Philosophy Updates

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Does science erode meaning? (paper)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09637214241262709

ABSTRACT: Humans need to experience meaning in their lives yet often find it difficult to do so. We argue that, for nonreligious individuals in many Western cultures, the materialist and reductionist ideology that surrounds scientific practice and data may be an impediment to attaining a robust sense of meaning in life. Furthermore, scientific materialism and reductionism may be especially problematic for existential mattering—the form of meaning entailing a belief that one’s life matters in the context of the universe as a whole. We review new research supporting this account, along with implications for those immersed in the materialist worldview. We conclude by suggesting possible means of finding meaning, including a sense of existential mattering, without abandoning science, and highlight research directions to further examine these possibilities.

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The odds on an empty cosmos

The Odds on an Empty Cosmos | Centauri Dreams

INTRO: When Arthur C. Clarke tells me that something is terrifying, he’s got my attention. After all, since boyhood I’ve not only had my imagination greatly expanded by Clarke’s work but have learned a great deal about scientific methodology and detachment.

So where does terror fit in? Clarke is said to have used the term in a famous quote: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” But let’s ponder this: Would we prefer to live in a universe with other intelligent beings, or one in which we are alone?

Are they really equally terrifying? Curiosity favors the former, as does innate human sociability. But the actual situation may be far more stark, which is why David Kipping deploys the Clarke quote in a new paper probing the probabilities... (MORE - details)

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This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little

This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little

The US government just hired a researcher who thinks we can beat aging with fresh cloned bodies and brain updates.

www.technologyreview.com

EXCERPT: The trickiest part is your brain. That ages, too, shrinking dramatically in old age. But you don’t want to swap it out for another—because it is you. And that’s where Hébert's research comes in. He’s been exploring ways to “progressively” replace a brain by adding bits of youthful tissue made in a lab. The process would have to be done slowly enough, in steps, that your brain could adapt, relocating memories and your self-identity. (MORE - details)
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How to say a beautiful ‘hello’ – inspired by philosophy from non-English speaking cultures

How to say a beautiful ‘hello’ – inspired by philosophy from non-English speaking cultures

There are many greetings that provide a unique glimpse into the culture of its speakers, reflecting different traditions and ways of acknowledging, respecting and honouring others.

theconversation.com

EXCERPT: It seems that when greeting someone in English, our choice is between the informal and the insincere. If languages reflect the culture and values of their speakers, this suggests English-speaking regions value informality and insincerity, or, with a more positive spin, simplicity and politeness. Outside of English, there are many greetings that provide unique glimpses into the cultures of their speakers, reflecting different traditions and ways of acknowledging, respecting and honouring others... (MORE - details)

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Babies and animals can’t tell us if they have consciousness – but philosophers and scientists are starting to find answers

Babies and animals can’t tell us if they have consciousness – but philosophers and scientists are starting to find answers

Dogs and infants may not be able to tell us what they’re thinking, but we are developing the tools that will help us find out.

theconversation.com

EXCERPT: . . . researchers have developed the “natural kinds” approach to consider consciousness in babies and infants. This involves looking at the brains and behaviour of adults when they’re conscious of something, and using this to make a list of all of the behaviour and brain patterns we have when we’re conscious of something, that aren’t there when we aren’t conscious of it. Researchers call these “markers” of consciousness. But developmental psychologist Andy Bremner and I have suggested we shouldn’t rely on just one marker of consciousness... (MORE - details)

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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

EXCERPTS: In early May I return to Kathmandu after almost 50 years. I’m one of a group of nearly 30 scientists, philosophers and Buddhist monks who have been invited to speak by Konstantin Anokhin, director of Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Institute for Advanced Brain Studies, to participate in a conference on animal consciousness. Is consciousness broadly spread across the animal world, something that occurs in most, if not all, species? Or is it encountered only occasionally, if at all, outside of mammals?

[...] 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.

[...] A well-established theory that bridged the gap between neurobiology and consciousness would help. Unfortunately, we have no such theory. Instead, we have many theories of consciousness — 22, according to a recent review Anil Seth and I authored — and no consensus as to which is on the right track. This embarrassment of richness could be ignored if rival theories agreed on which animals are likely to be conscious, but they don’t.... (MORE - details)

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Frameworks: the realist vs the pragmatist view of epistemology

The realist vs the pragmatist view of epistemology | Aeon Essays

Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation

aeon.co

EXCERPTS: How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anything but its correspondence to facts that were fixed before we started investigating them?

Some philosophers have argued that, despite widespread intuitions to the contrary, knowledge is not merely a matter of representation but also of construction, and that truth cannot be completely detached from human needs and interests...

[...] The realist view, which sees enquiry as a process of revelation and knowledge as a representation of antecedent facts, is intuitively compelling. Think of a murder investigation ... Knowledge consists in having the right beliefs about that fact, based on the right evidence.

These kinds of examples are useful for philosophers: they are simple, familiar and they generate powerful intuitions. But, precisely because of their simplicity, they can be misleading. Not all enquiries are like whodunnit investigations. In fact, if we want to know what knowledge is, we should also look at more complex cases, in which the object of investigation itself is articulated only as enquiry progresses. Depending on the type of enquiry we examine, we might find that it is more appropriate to talk of articulation than representation, creation rather than revelation.

[...] Frameworks can be understood as constellations of concepts, methods and assumptions that reflect our understanding of the world around us and regulate how we think and act. ... Once the framework is settled, it delimits the questions we can ask and the range of their possible answers, although the correct answer itself is not up to us... (MORE - details)

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Astronomers have warned against colonial practices in the space industry − a philosopher of science explains how the industry could explore other planets without exploiting them

Astronomers have warned against colonial practices in the space industry − a philosopher of science explains how the industry could explore other planets without exploiting them

Space may be considered the final frontier, but the US was once a frontier, too. How can space industry leaders avoid repeating practices that led to colonialism in the 18th century and beyond?

theconversation.com

EXCERPTS: In a 2023 white paper, a group of concerned astronomers warned against repeating Earthly “colonial practices” in outer space. But what’s wrong with colonizing space if there’s nothing there to begin with?

I am a philosopher of science and religion who has been writing about the space industry for several years. As government agencies and private companies turn their eyes toward the stars, I’ve noticed many of the factors that drove European Christian imperialism between the 15th and 19th centuries reappearing in high-speed, high-tech forms.

[...] Many space industry leaders, such as Mars Society President Robert Zubrin, argue that although European-style colonialism may have had unsavory consequences on Earth, it is the only way to proceed in outer space. In fact, he warns, any attempt to slow down or regulate the space industry will make the Martian frontier inaccessible to humanity, leaving us stuck on an increasingly dull and decadent Earth.

[...] Why should anyone care about the rights of rocks and a few hypothetical microbes? But as it turns out, not everyone agrees that outer space is empty. And as the concerned astronomers have argued, abandoning the colonial playbook would benefit industry insiders and outsiders alike... (MORE - details)

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Three fun paradoxes created by Ancient Greek philosophers to puzzle over

Three fun paradoxes created by Ancient Greek philosophers to puzzle over

Paradoxes point to conceptual glitches or bugs. How to fix the bugs, or whether they can be fixed, is rarely obvious.

theconversation.com

INTRO: Ancient Greek philosophers used paradoxes for all sorts of reasons, from sharpening their dialectical skills and showing philosophical opponents were talking nonsense to serious philosophical inquiry – but also for fun.

Some paradoxes were lethal. Philetas of Cos’s epitaph tells us he died tormented by the “liar paradox”. And according to one biographer, Diodorus Cronus killed himself in 284 BC after failing to solve a paradox put to him by fellow philosopher Stilpo of Megara.

These stories are fanciful, but they point to something maddeningly true about paradoxes: there cannot be a single, obvious solution. Sometimes there is no good solution. Sometimes there are too many good solutions. Paradoxes point to conceptual glitches or bugs. How to fix these bugs, or whether they can be fixed, is rarely obvious.

