Philosophy Updates

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'1st observational evidence supporting string theory,' which could reveal the nature of dark energy (metaphysics in cosmology)
https://www.livescience.com/physics...ould-finally-reveal-the-nature-of-dark-energy

EXCERPT: One of the most striking consequences of this quantum space-time, as predicted by string theory, is that it naturally leads to cosmic acceleration. Moreover, the researchers found that the rate at which this acceleration decreases over time aligns remarkably well with the latest observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)... (MORE - details)

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Einstein vs Bohr: Quantum reality is still up for grabs (metaphysics in physics)
https://iai.tv/articles/einstein-vs-bohr-quantum-reality-is-still-up-for-grabs-auid-3131?_auid=2020

INTRO: For decades, the story went that Bohr’s anti-realism triumphed over Einstein’s quest for a deeper reality. Physicists were told to "shut up and calculate" and metaphysical debates were dismissed as distractions. But today, realist interpretations of quantum mechanics constantly emerge and the anti-realist position is far from the mainstream – so if Bohr won, why does almost no one take his side? University of Massachusetts Boston physicist Jacques Pienaar argues that we’ve been wrong all along – Bohr was not an anti-realist after all, and Einstein's apparent realism is not on sure-footing... (MORE - details)

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How neuroscientists are challenging our understanding of reality. (philosophy of perception)
https://www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-03-31_grasping-reality

EXCERPTS: Of course, we have known for a long time that colours, shapes, sounds and smells are in an important sense created by our sensory apparatus and are not just 'out there' waiting to be detected.

[...] Few today find discoveries like these troubling. We accept that the feeling of 'what it is like' to experience the world varies. But we still assume that the things we are experiencing are really out there. [...] However, in recent decades, there has been a major shift in how scientists understand how perception works which seems to threaten this reassuring interpretation.

[...] most neuroscientists have been persuaded to adopt the predictive processing model of perception. On this view, most of what we perceive is what the brain expects to perceive. This means most of the signals coming in to our senses from the world get ignored. The ones that get amplified are the ones that differ from our expectations in ways that matter. We’re not even trying to take in a full picture of our environment. Rather, as Schaefer puts it, we’re "looking for confirmations, or things that might contradict our expectations, our biases"... (MORE - details)

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Neutron stars hint at another dimension (metaphysics in physics)
https://nautil.us/neutron-stars-hin...6d1-5fe7-4b2b-a7e2-8f63f497ef35.1743988924687

EXCERPTS: But our brane is not the entire universe. In their model, it’s embedded in something much larger, dubbed the “bulk.” The bulk has an extra spatial dimension, and our brane universe floats along inside of it like a piece of paper caught in the ocean currents. We can’t see the bulk, touch the bulk, experience the bulk, or otherwise interact with the bulk because our entire universe—all the particles and forces of nature—are restricted to life on the brane.

[...] If our running knowledge of gravity is mistaken, and our universe is really a brane floating in the bulk, then it might just show up in ever-so-slight differences in the behavior of neutron stars. This is because the brane-bulk interaction might change how gravity is working, ever so slightly—but just enough for us to detect it in those extreme environments.

[...] In particular, the extra dimension could make itself known by supplying an extra source of energy, something that physicists have dubbed “dark radiation,” and an extra source of pressure, called “dark pressure.” Dark radiation acts like an invisible form of light that can carry and transport energy; dark pressure is an extra source of support against the usual inward pull of gravity. Both of these appear as terms in the modified equations of gravity, additions that are absent in our usual conceptions of general relativity, our current best treatment of the gravitational force.

Which brings us back to neutron stars... (MORE - details)
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Are embryos property or people? Even the courts don’t know. (philosophy of personhood)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...e_code=1.-E4.HBAG.9k9WKXZVVm0j&smid=url-share

EXCERPTS: The murkiness of embryos’ status has sent courts on strange detours in their legal reasoning. [...] The questions raised by these legal scenarios, some unfolding with increasing regularity, should spur us to grapple with the current inconsistencies in our laws and ethics. These questions are likely to become even more salient in the years ahead: Hundreds of thousands of people undergo I.V.F. every year in the United States; hundreds of thousands more get divorced.

Procedures go awry. Clinics make mistakes. As a result of these ordinary events, people will continue to contest the meaning and fate of embryos in courts, where, as we have seen, there are few consistent guidelines. Over the years, philosophers, legal scholars and bioethicists have thought through these quandaries in the pages of academic journals... (MORE - details)

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A case study in groupthink: were liberals wrong about the pandemic? (philosophy of conformity)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/covid-policies-lockdown-masks-liberals-book

INTRO (excerpts): Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans will continue to pay for many years?

