and Wittgenstein each, in their own way and half a century apart, signaled a "linguistic turn" in philosophy. They also both made considerable inroads into bridging so-called Analytic and Continental traditions: Wittgenstein broadened his concerns, particularly with respect to "saying' and "showing", in the Tractatus, but didn't fully embrace the messiness that thinking necessarily entails until much later, and none of his subsequent writings were ever really, appropriately, all that complete (like Can, his later work was largely without beginning, ending, nor development); Derrida was interested in Analytic thought, particularly Ordinary Language philosophy, right from the get-go--and unlike most of their Analytic cohorts, the Ordinary Language types seemed genuinely concerned with clarity.

But, all of that, while important in it's own right, is in many respects a distraction. What Derrida and Wittgenstein were ultimately concerned with (and this is my own (underdeveloped) thesis, so feel free to call bullshit) one thing: engagement with the Other. Do we even? How? Searle may not cotton to Derrida's style (which changed very much from the early 70s), but he's gotta recognize that as an honorable endeavor.

It seemed astonishing to Derrida that all of fiction, all of poetry, all the ways we ‘play’ with language, including jokes, should be ignored in our search for how language works. Even if we allowed this – and Derrida even in his most generous of moods never would – where do we draw the line? The barrier between fiction and non-fiction is notoriously porous. Should we take a statement seriously until the utterer says ‘I’m only joking?’ And how do we know, even then, that the speaker is being earnest?

(Peter Salmon, from the article linked above)

Yeah. I often say, "I'm only half-joking". I think other people have said that, as well. But what the hell does that even mean? Interestingly, the thinkers most interested in pursuing this angle--like Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond--are largely American.

 

[C C]

Math, God and the Problem of Evil

Math, God and the Problem of Evil — John Horgan (The Science Writer)

HOBOKEN, AUGUST 10, 2024. JP Andrew, a philosopher with the tag @2Philosophical_, asserts on Twitter/X that the “unreasonable effectiveness” of math is “ evidence for Theism ”--that is, God. Let me push back against that argument. Andrew is alluding to “ The Unreasonable Effectiveness of

johnhorgan.org

EXCERPT: Distinguishing math from science, Radulovic proposes an analogy between nature and games like chess. Scientists are trying to discover the basic rules of the game within which we find ourselves.

Mathematicians, in contrast, are trying to discover all logically possible games, whether or not they correspond to our reality. The odds are against any given mathematical invention proving useful to scientists, and yet time and again they do. Radulovic excels at showing how seemingly esoteric, impractical inventions, such as imaginary numbers and non-Euclidian geometry, end up solving problems in physics and other fields.

“It almost seems as if some magic hand guided the ancient mathematicians” toward formulas that would help future scientists. Unlike burning bushes and parting seas, Radulovic says, mathematics is a “real miracle,” and “the book of mathematics is written by the very creator; no matter who or what that is.”

And yet Radulovic, like Wigner and Goldenfeld, implicitly undercuts the theism theory. He notes that mathematics is riddled with pitfalls and paradoxes, like Gödel’s proof about the limits of proof. Is God messing with us? (MORE - details)

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Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism

Why You Should Feel Good About Liberalism

We need to get better at standing up for the greatest social technology ever devised.

www.persuasion.community

EXCERPTS: On the one hand, critics are coming out of the woodwork. [...] Above all, they charge, liberalism has lost the confidence of the public—and of liberals.

[..But...] Francis Fukuyama was right. ... “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident ... in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism,” he wrote in 1989. [...] monarchy, feudalism, theocracy, autarchy, fascism, communism, and the other challengers to liberalism had all failed as governing systems and intellectual frameworks. Only Western-style liberalism had proven it can work on a large scale, in many places, and over time.

[...] Begin, then, with a basic question: what do we (or at least I) mean by liberalism? Not progressivism or moderate leftism, as the term came to mean in postwar U.S. discourse. Rather, liberalism in the tradition of Locke, Kant, and the Founders [the Enlightenment]. It is not one idea but a family of ideas with many variants... (MORE - details)

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When extraordinary writers prove fallible

Who Do They Think They Are? | Literary Review of Canada

An original essay by Patrick Warner on great writers and their many flaws.

reviewcanada.ca

A large number of readers believe that the social, moral, and artistic excellence found in a book is indicative of the person who wrote it. This is rarely — if ever — the case. Hence the shock when one held in the highest esteem is suddenly shown to be morally if not criminally liable for some wrong.

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What AI in music can — and can’t — do

What AI in music can — and can’t — do

Music production is getting easier. Does that make it better?

www.vox.com

Making, hearing, dancing to, and talking about music are fundamental human experiences, an essential means for relating to one another. Given this irrepressible human compulsion, AI won’t destroy music — but it can radically shift who is making it, what we hear, and why we create it in the first place

 

[C C]

The political preferences of LLMs (research paper)

The political preferences of LLMs

I report here a comprehensive analysis about the political preferences embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs). Namely, I administer 11 political orientation tests, designed to identify the political preferences of the test taker, to 24 state-of-the-art conversational LLMs, both closed and open...

journals.plos.org

ABSTRACT: I report here a comprehensive analysis about the political preferences embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs). Namely, I administer 11 political orientation tests, designed to identify the political preferences of the test taker, to 24 state-of-the-art conversational LLMs, both closed and open source.

When probed with questions/statements with political connotations, most conversational LLMs tend to generate responses that are diagnosed by most political test instruments as manifesting preferences for left-of-center viewpoints.

This does not appear to be the case for five additional base (i.e. foundation) models upon which LLMs optimized for conversation with humans are built. However, the weak performance of the base models at coherently answering the tests’ questions makes this subset of results inconclusive.

Finally, I demonstrate that LLMs can be steered towards specific locations in the political spectrum through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with only modest amounts of politically aligned data, suggesting SFT’s potential to embed political orientation in LLMs. With LLMs beginning to partially displace traditional information sources like search engines and Wikipedia, the societal implications of political biases embedded in LLMs are substantial.

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Population growth isn’t a progressive issue. It should be.

Opinion | Population Growth Isn’t a Progressive Issue. It Should Be.

There’s more to the issue than what JD Vance says.

www.nytimes.com

Because population decline is widely seen as a conservative issue, many progressives don’t seem to worry about it. But they should. If left unchecked, population decline could worsen many of the problems that progressives care about, including economic inequality and the vulnerability of marginalized social groups.

This doesn’t mean adopting the conservative case wholesale. Progressives need to develop their own version of pronatalism. It should stress the need for government benefits and social services like paid parental leave and subsidized child care while defending the right to abortion and rejecting the traditionalism and nativism that too often characterize the position on the right.

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What Hegelian e-girls understand and Ken Wilber doesn’t

What Hegelian e-girls understand and Ken Wilber doesn’t

My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly wh…

loveofallwisdom.com

I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.
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