The three paradoxes that follow are some of the best-known examples from Ancient Greece... (MORE - details)
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Patterns can't explain life's complexity

Patterns can't explain life's complexity | Perry Marshall

iai.tv

INTRO: Perry Marshall challenges the case made in Michael Levin's article last Thursday that patterns are alive, and that all life forms and thought are living patterns. Marshall argues that bacteria and viruses are more complicated than we imagine, but this is not a basis to claim that all lifeforms and thought can be explained by patterns. (MORE - details)

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MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

An MIT study on “legalese” suggests this convoluted language acts to convey a sense of authority in legal documents. The researchers also found that even non-lawyers use legalese when asked to write laws.

www.eurekalert.org

PRESS RELEASE: Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable? MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude. (MORE - details)

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Are robots about to level up?

Are Robots About to Level Up? | Quanta Magazine

Today’s AI largely lives in computers, but acting and reacting in the real world — that’s the realm of robots. In this week’s episode, co-host Steven Strogatz talks with pioneering roboticist Daniela Rus about creativity, collaboration, and the unusual forms robots of the future might take.

www.quantamagazine.org

EXCERPTS: Within just a few years, artificial intelligence systems that sometimes seem to display almost human characteristics have gone from science fiction to apps on your phone. But there’s another AI-influenced frontier that is developing rapidly and remains untamed: robotics. Can the technologies that have helped computers get smarter now bring similar improvements to the robots that will work alongside us?

In this episode, Daniela Rus, a pioneering roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, talks to host Steven Strogatz about the surprising inspirations from biology that may help robots rise to new levels. [...] we developed a new approach to machine learning we call liquid networks. And liquid networks result in solutions that are much more compact and explainable than today’s traditional AI systems... (MORE - transcript & podcast)

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Philosophical approaches to the question of Palestine (PDF)

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/resource/resmgr/inclusiveness_syllabi/inclusiveness_syllabi_2/philosophical_approaches_to_.pdf

INTRO: This syllabus was put together by a group of philosophers from a wide range of subfields – social and political philosophy, feminism, continental philosophy, decolonial theory, history of philosophy, and many others– and the variety of topics and readings reflects the diversity of approaches within our discipline. It is not designed as an exhaustive set of readings or arranged as a necessary sequence. Rather, it is intended as a series of independent but interconnected modules, each of which can be used in multiple contexts - incorporated into other courses, expanded into entirely new courses, or reassembled and supplemented by other topics pertinent to Palestine. We were motivated by a sense of urgency as the Gaza Nakba escalated; by a sense of dismay that there has been virtually no serious discussion of Palestine in the philosophy classroom or in the profession; and by our conviction that philosophy has both the responsibility and the capacity to address one of the most burning issues of our time. (MORE - details)

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video link: Posthumous harm

INTRO: David Boonin is a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Professor Boonin’s interests lie in the areas of applied ethics, ethical theory, and the history of ethics.

In this interview, we discuss Boonin's claim that the dead can be harmed. He takes a desire-satisfactionist stance on the nature of well-being, which essentially means that our well-being consists of getting our desires fulfilled. Since we can have desires toward things after we die, it follows that those desires can be frustrated after we die. This means that when said desires are frustrated, our well-being states when we are alive are negatively affected.

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video link: What are children for? (A conversation with Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman)

INTRO: Today’s show is a talk about an exciting new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman titled “What are Children For?” We talked about “slow love,” the common complaint from millennials that they do not have enough financial stability to start families, the ambivalent mother narrative, and something right in Tyler’s wheelhouse: eco apocalypse fiction. Why is the United States birthrate declining? Why are middle and upper-middle class women waiting longer to have children, or, in many cases, forgoing the decision altogether? We discuss all that with Anastasia and Rachel.

 

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Scientific consensus needs dissent

We need to evaluate expert consensus | Miriam Solomon

We view expert consensus as settled science. But expert opinion isn’t always right: while consensus is a useful epistemic guide, we should question it.

iai.tv

INTRO: We place high epistemic value on expert opinion and when it reaches a consensus, we may view this as settled science. But, writes Miriam Solomon, we should not equate expert opinion with certainty. While expertise is a valuable guide to decision-making, experts can be prone to human error too. Laypeople can, and should, critically evaluate how expert consensus is reached. (MORE - details)

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Do you need religion to be a moral person?

Do you need religion to be a moral person?

When asked "Do you need to believe in God to be moral?" the majority of people outside of Europe said yes. Are they right to think so?

bigthink.com

KEY POINTS: While some moral intuitions, like deference to authority, may align with religious beliefs, the link between religion and morality is not inherent. Scientific research suggests that morality is rooted in universal principles of cooperation, not necessarily tied to religious beliefs. A study across 60 diverse societies found that seven cooperative principles, such as loyalty, reciprocity, and respect for property, are universally judged as morally good, with rare exceptions rooted in specific cultural contexts. (MORE - details)
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Cynic's Corner : What planet is the naïve public living on? Left ideology is principally about using contrived secular morality to acquire power (based on class struggle, cultural hegemony, and the many spin-off social oppression conspiracies in general). Socialist or socialist-leaning bureaucrats replace the priests, and literary intellectuals (philosopher kings) replace the prophets. Left ideology has been around in developmental stages since the French Revolution, arriving at one of its peaks after 1867 with the publication of Das Kapital. A non-theist sphere of dogma has been demonstrating for over two centuries that you don't need religion (or precisely a religion) to profit from moral crusading.
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Examples of the "decolonization of science" movement (and related indigenous science)
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Decolonizing Science: Undoing the colonial and racist hegemony of western science

View of Decolonizing Science: Undoing the Colonial and Racist Hegemony of Western Science

journals.sfu.ca

BACKGROUND: Decolonization is the complicated and unsettling undoing of colonization. In a similarly simplified definition, science is a structured way of pursuing knowledge. To decolonize science thus means to undo the past and present racist and colonial hegemony of Western science over other, equally legitimate ways of knowing.

PURPOSE: This paper discusses the paradigmatic prerequisites and consequences of decolonizing Western science. Only if Western science is toppled from its pedestal and understood in a cultural way can it engage with other sciences at eye level. Such equal collaboration that results in the cocreation of new knowledge based on the scientific method and Indigenous scientific inquiry is what decolonizing science is all about.

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Indigenous knowledge is increasingly valued, but to fully respect it we need to decolonise science – here’s how

Indigenous knowledge is increasingly valued, but to fully respect it we need to decolonise science – here’s how

The concept of pūtaiao envisions a way of conducting science led by Māori and firmly embedded in the values of a Māori worldview. It offers a way towards decolonising the research system in general.

theconversation.com

EXCERPT: Decolonising science is at the heart of pūtaiao. It challenges and critiques the academy and disciplines of Western science. Decolonising science requires a focus on histories, structures and institutions that act as barriers to mātauranga, te reo and tikanga.

We argue that decolonising science is a necessary step before we can Indigenise science. Like mātauranga, pūtaiao is embedded in place and in the people of those places. It centres, prioritises and affirms Māori identity in the context of scientific research and science identity.

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The problem with “Indigenous science”

The problem with “Indigenous science”

Last month I was invited by Frances Widdowson, a faculty in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies at Mt. Royal University, in Calgary, to participate to a panel discussion on the …

platofootnote.wordpress.com

EXCERPTS: . . . The keywords to pay attention to there are “Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods.”

The Commission goes on to explain: “Incorporating Indigenous knowledge in education is not only useful in building stronger intercultural relationships [...] it means including an Indigenous perspective in schools that would involve getting lessons from elders..."

[...] Since David too, like Shawn, insisted that indigenizing the university would be a plus because it would introduce both faculty and students to other ways of knowing, I asked again for specific examples. I finally got them.