A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three questions, making the case that the aggressive policies that the US and other countries adopted to fight Covid – including school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and social distancing – were in some cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate.

In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement.

[...] The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,” he said.

[...] Many Covid stances presented as public health consensus were not as grounded in empirical evidence as many Americans may have believed, Macedo and Lee argue. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest... (MORE - details)
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Does testosterone or society make men? (philosophy of gender, philosophy of biology, anti-naturalism)
https://aeon.co/essays/a-psychologist-and-biologist-debate-the-significance-of-testosterone

INTRO: Does biology determine destiny, or is society the dominant cause of masculine and feminine traits? In this spirited exchange, the psychologist Cordelia Fine and the evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven unpack the complex relationship between testosterone and human behaviour.

Fine emphasises variability, flexibility and context – seeing gender as shaped by social forces as much as it is by hormones. By contrast, Hooven stresses consistent patterns; while acknowledging the influence of culture and the differences between individuals, she maintains that biology explains why certain sex-linked behaviours persist across cultures.

At stake in this debate is how we understand ourselves and organise our communities. Can we achieve equality by changing cultural norms, or must we accommodate biological realities that evolution has inscribed in our brains? As you read, notice how these scholars interpret the same evidence through fundamentally different frameworks – revealing why discussions about sex differences remain both scientifically complex and politically charged... (MORE - details)
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[TheVat]

Can we achieve equality by changing cultural norms, or must we accommodate biological realities that evolution has inscribed in our brains?

Cordelia Fine example of the oil rig workers reminded me of Robert Sapolsky's "Forest troop" of baboons - who developed a more egalitarian and peaceful culture (which then spread to other nearby troops) after an outbreak of tuberculosis had culled the aggressive males (who got first dibs on food, and thus ate most of a windfall discovery of tainted meat). I'm not sure but what Fine and Hooven are analyzing at different functional levels, more than disagreeing, but I need to read further.

The role of aggression in some human societies (e.g. dominating colonial cultures that readily used brutal force) also ties in with John Rawls' concept of deservedness, where there's a whole body of critical theory that looks at how societies choose to differentiate people in terms of what they deserve. When ideologies push the notion that some are more deserving than others, a more aggressive structure seems to develop and maintain itself. For me, such beliefs are vastly more potent than any hormone.

 

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The West is bored to death
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/04/the-west-is-bored-to-death

INTRO: Suppose Schopenhauer is right that life boils down to a flight from either boredom or pain. Insofar as the vast material abundance of wealthy, industrialised society has had an analgesic effect (there is simply less physical pain than in the past, before fluoride and anaesthesia and sedentary lives), it would seem to have solved one problem only to amplify the other.

In place of pain, we have ennui, the quintessential modern condition. It follows directly from overabundance: an endless stream of video “content” or chocolate cake or edibles or any other indulgence cannot deliver lasting satisfaction. Everything gets old eventually, leaving one to grope around for the next fix. For Schopenhauer, boredom is born of “intellectual dullness”, that “vacuity of soul” which leads so many “panting after excitement”, desperate to occupy their minds to kill the time... (MORE - details)

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Agnes Callard and the politics of public philosophy
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/agnes-callard-open-socrates/

EXCERPTS: Callard’s book [Open Socrates] is addressed to a different kind of skeptic: the one skeptical of the philosophical life. As she writes in the introduction, even academic philosophers often separate the rest of their own lives from their philosophical inquiry and give anodyne and bloodless justifications, such as the development of “critical thinking skills,” when pressed about the discipline’s value. [...] Callard wants to make the case for taking a different path, for the examined life: a life of courage and curiosity that is modeled, she argues, after Socrates and his approach to relentless questioning and open-ended philosophical conversations.

On the whole, I find myself conflicted about the case that Callard makes for the examined life. As a philosopher who aspires to something I’d readily describe as living philosophically, I am more than sympathetic to the book’s overall project. [...] But Callard [...underemphasizes...] the social roles and political hierarchies that determine who we are and allow us to have open-ended philosophical conversations in the first place... (MORE - details)

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James C. Scott and the art of resistance
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/in-praise-of-floods-james-c-scott-book-review

EXCERPTS: The lives of people working in agriculture were at the center of Scott’s work. Small farmers and peasants the world over endured dramatic transformations in the twentieth century and were subject to grand and ill-begotten experiments by capitalist and communist states alike. In colonial and post-colonial regimes, they were forced to plant cash crops and were heavily taxed. Under Stalin and Mao, experiments in collective farming led to famine. Scott wanted to study how rural populations responded to these upheavals.