Here are the only three that were presented during the entire panel discussion:

i) Indigenous people know the local flora and fauna well, including some of their medicinal properties (Indigenous biology).

ii) Chairs can change into bears, because energy is in movement and can change into matter (Indigenous “physics”).

iii) Going into a sauna and smudging some local plants on one’s skin is an effective way to “cleans” one’s mind, body, and spirit — though from what is not at all clear (here is a pretty much unhelpful description of the process).

Clearly, the first is an example of local knowledge that is not different in kind from scientific knowledge; and indeed, it’s a routine practice of botanists and zoologists all over the world to take advantage of such knowledge, there being nothing “alternative” about it.

The second example has a vague whiff of quantum mechanics — which was, indeed brought up during the discussion — but no, chairs ain’t gonna change into bears (much less with a probability of “about 1%,” as stated by David during his talk).

The third example is vaguely spiritual, perhaps hinting at the supernatural, and hardly seems to merit a spot in a science curriculum.

In a nutshell, it was clear to me that the positive claims made by supporters of Indigenous science reduce to an attempt to introduce what to me clearly qualifies as pseudoscience in the university curriculum. When they experience some pushback, however, they shift to a position that is entirely unobjectionable — like bringing students to nature walks or teaching them about the medicinal properties of the local flora.

But such unobjectionable proposals seem to be obviously designed as Trojan horses to get the real crazy stuff in by way of a secondary entrance.

Once a university hires an Indigenous scholar to teach Indigenous “science” there is very little oversight over what, exactly, the fellow will be teaching in the classroom. And the problem with Trojan horses, even when they are so obvious to spot, is that they tend to work — just ask Odysseus. This makes me worry for the future of Canadian education...

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Decolonise science – time to end another imperial era

Decolonise science – time to end another imperial era

A long read on how science’s dark imperial past still shapes research today – and what to do about it.

theconversation.com

EXCERPT: Recent years have seen an increasing number of calls to “decolonise science”, even going so far as to advocate scrapping the practice and findings of modern science altogether. Tackling the lingering influence of colonialism in science is much needed.

But there are also dangers that the more extreme attempts to do so could play into the hands of religious fundamentalists and ultra-nationalists. We must find a way to remove the inequalities promoted by modern science while making sure its huge potential benefits work for everyone, instead of letting it become a tool for oppression.

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Decolonising science: it’s high time for Indonesia to break free from overreliance on Western theories
https://theconversation.com/decolon...-from-overreliance-on-western-theories-179474

EXCERPTS: The movement to decolonise science calls for the scientific community to break free from knowledge production dominated by colonial nations – particularly the Western world (eurocentrism) – to make more scientific room for scholars from all corners of the globe.

In the view of decolonisation, knowledge is currently centered on the Western world, while academics from formerly colonised states have traditionally been mere study objects.

[...] The push to decolonise science in the modern age is part of a wider emancipation movement. For instance, it’s also driven by other campaigns outside academia that advocate for human rights and social justice – from #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo.

The most important aspect of decolonising science, however, is moving away from scientific absolutism born from the dynamics of colonisation. This is the ultimate goal of scholars who push for decolonisation; most of them originating from Latin America, South Asia, and also Africa.

[...] Throughout the years, Indonesian scholars have grown weary of dominant theories, pushing them to always ride the wave of scientific trends – often times Western.

But this tendency can also stem from a feeling of inferiority among Indonesian scholars. They often face difficulty in expressing ideas if they’re not supported by seemingly intricate and complex theories.

Unfortunately, this reinforces the dominance of Western ways of thought. Sociologist Leon Moosavi reminds academics to not just jump on the decolonial bandwagon, but also to ride the important train headed for a more inclusive scientific regime.

[...] Decolonising science starts with the will to look inside each academic discipline, and ask whether there is room to look for the truth without having to depend on Western science.
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John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism

John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism

Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world.

josephheath.substack.com

INTRO: Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world.

[...] So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals.

Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement [...] as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School ... wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.

If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism. This is not quite right though, because what they actually discovered was that the new, modernized, reinvigorated liberalism... (MORE - details)

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How two leftist scholars saved Nietzsche’s archive

How Two Leftist Scholars Saved Nietzsche’s Archive

In postwar Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche was seen as an intellectual proto-Nazi. A new book explains how two antifascist Italian academics — one of whom was a communist — fought to recover the “real” Nietzsche for the Left.

jacobin.com

EXCERPTS: [...] as a leftist lover of Nietzsche, one is often required to park one’s commitments and either skim his work or look the other way for certain passages. ... But ultimately, there is no way around it: Nietzsche hated equality. And insofar as a leftist politics advocates for equality, there is no reconciliation possible. As a philosopher committed to radical, aristocratic individualism, he was a vehement critic of every kind of egalitarianism.

Which is why the story told by Philipp Felsch in How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption is a compelling and fascinating one. [...] In the immediate postwar period, he was known as the “favorite philosopher” of both Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists and Benito Mussolini’s Fascists.

Despite this, in a space of just a few decades, French philosophers associated with the New Left and the May 1968 revolt had come to embrace Nietzsche, finding in his writings ideas that would come to define subsequent movements in so-called continental philosophy, including poststructuralism and deconstruction.

Today the pendulum seems to have swung back toward the other dimension. It’s common — at least in the Anglophone left — to criticize poststructuralism and deconstruction as intellectual vanguards of neoliberalism. And as a corollary, it’s become fashionable once again to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy as romantic, reactionary irrationalism that’s fundamentally at odds with a Marxist commitment to materialism, reason, and collectivism.

However, this account misses an important part of the story. This story is the focus Felsch’s book [...] We only have access to the full archive of Nietzsche’s writing thanks to the work of two Italian scholars, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari.

Both were committed to uncovering the “real” Nietzsche, against his reputation in postwar Europe as an intellectual proto-Nazi whose thinking was believed to lead straight to the gas chambers. They possessed almost no qualification for the task, and neither was an archivist. However, both were committed anti-fascists, and Montinari was a communist... (MORE - details)

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Consciously smelling—an edited excerpt from ‘Stinking Philosophy! Smell Perception, Cognition, and Consciousness’

Consciously smelling—an edited excerpt from ‘Stinking Philosophy! Smell Perception, Cognition, and Consciousness’

In his new book, published earlier this month, Benjamin Young tackles the debates and central questions surrounding olfactory perception, cognition and consciousness.

www.thetransmitter.org

EXCERPT: The following excerpt from Chapter 2 of my book “Stinking Philosophy!” asks a simple question: What are smells? One would assume we know the answer, yet despite the best efforts of chemoscientists and philosophers, it is still an open area of research. What I offer is my attempt at grappling with what I argue is not a singular issue but a host of nested questions. The selected portion here focuses on just one small part: what determines the olfactory quality of smells. (MORE - details)

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Stephen Wolfram thinks we need philosophers working on big questions around AI

Stephen Wolfram thinks we need philosophers working on big questions around AI | TechCrunch

As AI developers and others start to think more deeply about how computers and people intersect, Stephan Wolfram says it is becoming a much more of a philosophical exercise

techcrunch.com

EXCERPT: He says scientists in general have a hard time thinking about things in philosophical terms. “One thing I’ve noticed that’s really kind of striking is that when you talk to scientists, and you talk about big, new ideas, they find that kind of disorienting because in science, that is not typically what happens,” he said. “Science is an incremental field where you’re not expecting that you’re going to be confronted with a major different way of thinking about things.”

If the main work of philosophy is to answer big existential questions, he sees us coming into a golden age of philosophy due to the growing influence of AI and all of the questions that it’s raising. In his view, a lot of the questions that we’re now being confronted with by AI are actually at their core of traditional philosophical questions. (MORE - details)

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On Nietzsche and our crisis of masculinity

Over Man | The Point Magazine

As is often the case, I first read Friedrich Nietzsche as a teenage boy.

thepointmag.com

EXCERPT: This whitewashing approach to Nietzsche can obscure Nietzsche’s present cultural meaning in the world beyond academia. And its influence detached me, for a long time, from any consideration of the overwhelmingly male Nietzsche who had appealed to me as a boy. I was jolted back into reflection upon that Nietzsche last year when, in office hours, a male student sheepishly brought up Jordan Peterson in connection to the Will to Power notes we had read in class, relating the austere self-control that Nietzsche calls the mark of strong life to Peterson’s injunction to young men to “clean your room.” For many boys and men, Nietzsche is still a specifically male voice addressing young male readers. Just why is it that so many Nietzsche readers are very young men? What is Nietzsche offering them? (MORE - details)
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How much science should there be in philosophy?

How much science should there be in philosophy?

A debate about metaphysics that's crucial to how we understand the world

www.chemistryworld.com

EXCERPT: The degree of specialisation required to understand quantum physics or chemistry or biology is very demanding, so much so that even scientists themselves are often unaware of big chunks of their own disciplines. This becomes even harder for philosophers, who must train in the natural sciences on top of studying philosophy. This also explains the extensive fragmentation of philosophy of science into philosophy of physics, biology, chemistry and so on. Practically, philosophers cannot focus on all sciences at once and there is a degree of specialisation required when studying a particular science from a philosophical perspective.

Moreover, there are some philosophers, such as Anjan Chakravartty, who believe that science itself involves making assumptions that are not solely based on the results of scientific or empirical investigations.4 Metaphysics is ineliminable from science in the sense that even when it comes to interpreting empirical observations (of, say, an experiment), scientists are influenced by their background beliefs about what the world is like, which in turn are not exclusively determined by their study of science. (MORE - details)

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How religion wrote the playbook for Big Tech

How religion wrote the playbook for Big Tech | Paul Seabright

Following the publication of his recent book, Paul Seabright argues that thinking of religions like an economist can discover valuable new insights into The Divine Economy.

iai.tv

On the surface, Facebook is about as far removed from the Catholic Church as physically possible. But, perhaps by thinking of religions like platform businesses, we can get to the heart of how religions work, why they do what they do, and that the adage ‘if the product is free, you’re the product’ is just as applicable to religions as it is to YouTube. Paul Seabright argues that thinking of religions like an economist can discover valuable new insights into The Divine Economy.

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The mystic and the mathematician: What the towering 20th-century thinkers Simone and André Weil can teach today’s math educators

The mystic and the mathematician: What the towering 20th-century thinkers Simone and André Weil can teach today’s math educators

André Weil was a mathematician. His sister Simone Weil was a philosopher. They both thought deeply about the nature and value of mathematics and mathematics education.

theconversation.com

EXCERPT: Sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing, André and Simone Weil were the sort of siblings who would argue about such questions. André achieved renown as a mathematician; Simone was a formidable philosopher and mystic. André focused on applying algebra and geometry to deep questions about the structures of whole numbers, while Simone was concerned with how the world can be soul-crushing. Both wrestled with the best way to teach math. Their insights and contradictions point to the fundamental role that mathematics and mathematics education play in human life and culture. (MORE - details)

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What is ‘nature’? Dictionaries urged to include humans in definition

What is ‘nature’? Dictionaries urged to include humans in definition

Defining nature as separate from people perpetuates troubled relationship with the natural world, say campaigners

www.theguardian.com

Currently, all English dictionaries define nature as an entity separate from and opposed to humans and human creations – a perspective campaigners say perpetuates humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world.

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Folklore is philosophy

Folktales like philosophy startle us into rethinking our values | Aeon Essays

Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world

aeon.co

Folklore has existed in some form in every culture and, in each, it has brought underrepresented groups to the fore. As we look to expand the canon, folklore is a rich source of thought on topics of philosophic interest with the potential to uplift a wide range of voices who have thus far been largely overlooked.

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The surprising truth about wealth and inequality in the west

The surprising truth about wealth and inequality in the West | Aeon Essays

The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before

aeon.co

EXCERPT: Today, the populations of Europe and the United States are substantially richer in terms of real purchasing-power wealth than ever before. We define wealth as the value of all assets, such as homes, bank deposits, stocks and pension funds, less all debts, mainly mortgages. When counting wealth among all adults, data show that its value has increased more than threefold since 1980, and nearly 10 times over the past century. Since much of this wealth growth has occurred in the types of assets that ordinary people hold – homes and pension savings – wealth has also become more equally distributed over time. Wealth inequality has decreased dramatically over the past century and, despite the recent years’ emergence of super-rich entrepreneurs, wealth concentration has remained at its historically low levels in Europe and has increased mainly in the US.

Among scholars in economics and economic history, a new narrative is just beginning to emerge, one that accentuates this massive rise of middle-class ownership and its implications for society’s total capital stock and its distribution. Capitalism, it seems, did not result in boundless inequality, even after the liberalisations of the 1980s and corporate growth in the globalised era. The key to progress, measured as a combination of wealth growth and falling or sustained inequality, has been political and institutional change that enabled citizens to become educated, better paid, and to amass wealth through housing and pension savings. (MORE - details)
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How Sigmund Freud attempted to solve the ‘riddle’ of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius

How Sigmund Freud attempted to solve the ‘riddle’ of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius

Freud wanted to know how da Vinci combined supreme artistic accomplishments with a technological imagination that seemingly anticipated modern science and engineering.

theconversation.com

EXCERPT: Freud’s obsession with da Vinci merged with his wider interests in how the unconscious memory of a child’s earliest relations to others (always for Freud charged with sexuality) could either energise or hinder creativity later in life. Because da Vinci left such detailed notes about his own chaste and self-disciplined life, Freud felt justified in his assumptions: here was someone whose erotic life had morphed into intellectual and creative activities. (MORE - details)

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Abolish Grades

Abolish Grades

A modest proposal.

yaschamounk.substack.com

INTRO: Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.

The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the United States, the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.

Some professors and departments, especially in STEM disciplines, have managed to uphold more stringent criteria. A few advanced courses attract such a self-selecting cohort of students that virtually all of them deserve recognition for genuinely excellent work. But for the most part, the grading scheme at many institutions has effectively become useless. An A has stopped being a mark of special academic achievement.

If everyone outside hardcore engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system becomes vacuous. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves as well as to others—that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, the system as currently constituted creates bad incentives. To name but one example, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses... (MORE - details)

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(paper) When sociology must comprehend the incomprehensible: interpretation of Weber and Durkheim in the sociology of Theodor W. Adorno

When sociology must comprehend the incomprehensible: interpretation of Weber and Durkheim in the sociology of Theodor W. Adorno - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

In this article, we will delve into Theodor W. Adorno’s sociology. The general aim is to study Adorno’s theory of society and its relation to sociological interpretation. What primarily distinguishes Adorno from other sociologists (of his time and today) is that he considers society to be the...

www.nature.com

ABSTRACT: In this article, we will delve into Theodor W. Adorno’s sociology. The general aim is to study Adorno’s theory of society and its relation to sociological interpretation. What primarily distinguishes Adorno from other sociologists (of his time and today) is that he considers society to be the fundamental concept of the discipline. Theorising on the post-liberal capitalism of his time, Adorno proposes the concept of the exchange society, which is understood as an antagonistic totality that reproduces itself through the suffering it inflicts on socialised individuals.

Within texts dating back to the 1960s, such as ‘Society’, Adorno engages in an exploration of comprehensive sociology and the sociology of social facts, reciprocally examining them. He confronts one with the other in a proposal of an interpretative model of the comprehensibility or incomprehensibility of society. This intellectual confrontation, while avoiding synthesis, leads Adorno to two main outcomes.