[...] “Seeing Like a State” was published in 1998, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of socialism, and after the United States had lost its taste for New Deal-style economic planning. Perhaps as a result, the book appeared more conservative than Scott meant it to be. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama gave it an approving notice in Foreign Affairs, and, a year after it was published, the head of the libertarian Cato Institute invited Scott to address its annual convention, much to his dismay.

[...] In a review, the liberal economist Brad DeLong noted the striking similarities in argument between Scott’s brief against planning and the libertarian Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s praise of the “spontaneous order” of market economies. Scott, unlike Hayek, was an avowed skeptic of free markets ... But his critics on the left weren’t wrong to compare his arguments to Hayek’s: so intently and thoroughly did Scott make his case against the modern state that, once you’ve read “Seeing Like a State,” it’s difficult to imagine the virtue of any state action, even of the incremental and meliorist variety. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? (MORE - details)
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Kant vs Hume: Can we access reality?
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/04/09/kant-vs-hume-can-we-access-reality/

INTRO: David Hume and Immanuel Kant were almost contemporaries, but they reached radically different conclusions on the nature of reality and our ability, or lack thereof, to access it. Hume cast doubt on humans’ ability to ever really know the reasons or fundamental truths behind our experience. Kant, in response, proposed a revolution in our understanding of our relationships to ourselves and to the outside world, and in doing so offered a way to maintain knowledge of the physical world... (MORE - details)

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Separate but equal cosmologies?
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/04/08/separate-but-equal-cosmologies/

EXCERPTS: Brown University physics professor Stephon Alexander strikes one as an amazing cosmologist. He has written a book, The Jazz of Physics, that describes the intimate relationship between music, especially jazz (Alexander is a saxophonist), and the vast open sea ‘up there’ of elegant mysteries. In his most recent book, he ponders the cosmos for the connectability of matter unseen, dark and light, and makes string theory come alive like a Stravinsky cello concert. He gave a TED talk connecting Albert Einstein to John Coltrane. He’s gone on to great scholastic heights, including not one but two postdoctoral appointments.

He’s a philosopher, a panpsychist. Stellar stuff.

But he’s Black, and that’s a problem for some of the intellectuals he has moved amongst throughout his illustrious career. Even the title of his latest work on cosmology suggests there is racial tension among the mental luminaries [...] But this is not an article about Alexander, per se—I did one of those already for the APA blog—but rather his plight, his journey that requires of him the burden of growing his genius while at the same time having to deal with the stigma of being born Black and coping with a conflicting “double consciousness...” (MORE - details)
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Seems to be partly a call for the social or human-related sciences to assume the role of philosophers or ethics-oriented literary scholars. Certainly nothing new, and the soft sciences and humanities have arguably had a reciprocal relationship for decades. (Contrast with the latter's reputedly tepid to frigid dialogue with the physical or hard sciences over that period.)
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Human-AI relationships pose ethical issues, psychologists say
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1079301

INTRO: It’s becoming increasingly commonplace for people to develop intimate, long-term relationships with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. At their extreme, people have “married” their AI companions in non-legally binding ceremonies, and at least two people have killed themselves following AI chatbot advice.

In an opinion paper publishing April 11 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, psychologists explore ethical issues associated with human-AI relationships, including their potential to disrupt human-human relationships and give harmful advice.

“The ability for AI to now act like a human and enter into long-term communications really opens up a new can of worms,” says lead author Daniel B. Shank of Missouri University of Science & Technology, who specializes in social psychology and technology. “If people are engaging in romance with machines, we really need psychologists and social scientists involved.”

AI romance or companionship is more than a one-off conversation, note the authors. Through weeks and months of intense conversations, these AIs can become trusted companions who seem to know and care about their human partners. And because these relationships can seem easier than human-human relationships, the researchers argue that AIs could interfere with human social dynamics.

“A real worry is that people might bring expectations from their AI relationships to their human relationships,” says Shank. “Certainly, in individual cases it’s disrupting human relationships, but it’s unclear whether that’s going to be widespread.” (MORE - details, no ads)
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Annaka Harris: Consciousness is fundamental
https://iai.tv/articles/annaka-harris-consciousness-is-fundamental-auid-3136?_auid=2020

INTRO: For decades, our best intuitions have told us that consciousness is a product of complex brain processes, creating the taste of coffee or the smell of a rose. However, New York Times bestselling author, Annaka Harris, argues this view has been shattered by modern neuroscience. In this exclusive, in-depth article Harris draws from her recent documentary, Lights On, taking inspiration from the work of leading physicists, like Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin, and explains why consciousness is the most fundamental thing in the universe... (MORE - missing details)

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Pets and power: Why it’s wrong to keep pets
https://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/blog/2025/04/11/pets-and-power-why-its-wrong-to-keep-pets/

EXCERPTS: Most ethical discussions concerning the permissibility of pet keeping focus on the question of whether we can give individual pets a good life. However, we think this tendency to focus on the well-being of individual pets obscures important political dimensions of the practice.