First, it yields a diagnostic perspective on social theory, portraying capitalist society as simultaneously rational and irrational, comprehensible and incomprehensible. Second, it hints at a sociological interpretation of specific phenomena. In addition to exploring this central theme in Adorno’s sociology, we will also shed light on his distinctive approach to classic texts and concepts. Specifically, Adorno links to the received terminologies but incorporates them into constellations that imbue them with eloquence by revealing the underlying objective moments they encapsulate.

The theoretical significance of this article lies in the aim to demonstrate that Adorno’s contributions to sociology are not merely borrowed from philosophical contemplations. Instead, they arise from an immanent critique of the sociological tradition. (MORE - details)

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‘He was in mystic delirium’: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman?

‘He was in mystic delirium’: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman?

In isolation, Alexander Grothendieck seemed to have lost touch with reality, but some say his metaphysical theories could contain wonders

www.theguardian.com

EXCERPT: Alexander Grothendieck’s capacity for abstract thought is legendary: he rarely made use of specific equations to grasp at mathematical truths, instead intuiting the broader conceptual structure around them to make them surrender their solutions all at once. He compared the two approaches to using a hammer to crack a walnut, versus soaking it patiently in water until it opens naturally. “He was above all a thinker and a writer, who decided to apply his genius mostly to mathematics,” says Olivia Caramello, a 39-year-old Italian mathematician who is the leading proponent of his work today. “His approach to mathematics was that of a philosopher, in the sense that the way in which one would prove results was more important to him than the results themselves.” (MORE - details)

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Oh, the Places You’ll Go

Philip Womack - Oh, the Places You’ll Go

Philip Womack: Oh, the Places You’ll Go - The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith

literaryreview.co.uk

EXCERPT: Some academics even insist that true children’s literature can only be written by children. Those academics, incidentally, are off their rockers. Amid all this, it’s undeniable that when it comes to what we serve up to the young, the dulcis (‘sweet’) and the utilis (‘useful’) have been in tension for centuries. Should we pander to the little rotters’ desires (BURRRP!) or should we give them impossibly pious characters Doing Good? The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between. (MORE - details)
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There is no foundation to reality

There is no foundation to reality | Naomi Thompson

Physics is often said to be more fundamental than biology, because the physical facts are thought to explain the biological facts. But is the world really divided into levels in this way? Naomi Thompson argues that, in fact, we project this structure onto reality, rather than discovering it there.

iai.tv

INTRO: Are some parts of reality more fundamental than others? Physics is often said to be more fundamental than biology, because the physical facts are thought to explain the biological facts. But is the world really divided into levels in this way? Naomi Thompson argues that, in fact, we project this structure onto reality, rather than discovering it there. This structure tells us about our ways of understanding and explaining the world, but it does not tell us about reality as it is in itself. (MORE - details)

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Cosmology can't understand the expanding universe

Cosmology can't understand the expanding universe | Marco Forgione

Delve into the Hubble Tension, where cosmic expansion rates clash. Marco Forgione discusses new insights and the philosophical questions arising from scientific uncertainty.

iai.tv

INTRO: The Hubble Tension describes the discrepancy between measurements of the early and late universe, of the current rate of cosmic expansion. The initial cause of this tension was assumed to be systematic, with many thinking that some error in our measurements could be eliminated by better telescopes and better data, but following James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) results many believe that something more mysterious might be at play. Do we need new physics outside of cosmology’s standard model? In this piece, Marco Forgione explores recent attempts to resolve the tension and highlights the role of philosophy when science can’t make its mind up. (MORE - details)

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Ask Ethan: Could we determine if UAPs/UFOs are aliens?

Ask Ethan: Could we determine if UAPs/UFOs are aliens?

Although a great many unidentified sights have been seen in the skies, none have conclusively demonstrated the presence of aliens. So far.

bigthink.com

INTRO: For as long as humans have been looking up, we’ve seen objects or phenomena that have defied our conventional explanations for what we’ve known is scientifically possible. Many have attributed these sightings to extraterrestrial or even supernatural activity, although no conclusive proof or incontrovertible evidence supporting these claims has ever survived scrutiny. What scientific steps could we take to evaluate the activity of an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) or an unidentified flying object (UFO) to determine if they’re actually “beyond” present Earthly knowledge? Here’s how to do it. (MORE - details)

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Portrait of the philosopher as a young dog: Kafka’s philosophical investigations

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/09/05/portrait-of-the-philosopher-as-a-young-dog-kafkas-philosophical-investigations/

EXCERPT: We are not in the standard Kafkian milieu of the trial but the university. The name Kafka is popularly associated with the horrors of a grotesquely impenetrable legal system, but there is another aspect to Kafka, which concerns knowledge.

“Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque, with its nonsensical rankings and evaluations, market-driven imperatives, and exploding administrative ranks.

But Lacan’s term was meant not so much to target the mismanagement of the modern university as to designate a broad shift in the structure of authority, a new kind of social link based on the conjunction of knowledge and power, the establishment of systems of administration operating in the name of reason and technical progress. And this is where Kafka’s dog comes in, to question this new order, to excavate the underside of its supposed neutrality, to propose another way of thinking, even, perhaps, a way out.

The entry for “dog” in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas reads: “Especially created to save its master’s life. Man’s best friend.” Kafka, a true Flaubertian, upends this cliché about canine fidelity to authority. His dog is not man’s best friend, but the truth’s; and he does not save his master’s life, but risks his own in seeking to free himself from domination and reveal the hidden forces at work in his world. Along the way of this fraught quest, some of the questions the dog will grapple with are: Can one actually be friends with the truth? What kind of dissident science might be built around it? and, Who are his comrades in this struggle? (MORE - details)

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Poetry as low-grade musical material

Poetry as Low-Grade Musical Material

...

mostly.substack.com

EXCERPT: But really I think the flaws in Attridge’s theory are deeper than it sometimes misidentifies the beats. I that that its conceptual framework is unsound. He says that in verse one can perceive stressed and unstressed syllables, and also these new (to us) features: beats and off-beats. These new features are central to his theory of iambic pentameter as a “five beat” line. Attridge asserts that in singe my white head, not all the stresses are heard as beats; I don’t hear it that way. This could be because he’s wrong about how many beats there are. Worse for him is my favored diagnosis: it’s because there are no such perceptual features of verse as beats to begin with. (MORE - details)
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AI will surpass human brains once we crack the ‘neural code’

AI will surpass human brains once we crack the ‘neural code’

Understanding how ‘visual thinking’ works is key to building human-level AI, says AI expert, but society must control AI technology and have ‘sole control of the off switch’

www.eurekalert.org

INTRO: Humans will build Artificial Intelligence (AI) which surpasses our own capabilities once we crack the ‘neural code’, says an AI technology analyst.

Eitan Michael Azoff, a specialist in AI analysis, argues that humans are set to engineer superior intelligence with greater capacity and speed than our own brains.

What will unlock this leap in capability is understanding the ‘neural code’, he explains. That’s how the human brain encodes sensory information, and how it moves information in the brain to perform cognitive tasks, such as thinking, learning, problem solving, internal visualisation, and internal dialogue.

In his new book, Towards Human-Level Artificial Intelligence: How Neuroscience can Inform the Pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence, Azoff says that one of the critical steps towards building ‘human-level AI’ is emulating consciousness in computers... (MORE - details, no ads)
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[Gawdzilla Sama]

In the 1980s people were saying 'they' would put chips in our brains and make us integrate. I see nothing much has changed.

 

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In the 1980s people were saying 'they' would put chips in our brains and make us integrate. I see nothing much has changed.

Well, they are placing them in brains, but how much success is falling out of such is unclear. There's also the political backlash obscuring things, where the establishment preconditionally does not seem to want these enterprises portrayed as progressing or advancing toward anything good, and maintain a surrounding news media aura of immoral practices transpiring within the industry.
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Second person with spinal cord injury gets Neuralink brain chip

Second person with spinal cord injury gets Neuralink brain chip and it's working, Musk says

A second human has successfully been implanted with a Neuralink brain chip, and founder Elon Musk said, 'It's working very well.'

www.usatoday.com

EXCERPT: Arbaugh, 30, told Bloomberg in May that the device has helped his life, including allowing him to play video games and chess and surf the Internet with ease. Before the surgery, Arbaugh was still reacclimating to life following a diving accident in mid-2016 that left him with a dislocated spine. “Once you get a taste for using it, you just can’t stop," Arbaugh said about Neuralink, per Bloomberg.
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A brief reflection on the issue of science, ideology and critical theory

A brief reflection on the issue of science, ideology and critical theory - PMC

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

EXCERPTS: Postmodernism rejects the modernist reliance on authority, rationality and objectivity of science and engineering. While the modernist stance rejects religion and tradition, postmodernism questions this rejection, although postmodernism notably only shows a renewed interest in religions and traditions other than western. Postmodernism in science also tends to rely on subjective feelings and the aim to pursue certain a priori defined ideological goals (Inglehart, 1997).

The postmodern view of science is far from synonymous with critical theory, but the two are interrelated because liberalism and Marxism both stress the liberation of individuals from inherited culture (Crick, 1987; Gray, 1986). Critical theory (and ideology) may tentatively be seen as an explicitly stated and rather extreme expression of postmodernism's stress on the importance of self-experience, self-expression, subjectivity and ideological goals in science.

[...] Science and ideology have two different roles. Science should strive for objectivity and high validity. Ideology should be the basis for underpinning personal and social group interests with rational thinking and empirical scientific facts in order to form relevant arguments in politics. The intentional merging of science and ideology into one inseparable entity will lead to soft totalitarianism, i.e. silence culture. This fact is illustrated by totalitarian states but also by the emergence of the postmodern phenomenon of cancel culture at western universities. The notion that critical theory solely enhances research based on individual self-experience is a false pretense, because critical theory is a broad ideological movement with diverse branches in academia. (MORE - details)

RELATED: The Decolonization of Science
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Medieval theology has an old take on a new problem − AI responsibility

Medieval theology has an old take on a new problem − AI responsibility

Autonomous AI is still designed by people − so who or what is really responsible for its actions? For centuries, theologians have posed similar questions about mankind and God.

theconversation.com

EXCERPT: As a society, we face a conundrum: it seems that no one, or no one thing, is morally responsible for the AI’s actions – what philosophers call a responsibility gap. Present-day theories of moral responsibility simply do not seem appropriate for understanding situations involving autonomous or semi-autonomous AI systems. If current theories will not work, then perhaps we should look to the past – to centuries-old ideas with surprising resonance today... (MORE - details)

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The machines are proving Ray Kurzweil right—sort of

The Machines Are Proving Ray Kurzweil Right—Sort Of

For decades, Kurzweil has been prophesying the unstoppable rise of AI and its eventual merging with human intelligence.

newrepublic.com

EXCERPT: Even if the nature and origin of consciousness can never be settled in a way that satisfies the requirements of scientific definition, Kurzweil believes we know enough to begin desacralizing biological qualia. For him, both carbon- and silicon-based consciousness are intensely complex forms of information that emerged from chaos and thus command reverence. One is conjured by eons of biological evolution, the other by thunderbolts of technological advance; both represent a “fundamental force of the universe.” If the math adds up, outward signs of consciousness should be taken seriously as evidence of a subjective inner life, in both original AI consciousnesses and “replicants” based on existing human brains. “If there’s a plausible chance that an entity you mistreat might be conscious,” he writes, “the safest moral choice is to assume that it is rather than risk tormenting a sentient being.” (MORE - details)


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Doors: an experiment in playable philosophy

Doors: An Experiment in Playable Philosophy — The Junkyard

A post by Nele Van de Mosselaer Imagine the following situation: you open a door in a videogame. An in-game alert pops up with the message “Congratulations, you opened the door!” Immediately afterwards, the game – being apparently philosophically inclined – puts that message into question. A new po

junkyardofthemind.com

EXCERPT: Players of digital games are usually not concerned with the fact that they are interacting with pixels, that a glitch or malfunction makes the game narrative nonsensical, or that they are unable to set in-game doors on fire even though they are represented as being made out of wood. When immersed in games, these questions seem inappropriate and distracting. In Doors, however, these questions are deliberately “outmersive” (i.e. they purposely reduce in-game immersion). They are explicitly and self-reflexively foregrounded as part of the game experience. Through whimsical, weird, and even frustrating situations, Doors is meant to help players adopt a detached, critical view on their interactions with in-game representations... (MORE - details)

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Why fascists hate universities

Why fascists hate universities | Jason Stanley

Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent

www.theguardian.com

EXCERPT: Bangladesh’s non-violent student movement has not gone unnoticed in neighboring countries. In Pakistan, the popular former prime minister and leader of the opposition party, Imran Khan, was jailed a year ago, an act dictated by Pakistan’s military. Media companies were instructed not to mention his name, quote his words, or show his picture. Members of his opposition party were imprisoned. But something astonishing has begun there. Motivated by the success of the student-led pro-democracy movement in Bangladesh, the Pakistan Students Federation declared an ultimatum for the government: free Khan by 30 August or face nationwide student protests.

What has happened in Bangladesh and now could happen in Pakistan is the nightmare of every autocratic regime. Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent. Attacks on universities are the canary in the coalmine of fascism... (MORE - details)

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The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience (Eric Schwitzgebel)

The Disunity of Consciousness in Everyday Experience

schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com

INTRO: A substantial philosophical literature explores the "unity of consciousness": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately experiencing the sound of music but rather having some combined experience of music-with-beer. You might be sitting next to me, sipping the same beer and hearing the same music. But your beer-tasting experience isn't unified with my music-hearing experience. My beer-tasting and music-tasting occur not just simultaneously but in some important sense together in a unified field of experience.

Today I want to suggest that this picture of human experience might be radically mistaken. Philosophers and psychologists sometimes allow that disunity can occur in rare cases (e.g., split-brain subjects) or non-human animals (e.g., the octopus). I want to suggest, instead, that even in ordinary human experience unity might be the exception and disunity the rule. (MORE - details)

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How prairie philosophy democratised thought in 19th-century America

How prairie philosophy democratised thought in 19th-century America | Aeon Essays

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest

aeon.co

INTRO: What is the future of philosophy in the United States? This question weighs heavily on teachers and scholars as philosophy departments around the country – at schools rich and poor, large and small – blink out of existence. Some are eliminated as part of an institution-wide downsizing effort, as operating budgets and endowments contract; others are simply pillaged for resources to give to other programs that more readily display the one virtue recognised by administrators: ‘impact’.

However, compared with other disciplines in the humanities experiencing rapid decline in majors and enrolments – English, history, languages and so forth – philosophy hangs on as a common minor or second, subordinate major for students pursuing degrees in law, politics or the natural sciences. Nevertheless, philosophy departments routinely wind up on the chopping block when administrators and educational consultants write up their plans for institutional restructuring, even if their elimination brings no obvious benefit.

Consider Manhattan College, for instance, a Catholic institution in New York that announced the elimination of their philosophy major earlier this year. In an interview with the campus newspaper, an anonymous faculty member said:

• "Philosophy is one of the strongest, fastest-growing programs at Manhattan College … we have over 20 per cent more students taking philosophy classes this year than last year … Closing the philosophy major and minor does not save any money."

This is just one example of many, all of which tell that the circumstances for studying philosophy in a college or university setting, democratised by the post-Second World War expansion of higher education, are in the midst of great change, if not dying out altogether.

The history of philosophical study in the US offers some insight into what this great change might look like... (MORE - details)
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How Illuminating Is the Light?