Of particular importance, in keeping pets we exercise a huge amount of power. [...] but why is this problematic? Well, a central tenet of liberal political thought is that no individual naturally has legitimate power or authority over another. Our ability to exercise power by imposing coercion, force, and threats must be justified if it is to be legitimate. And there is no reason to think that the same is not true of our power over non-human animals... (MORE - details)

COMMENT: One of the many inevitable consequences of leaving that ideological offspring of the Enlightenment without constraints, and open to eternal development and refinement across the centuries. Or at least treating it as an evolving project like that. No limit to what entities can receive personhood status and extended rights (radical, universal equality). No limit to normalizing eccentricities, aberrations, and irregularities. Time's incremental lethargy being the only obstacle to all those countless prospects being hashed-out and fatally realized right now...
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How classical Indian philosophy helps us understand the self
https://aeon.co/essays/how-classical-indian-philosophy-helps-us-understand-the-self

EXCERPT: There is only one reality, brahman, which takes myriad illusory forms, but like fire it is both an individual flame and a blaze. This one reality is both the transcendental brahman and the immanent ātman. Everything else is fleeting, illusory, sprung from ignorance. Consciousness is illumination. As the light of a blazing lamp brightens a dark room, so consciousness lights up life.

What does it mean to say that consciousness is illumination? (The Sanskrit word is prakāśa, sometimes rendered as ‘manifestation’.) We aim to enquire here whether notions like this, drawn from classical Indian philosophy, could be applied to debates about the nature of consciousness in contemporary analytical philosophy of mind... (MORE - details)

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Perceived consensus drives moral intolerance in a time of identity-driven politics and online bubbles (ethics)
https://theconversation.com/perceiv...ity-driven-politics-and-online-bubbles-242088

EXCERPTS: . . . Their behavior seems weird to you, but you consider it an instance of everyone’s freedom to express themselves. But other times something seems not only abnormal but also unacceptable. [...] A decade of research in my psychology lab and others’ demonstrates that people struggle to express tolerance for different moral values...

[...] While perceived disagreement within a community appears to function as a corrective to intolerance, the opposite is also true: Consensus is a powerful trigger of intolerance. When most of the community agrees that something is morally bad, then those who disagree are viewed as outliers and labeled as “deviant.” Intolerance becomes not only justified but is seen as necessary.

But how is consensus reached? (MORE - details)

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New study reveals wealth inequality’s deep roots in human prehistory (informative to Marxism, general left-wing philosophy)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1080429

INTRO: Wealth inequality began shaping human societies more than 10,000 years ago, long before the rise of ancient empires or the invention of writing.

That’s according to a new study led by Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler that challenges traditional views that disparities in wealth emerged suddenly with large civilizations like Egypt or Mesopotamia. The research is part of a special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, co-edited by Kohler and Amy Bogaard, an archaeologist at Oxford University in England.

Drawing on data from over 47,000 residential structures across 1,100 archaeological sites worldwide, the researchers used house sizes as a measure of wealth. Their analysis shows that wealth inequality started to increase roughly 1,500 years after the advent of agriculture in different civilizations across the world. This effect was driven by population growth, competition for land and the development of hierarchical settlements.

“Many people imagine early societies as egalitarian, but our research shows wealth inequality took root surprisingly early,” said Kohler. “The shift wasn’t instantaneous. It grew gradually as societies expanded, populations increased and resources became more constrained.”

The study highlights several key factors contributing to inequality. As farming communities grew, land became a finite resource, leading to competition and innovations like terracing and irrigation to boost productivity. Over time, larger settlements emerged as hubs of economic and political activity, where wealth began to concentrate in the hands of a few households. These wealth disparities were particularly evident in high population settlements, which exhibited greater inequality than smaller communities... (MORE - details, no ads)
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David Deutsch: "There is only one interpretation of quantum mechanics" (scientific realism)
https://iai.tv/articles/david-deuts...ion-of-quantum-mechanics-auid-3139?_auid=2020

INTRO: The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realised in different worlds. These many worlds have proved extremely contentious, with critics arguing that they are mere fantasy. In this IAI interview, David Deutsch explains the philosophy behind the many-worlds interpretation and argues that not only is it the best interpretation of quantum mechanics – it is the only interpretation.

INTERVIEW EXCERPT: [In] the twentieth century, for various bad philosophical reasons [...] they tried to champion ideas like “the world doesn't really exist” – I mean the physical world. Or that if it does exist, we can't have any knowledge of it, or that we are only playing with words, or that there isn't a difference between a truer theory and a less true theory, and so on. And those are all dead ends. They are all really promoting an agenda of not understanding the world... (MORE - details)

RELATED: Taming the multiverse - originally published in 2001 at New Scientist, interview by Marcus Chown

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No “uncanny valley” effect in science-telling AI avatars (informing philosophy of AI)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1079762

EXCERPTS: The generation of images and animations through artificial intelligence is a rapidly growing field, constantly improving in quality. Yet many avatars, though realistic, still present minor flaws — glitches, delays, inconsistent facial expressions or lip-syncing — sometimes barely noticeable, but still easily picked up by a human observer.

[...] these avatars could trigger a phenomenon known in cognitive science as the “uncanny valley.” The uncanny valley describes a human reaction to humanoid avatars (digital or robotic): when they look hyper-realistic but not quite perfect, they may evoke strong discomfort, while more stylized or cartoonish humanoid figures tend not to.

[...] The study (conducted in Germany, in German) involved a series of videos featuring AI-generated avatars portraying science communicators — both male and female. ... Baake and colleagues were surprised: in their experiments, the realistic avatars were rated more positively than the cartoon-style ones.

[...] However, Baake emphasizes that while no uncanny valley effect was found here, future studies should test a broader range of realism levels... (MORE - details, no ads)
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Holy shift: More Americans finding faith outside church
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1080556

INTRO: A "remarkable" transformation is underway in American religious life, new Cornell-led research finds: Large numbers are leaving organized religion – not in favor of secular rationality, but to pursue spirituality in ways that better align with their individual values.

This reimagining of religion outside traditional institutions fits within broader social changes that have prioritized individual fulfilment and “finding” oneself, including shifting views about gender and sexuality and the rise of the internet. Spanning political views, it also reflects a revolt against religious organizations growing more bureaucratic, rigid and political over time.

"People aren't leaving religious institutions passively or only because of partisan politics, but because of more deeply held values – about the sacredness of the individual, their concern for others, and feeling that their participation in an institution doesn't align with being the type of person they want to be," said Landon Schnabel, associate professor of sociology and first author of "Breaking Free of the Iron Cage: The Individualization of American Religion," published April 14 in Socius. "They're more intentionally choosing to follow what they really believe in."

The proportion of religious "nones" in the U.S. – those claiming no religious affiliation – has surged in just a few decades, from 1 in 20 to more than 1 in 4. The new research advances understanding of the reasons behind that change, leveraging a nationally representative study that tracked teens as they came of age early in the 21st century – amid shifting social values and technological and economic upheaval.

The scholars analyzed data from more than 1,300 participants in the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) who completed four rounds of surveys between 2003 and 2013, starting when they were between 13 and 17 years old... (MORE - details)

COMMENT: Undermines previous notions, however, that "nones" might represent a shift toward secular materialism and anti-mysticism. These eclectic, personal pursuits imply a feral landscape developing that could be more unpredictable than ever to deal with, which the traditional bureaucratic [religious] institutions at least kept minimalized into large, homogeneous chunks.

Surges in chaotic multifariousness may also contribute to offbeat populist candidates being elected. For instance, Trump and Bernie Sanders each attracting their own mixes of unconventional independents in recent/past political campaigns. Fringe elements, ideologies, and conspiracies that customary Republican and Democrat platforms would not normally attract.
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[C C]

Harmonizing with the Dao: Sketch of an evaluative framework
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/04/harmonizing-with-dao-sketch-of.html

INTRO: Increasingly, I find myself drawn to an ethics of harmonizing with the Dao. Invoking "the Dao" might sound mystical, non-Western, ancient, religious -- alien to mainstream secular 21st-century Anglophone metaphysics and ethics. But I don't think it needs to be.

It just needs some clarification and secularization. As a first approximation, think of harmonizing with the Dao as akin to harmonizing with nature. Then broaden "nature" to include human patterns as well as non-human, and you're close to the ideal. Maybe we could equally call it an ethics of "harmonizing with the world" or simply an "ethics of harmony". But explicit reference to "the Dao" helps locate the idea's origins and its Daoist flavor... (MORE - details)

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New paper in draft: Superficialism about Belief, and How We Will Decide That Robots Believe
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/04/new-paper-in-draft-superficialism-about.html

INTRO: Superficialism about property X treats the possession, or not, of property X as determined entirely by superficial as opposed to deep facts. Belief should be understood superficially, as determined entirely by facts about actual and potential behavior, conscious experience, and transitional cognitive states ultimately understood in terms of actual and potential behavior and conscious experience.

On both intuitive and pragmatic grounds, superficialism about belief is superior to accounts of belief in terms of deep cognitive or neural architecture, and it is not systematically inferior on scientific grounds. Behaviorist and interpretativist superficialism suggests that robots and Large Language Models already do, or will soon, believe. If consciousness is also essential to belief, the issue might soon become unclear for some of the most advanced systems.