How Illuminating Is the Light?

schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com

Guest post by Andrew Y. Lee, in reply to Eric Schwitzgebel's Aug 29 critique of his "Light and Room" metaphor for consciousness

In “The Light & the Room,” I explore a common metaphor about phenomenal consciousness. To be conscious—according to the metaphor—is for “the lights to be on inside.” The purpose of my piece is to argue that the metaphor is a useful conceptual tool, that it’s compatible with a wide range of theories of consciousness, that it illuminates some questions about degrees, dimensions, and determinacy of consciousness, and that it disentangles a systematic ambiguity in the meaning of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. In “Is Being Conscious Like 'Having the Lights Turned On?'”, Eric Schwitzgebel reacts to the piece... (MORE - details)

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How many cows does it take?

How Many Cows Does It Take?

Here, instead of five people versus one person, the trolley is heading toward N cows and diverting it will kill one person.

daily-philosophy.com

EXCERPTS: You are probably familiar with the Trolley Problem, one of the most famous ethical dilemmas still being debated today. [...] Since this problem was introduced, many other variations have emerged, adding to the dilemma and making the Trolley Problem more thought-provoking in different ways. [...] Here, instead of five people versus one person, the trolley is heading toward n cows and diverting it will kill one person. [...] This dilemma expands the ethical horizon and invites us to consider how we value human and animal lives. Including animals in the equation challenges us to re-examine our beliefs about moral worth, speciesism, and our ethical obligations to non-human creatures. (MORE - details)

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The censoriousness and spinelessness of literary magazines are stifling writers’ careers before they begin

https://philosophynews.com/the-censoriousness-and-spinelessness-of-literary-magazines-are-stifling-writers-careers-before-they-begin/

EXCERPT: Today’s culture of censorship and censure in literary magazines is stifling writers’ careers at their most vulnerable stage. Our experience at Crab Creek Review offers a case in point and a warning. We knew from others in the lit mag community that our experience wasn’t uncommon. Eventually, we interviewed over a dozen writers whose work had been retracted for a variety of offenses—personal, political, perceived, and fabricated whole-cloth. Their editors, unable to countenance online outrage, alternately chose to A) rewrite the offending language, or B) “unpublish” the piece, with either minimal commentary or extravagant, self-flagellating apologies. (MORE - details)

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Free speech on the internet: The crisis of epistemic authority

Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority

Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from...

www.amacad.org

ABSTRACT: Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from our reliance on epistemic authorities (scientists, historians). Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible, and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of actual experts. This essay considers some possible changes to existing free speech doctrine to remedy the epistemological crisis brought about by the internet. (MORE - details)

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Yuval Noah Harari takes on AI

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/09/11/nexus-yuval-noah-harari-review/

EXCERPTS: : A curious blind spot limits the persuasiveness of many recent books warning of the threats and challenges of our AI revolution: They consistently fail to acknowledge the extent to which they are themselves already reflective of the automation of so much of contemporary life. Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book is no exception, as indeed at several points it betrays what at least looks to be an assembly-line process behind its creation.

[...] That said, the elevator pitch version of the book is a good one: It is a history of human information networks, broadly conceived to include communication forms from text messages to smoke signals, markings on cave walls, and indeed face-to-face speech or gesture. This history is related from a perspective sufficiently zoomed out to reveal both the real continuities and the surprising discontinuities between, say, cuneiform clay tablets and iPhones. Harari ultimately comes around to laying out his concerns about the rise of AI, but it’s never totally clear what worries him, even if he frets that whatever it is threatens to change the nature of human consciousness for the worse... (MORE - details)

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Is God a strange loop? (John Horgan)

Is God a Strange Loop? — John Horgan (The Science Writer)

CAMBRIDGE, MA, SEPTEMBER 13, 2024. I recently hobnobbed with a writer, I’ll call him Bob, as obsessed with the mind-body problem as I am. The problem concerns, in a narrow sense, how matter makes mind, but it also encompasses the puzzles of consciousness, intelligence, free will, the self, meaning

johnhorgan.org

INTRO: I recently hobnobbed with a writer, I’ll call him Bob, as obsessed with the mind-body problem as I am. The problem concerns, in a narrow sense, how matter makes mind, but it also encompasses the puzzles of consciousness, intelligence, free will, the self, meaning, morality…

The mind-body problem, in short, is the mystery of what we are. And should be. The key puzzle is consciousness, without which nothing else matters. I don’t feel like defending this proposition, I’m just asserting it as an axiom.

Bob’s been pondering recent advances in artificial intelligence, and whether they favor this or that model of cognition. I told Bob I’m not a fan of any leading mind-models. I had in mind integrated information theory, the global workspace widget and the Penrose-Hameroff contraption.

The only model that strikes me as true, I told Bob, or at least on the right track, is Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loop, which rarely gets mentioned in mind-body debates. Below I’ll describe Hofstadter’s loopy idea. Or try... (MORE - details, no ads)

 

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Is Wikipedia distorted by ideology and propaganda? (Jerry Coyne)

Is Wikipedia distorted by ideology and propaganda?

Well, the Free Press article by Ashley Rindsborg below argues that yes, Wikipedia definitely leans towards the Left, favoring Left-wing over Right-wing sources as more reliable, and giving more favora

whyevolutionistrue.com

INTRO (excerpts): Well, the Free Press article by Ashley Rindsborg below argues that yes, Wikipedia definitely leans towards the Left, favoring Left-wing over Right-wing sources as more reliable, and giving more favorable coverage to Democrats than Republicans...

You’ve probably noticed some bias in some articles, and it gets worse if you go to the “talk” page on Wikipedia articles and see the editors fight out the contents of a given article...

[...] I won’t go into those controversies, as you can read the article yourself, but I do want to highlight several assertions in the piece. The crux of the matter is that what goes into Wikipedia depends on whether there are not only sources for assertions, but reliable sources. It turns out that the list of “reliable” sources seems biased and, to my mind, dubious, and the policy on what’s reliable was in fact confected by a single man, the anonymous “MrX”... (MORE - details)

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Problem-solving matter: Life looks more like computational process

Is life a complex computational process? | Aeon Essays

Life is starting to look a lot less like an outcome of chemistry and physics, and more like a computational process

aeon.co

EXCERPTS: Today, doubts about conventional explanations of life are growing and a wave of new general theories has emerged to better define our origins. These suggest that life doesn’t only depend on amino acids, DNA, proteins and other forms of matter. Today, it can be digitally simulated, biologically synthesised or made from entirely different materials to those that allowed our evolutionary ancestors to flourish. These and other possibilities are inviting researchers to ask more fundamental questions: if the materials for life can radically change – like the materials for computation – what stays the same? Are there deeper laws or principles that make life possible?

[...] Their proposals can be grouped into three distinct categories, three hypotheses, which we have named Tron, Golem and Maupertuis. The Tron hypothesis suggests that life can be simulated in software, without relying on the material conditions that gave rise to Earth’s living things. The Golem hypothesis suggests that life can be synthesised using different materials to those that first set our evolutionary history moving. And, if these two ideas are correct and life is not bound to the rare chemistry of Earth, we then have the Maupertuis hypothesis, the most radical of the three, which explores the fundamental laws involved in the origins of complex computational systems.

These hypotheses suggest that deep principles govern the emergence of problem-solving matter, principles that push our understanding of modern physics and chemistry towards their limits. They mark a radical departure from life as we once knew it. (MORE - details)
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Portrait of the philosopher as a young dog: Kafka’s philosophical investigations

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/09/05/portrait-of-the-philosopher-as-a-young-dog-kafkas-philosophical-investigations/

EXCERPT: We are not in the standard Kafkian milieu of the trial but the university. The name Kafka is popularly associated with the horrors of a grotesquely impenetrable legal system, but there is another aspect to Kafka, which concerns knowledge.

“Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque, with its nonsensical rankings and evaluations, market-driven imperatives, and exploding administrative ranks.