However, it will at least be practical to attribute some such systems belief* -- belief shorn of commitment to any conscious aspect -- and it will be forgivable if people forget to pronounce the asterisk. Krzysztof Poslajko should welcome this manner of thinking, though it needn't be as "antirealist" as Poslajko suggests... (MORE - details)

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Resistance to Evidence (book review)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/resistance-to-evidence/

INTRO (excerpts) : It is easy to dismiss conspiracy theorists and their ilk as irrational or dull, lost to the normative sway of the epistemic. Mona Simion’s Resistance to Evidence offers a timely intervention against this temptation...

[...] The resulting account yields an analysis of resistance to evidence as epistemic malfunction (and an argument that such malfunction is rare), a unified account of epistemic defeat, and a knowledge-first treatment of disinformation, among other applications. Much of this arises from one of the book’s most distinctive contributions: a novel argument for the existence of positive epistemic obligations.

Resistance to Evidence systematically engages with competing views, introduces original objections, and—being grounded in an embodied understanding of epistemic practice—resonates with current trends in epistemology. Simion’s account of epistemic normativity encompasses both traditional questions (justification, defeat, etc.) and newer concerns, such as testimonial injustice and inquiry. Taken together, these contributions offer a rich, unified account of epistemic normativity with the capacity to respond to our sometimes-antagonistic epistemic environments... (MORE - details)
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How quantum mechanics changed science forever (philosophy of science)
https://iai.tv/articles/how-quantum-mechanics-changed-science-forever-auid-3144?_auid=2020

INTRO: Quantum mechanics is extremely successful and extremely weird. Its weirdness has made it controversial. It doesn’t even try to do what we often think scientific theories must do: it doesn’t try to describe reality. Karl Popper thought this went against science’s very essence.

But philosopher Marij van Strien argues here that quantum mechanics’ success shows that science has no fixed rules: progress is often made by breaking from conventional standards of rationality. This needn’t leave us in anarchy, unable to distinguish between good and bad science, as some fear: we just need to be more pragmatic when it comes to judging whether a theory is any good... (MORE - details)

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Private guns and public safety: Making sense of the tension
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/04/17/private-guns-and-public-safety-making-sense-of-the-tension/

INTRO: A natural way to understand the conflict between respecting individual rights and advancing the public good is as follows: if a socially worthwhile cause can be realized only by infringing upon the rights of individuals, we must ensure that the benefits to be gained from the cause are worth the sacrifice.

This is how discussions about controversial policy issues such as surveillance, protest crackdowns, and hate speech restrictions often go. The gun control debate can be construed in a similar light. The right to own guns is provided by the United States Constitution, though its precise scope and nature is fiercely debated... (MORE - details)

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What are oppressive acts? Conceptual engineering and pornography
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/04/...-acts-conceptual-engineering-and-pornography/

INTRO: Criticisms of inegalitarian pornography (which I will call “pornography” hereafter for brevity)—or what Ann Eaton defines as “sexually explicit representations that as a whole eroticize relations (acts, scenarios, or postures) characterized by gender inequity”—are not new. Partly in response to free speech defenses of pornography, much philosophical critique has stemmed from the philosophy of language tradition.

Using J. L. Austin’s insight that saying things sometimes constitutes doing things, anti-pornography feminists such as Rae Langton have argued that pornography involves illocutionary speech acts that oppress, subordinate, and silence women. One controversial aspect of this speech act account is the claim that pornography as a form of speech not only causes the oppression and subordination of women but also itself constitutes oppression and subordination.

If pornography is not only speech that can produce harmful effects but also an objectionable act itself, then defenses of pornography based on freedom of speech are less powerful, and the regulation of pornography is more warranted... (MORE - details)

RELATED: Growing body of research shows porn causes lasting harm to the brain & relationships

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Why philosophers hate that ‘equity’ meme
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/why-philosophers-hate-that-equity

INTRO (excerpts): If you want to annoy your favorite philosopher, one of the best ways to do it these days is to mention the “kids standing on boxes equity meme.” To call it the bane of our existence would be something of an overstatement, but it’s certainly not making anyone’s job easier.

[...] Unfortunately for us, this little picture with the boxes represents the undoing of practically everything we have been trying to achieve in our debates over equality and social justice for the past half-century. (More evidence that when reason goes up against social media, reason loses every time.) Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the inadequacy of the conception of “equity” presented in this picture served as the point of departure of the major debates over egalitarianism that have been central to the discipline since the 1970s.