But Lacan’s term was meant not so much to target the mismanagement of the modern university as to designate a broad shift in the structure of authority, a new kind of social link based on the conjunction of knowledge and power, the establishment of systems of administration operating in the name of reason and technical progress. And this is where Kafka’s dog comes in, to question this new order, to excavate the underside of its supposed neutrality, to propose another way of thinking, even, perhaps, a way out.

The entry for “dog” in Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas reads: “Especially created to save its master’s life. Man’s best friend.” Kafka, a true Flaubertian, upends this cliché about canine fidelity to authority. His dog is not man’s best friend, but the truth’s; and he does not save his master’s life, but risks his own in seeking to free himself from domination and reveal the hidden forces at work in his world. Along the way of this fraught quest, some of the questions the dog will grapple with are: Can one actually be friends with the truth? What kind of dissident science might be built around it? and, Who are his comrades in this struggle? (MORE - details)

Kafka actually borrows this idea from Plato, for whom dogs are the guardians of truth, in Republic. See also Baxter, a French film from 1989 about a bull terrier (and a boy, I guess). For decades, I had serious problems with this film owing to Baxter's confused notion of what constitutes genuine "obedience" (in my own view, it's more to do with acknowledgement of truth rather than servility), but I've since let it go.

 

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Self-forgiveness is more than self-comfort − a philosopher explains

Self-forgiveness is more than self-comfort − a philosopher explains

Ahead of the Jewish High Holidays, repentance and forgiveness are on many people’s minds. But self-forgiveness is important for personal growth, too.

theconversation.com

But what about self-forgiveness? Is it morally valuable, or just something we do to make ourselves feel better? And what is self-forgiveness, anyway? As a philosopher of education, some of my own research has wrestled with these questions.

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Climate science needs to talk more about ‘justice’ – here’s how philosophy can help

Climate science needs to talk more about ‘justice’ – here’s how philosophy can help

When scientists claim that a policy is ‘just’, they sometimes can’t or don’t explain what they actually mean.

theconversation.com

Consider by how much a given country should cut its emissions. If I say a plan is fair and you say it’s unfair, but we don’t have an explanation of what our underlying assumptions are, we’ll just end up talking past each other. Scientists recognise this challenge and have been calling for shared justice language they can use. As a philosopher, I helped answer this challenge by contributing to recent research which lays out justice language for climate scientists. Although it is intended for climate scientists, it can also be used in climate policy or by anyone trying to think more rigorously about climate change.

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The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts – man of many myths

The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts – man of many myths

A splendid, fearless biography of the ‘gullible genius’ who popularised Gaia theory

www.theguardian.com

Lovelock’s Gaia theory has, ever since its inception in the late 1960s, been whatever one wants to make of it: a smokescreen for polluting industries, a clarion call for environmentalists, a revolution in the earth sciences, a conceptual framework for astrobiology, a spiritual movement for reconnecting to the living earth. Remarkably, Lovelock himself embraced each of these positions at some time or another during his 103 years on the planet.

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Hannah Arendt wanted political thinking to be urgent and engaged. She is a philosopher for our times

Hannah Arendt wanted political thinking to be urgent and engaged. She is a philosopher for our times

Arendt maintained that our ‘common sense’ depends on our good will and curiosity, our adventurous enjoyment of testing opinions and perspectives against those of others.

theconversation.com

As Stonebridge points out, Arendt wanted political thinking to be urgent and engaged. Thinking about our times could reconcile us to the perplexities of the reality we face and help us address our common predicament. There is a need for “thinking what we are doing” – a need to respond to circumstances in a way that is creative, courageous and receptive to the texture of experience.

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No Peeking: Peer Review and Presumptive Blinding

No Peeking: Peer Review and Presumptive Blinding | Canadian Journal of Philosophy | Cambridge Core

No Peeking: Peer Review and Presumptive Blinding

www.cambridge.org

ABSTRACT: Blind review is ubiquitous in contemporary science, but there is no consensus among stakeholders and researchers about when or how much or why blind review should be done. In this essay, we explain why blinding enhances the impartiality and credibility of science while also defending a norm according to which blind review is a baseline presumption in scientific peer review.

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To teach students to use AI, teach philosophy

To teach students to use AI, teach philosophy (opinion)

Adam Zweber writes that philosophy has much to teach about how to use AI effectively.

www.insidehighered.com

Few can use artificial intelligence without wondering whether it is conscious. Fewer still fail to question the many ethical issues it raises. These questions about mind and morality are reasons enough to justify widespread emphasis on philosophy in education. But philosophy has an additional educational benefit: It can teach students how to use AI effectively.

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Plato’s cave and the stubborn persistence of ignorance

Plato’s Cave and the Stubborn Persistence of Ignorance

Plato's cave metaphor illustrates the cognitive trap of ignorance, where we may be unaware of the limitations of our understanding.

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

The most memorable image of ignorance occurs in what is probably the most famous passage of all philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in “The Republic.” [...] Are we like these cave dwellers? Is this gloomy cave the image of the womb from which we were all thrust unknowing into the light? But do we not then quickly overcome this primal oblivion — or do we all still dwell in a place of such abysmal ignorance? To think this through, I want to reverse Plato’s approach: Rather than describing how we may know the truth, let us consider how we recognize ignorance.

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Imagining what a fair society would look like, with Daniel Chandler (podcast with rough transcript)

Why Is This Happening? Imagining what a fair society would look like with Daniel Chandler

Chris Hayes speaks with author Daniel Chandler about frameworks for creating a more just and equitable society.

www.msnbc.com

Could the answer to building a more just society lie in 50-year-old ideas? Our guest this week points to the ideas of John Rawls, one of the greatest political philosophers, as a blueprint of sorts for building a more equitable society. Daniel Chandler is the research director of the Programme on Cohesive Capitalism at the London School of Economics. He’s also an economist, philosopher and author of “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society.” He joins WITHpod to discuss how we might overcome some of the most devastating and escalating present day crises, what adopting Rawls’ liberal political framework could look like and more.
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[TheVat]

INTRO (excerpts): Well, the Free Press article by Ashley Rindsborg below argues that yes, Wikipedia definitely leans towards the Left, favoring Left-wing over Right-wing sources as more reliable, and giving more favorable coverage to Democrats than Republicans...

You’ve probably noticed some bias in some articles

Like thumb given for the Aeon paper on the Mapertuis hypothesis, however my response is directed to the other part of the post. I think some bias lies with the reality of the world, i.e. left-leaning sources are currently (on average) more respecting of hard facts and uncovering corruption in the provision of information from public sources. If RW sources are more propagandistic, ignorant of scientific evidence, and controlled by meddling corporate PTB, then steering away from them is evidence of intellectual integrity, not bias.

 

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While the title might warrant this being posted in the "Compromised Science" thread, the content seems to be a philosophical diatribe that expands beyond the mere "publish or perish" and "predatory publishing" afflictions of the industry.
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Science publishing is a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme

Science publishing is a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme | Àlex Gómez-Marín

iai.tv

EXCERPTS: Scientific publishing has been gamed to advance scientists’ careers, not knowledge. While science communication has turned into a means of public indoctrination. In this essay, Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that real experts don’t know “the truth,” and that we should become pilgrims towards the unknown rather than the squatters of the broken records of ideological mantras..

[...] How did science become so unscientific? To make a long story short, we have been sold a triple pseudo-intellectual flimflam for decades: if you want to be a respectable homo academicus, then you must embrace the unholy trinity of mechanistic reductive materialism, plus skepticism in its most dogmatic declination, and finally secularism in the mode of viciously naive atheism. In a word, scientism has been institutionalized in the name of science. But, in the end, scientism is more dangerous than pseudoscience because it is an inside job. Error, bias, and hype are minor sins compared to scientific hubris. Arrogance is antithetical to progress... (MORE - details)
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