As a result, anytime a student brings this meme up – and they pretty much inevitably do – the competent philosopher has little choice but to explain what is wrong with it. This immediately leads them to suspect us of wrong-think, because as everyone knows, the type of “equity” illustrated in the meme provides the E in DEI, and so if you’re not down with this conception of equity, then that makes you an opponent of DEI, which means you might as well be a Trump supporter... (MORE - details)
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What right do we have to colonize other worlds? (ethics)
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/right-colonize-other-worlds/

KEY POINTS: For as long as humans have looked up at the night sky, we’ve been curious about what else is out there, including the possibility of life on other worlds and around distant stars. In all the time that we’ve been studying and exploring the Universe, however, we have yet to find our very first example of life that originated anyplace other than on Earth; we may yet be alone. Many have long dreamed of starting human colonies on other worlds, including in our Solar System but also to worlds beyond. Here are the ethical questions we should all be asking as we look to expand into space... (MORE - details)

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How thoughts influence what the eyes see (philosophy of perception, indirect realism)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1081075

EXCERPT: Most scientists agree that categorizing an object — like thinking of a carrot as either a root vegetable or a party snack — is the job of the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for reasoning and other high-level functions that make us smart and social. In that account, the eyes and visual regions of the brain are kind of like a security camera collecting data and processing it in a standardized way before passing it off for analysis.

However, a new study led by biomedical engineer and neuroscientist Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana, an assistant professor at Columbia Engineering, shows that the brain’s visual regions play an active role in making sense of information. Crucially, the way it interprets the information depends on what the rest of the brain is working on... (MORE - details, no ads)

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Are we really living in a materialist age? (scientism)
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/a...les/are-we-really-living-in-a-materialist-age

INTRO (excerpts): When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.

Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. [...] The basic rationale is well rehearsed: that physics, having been remarkably successful at toppling superstitions up to now, must naturally go on to conquer every last corner of reality...

[...] to call reductive materialism a “belief” is perhaps a bit misleading. Plenty of people—the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, and the physicist Lawrence Krauss among them—piously recite its creed: I do not exist, life is meaningless, morality is an illusion. But do any of them really believe it?

Certainly, they don’t act as though they do... (MORE - details)
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Is a corporation a slave? Many philosophers think so
https://theconversation.com/is-a-corporation-a-slave-many-philosophers-think-so-253226

If you’ve ever heard the term “wage slave”, you’ll know many modern workers – perhaps even you – sometimes feel enslaved to the organisation at which they work. But here’s a different way of thinking about it: for-profit business corporations are themselves slaves...

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What I learned from philosophers of language
https://www.philipbold.com/_files/ugd/573475_c651efeb0a274f5b8f8cd389b464277c.pdf

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The philosopher’s machine: my conversation with Peter Singer’s AI chatbot
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-my-conversation-with-peter-singer-ai-chatbot

The world’s most famous living philosopher has launched a chatbot to deal with ethical dilemmas. Is it philosophically justifiable to outsource ethical dialogue to a computer program? One former philosophy student-turned-journalist tests it out...

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Jeffrey King and felicitous underspecifications (interview)
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/jeffrey-king-and-felicitous-underspecifications?c=end-times-series

INTRO: Jeffrey C. King is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy known for his works on philosophy of language. Here he talks about his latest book concerning the notion of felicitous underspecification, Stalnaker’s idea of ‘common ground’ and updating sets, the matter of context, and implications for the metasemantics of contextually sensitive expressions. He then discusses the nature of propositions, why such a discussion is on the interface between metaphysics and philosophy of language, why he thinks propositions are facts and then goes on to discuss Stalnaker's "two dimensional" account of the necessary a posteriori on which there is no single proposition that is both necessary and a posteriori, the notion of anaphora and in particular the puzzles about anaphoric pronouns , why Stalnaker is wrong to deny the existence of metaphysically impossible worlds and why philosophers are getting involved in what might look like linguistics... (MORE - details)
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Analytic vs Conventional Bioethics: Intellectuals should do more than launder vibes
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/analytic-vs-conventional-bioethics

EXCERPT: My talk was partly inspired by a survey that seemed to confirm all the worst stereotypes about the field of bioethics as uncritically laundering conventional moral platitudes (of a broadly progressive-egalitarian stripe). So I’m especially curious to hear more about how the philosophers in the field, who often do good and important work, feel about the larger field—since so much of the latter strikes me as worse than worthless... (MORE - details)

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My history with philosophy
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/my-history-with-philosophy.html

EXCERPT: My notion of who is a philosopher has broadened extensively over the years. I think of Patrick Collison, Camille Paglia, and the best Ross Douthat columns (among many other examples, let’s toss in the best Matt Y. sentences as well, and the best Peter Thiel observations), not to mention some art and architecture and music critics, as some of the best and most important philosophy of our time.

The best philosophy of Agnes Callard (NYT) does not look like formal philosophy at all. I know it is hard for many of you to make this mental shift, but revisit how Kierkegaaard and Schopenhauer wrote and you might find it possible. And of course the very greatest philosophers of our time are the people who are building and learning how to use the quality LLMs.

A simple rule of thumb is that if no one is writing you, and telling you that you changed their lives, you probably are not a philosopher. You cannot expect such feedback in mathematical logic, or early in your career, but still it is not a bad place to start for judging this issue... (MORE - details)

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Colors are objective, according to two philosophers − even though the blue you see doesn’t match what I see
https://theconversation.com/colors-...e-blue-you-see-doesnt-match-what-i-see-234467

INTRO: Is your green my green? Probably not. What appears as pure green to me will likely look a bit yellowish or blueish to you. This is because visual systems vary from person to person. Moreover, an object’s color may appear differently against different backgrounds or under different lighting.

These facts might naturally lead you to think that colors are subjective. That, unlike features such as length and temperature, colors are not objective features. Either nothing has a true color, or colors are relative to observers and their viewing conditions.

But perceptual variation has misled you. We are philosophers who study colors, objectivity and science, and we argue in our book “The Metaphysics of Colors” that colors are as objective as length and temperature... (MORE - details)

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Four Views on Free Will (2nd edition)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/four-views-on-free-will-2nd-edition/

INTRO: The first edition of Four Views on Free Will appeared some seventeen years ago as a compelling addition to Blackwell’s “Great Debates in Philosophy” series. As I emphasized in a review here at that time, the volume was (and remains) remarkable both as a high-level introduction to the contemporary debate about freedom and responsibility and as a model of constructive and cooperative philosophy.

I am happy to report that the second edition only improves on the initial excellences. Still, a natural question to ask is whether, in light of the first edition’s standing strengths, a second edition is justified. My answer to this question is a full-throated yes.

Not only does it contain new and provocative first-order thinking about the core issues, including intriguing developments and concessions among the authors regarding their target positions; it also demonstrates afresh and across time how philosophy can and should be done collectively and with serious shared attention to the details of the moral life.

Because of the exceedingly rare combination of expertise, depth, cooperation, and accessibility in this volume, there is no better resource for entering into the lively philosophical discussion of the problem of free will and for taking the measure of the current state of the debate... (MORE - details)
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Humanity’s Fifth Copernican Moment
https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com/p/humanitys-fifth-copernican-moment

I expect to see the existence of extraterrestrial life confirmed within the next few years. When it happens, put down your phone, look up from your work, walk away from your computer, and let the moment sink in. Then we can go back to arguing about pronouns and tariffs...

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Consciousness reveals there's no single objective world
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-reveals-reality-cannot-be-described-auid-3151?_auid=2020

INTRO: Does reality contain only physical things? Or could everything be conscious, as panpsychists claim? Philosopher Christian List argues it’s time to move beyond both sides of this debate. Consciousness reveals something far more radical: reality cannot be captured by a single, objective description.

Dualists, panpsychists and materialists all assume that there’s one unified reality that science and philosophy can aim to describe. But the deep subjectivity of consciousness shows this can’t be right. Reality cannot be contained in a single book – only a whole library of perspectives will do... (MORE - details)

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When AIs do science it will be strange and incomprehensible
https://aeon.co/essays/when-ais-do-science-it-will-be-strange-and-incomprehensible

EXCERPT: The late philosopher Paul Humphreys called this the ‘hybrid scenario’ of science: where parts of the scientific process are outsourced to computers. However, he also suggested that this could change.

Even though he began writing about these ideas more than a decade ago, long before the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), Humphreys had the foresight to recognise that the days of humans leading the scientific process may be numbered. He identified a later phase of science – what he called the ‘automated scenario’, where computers take over science completely. In this future, the computational capacities for scientific reasoning, data processing, model-making and theorising would far surpass our own abilities to the point that we humans are no longer needed. The machines would carry on the scientific work we once started, taking our theories to new and unforeseen heights.

According to some sources, the end of human epistemic dominance over science is on the horizon... (MORE - details)

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Female bonobos keep males in check—not with strength, but with solidarity (feminist philosophy)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1080557

EXCERPT: Like almost all other social mammals with larger males, bonobo societies should be dominated by males. And yet, bonobo females famously maintain a high social status compared to their larger male counterparts. Until now, though, nobody knew how this paradoxical dynamic was possible at all.

“There were competing ideas for how,” says MPI-AB’s Barbara Fruth who has led the LuiKotale bonobo research station for 30 years, “none of which had ever been tested in wild bonobos living in the jungles in which they evolved.”

Now, a study by Surbeck and Fruth has delivered the first empirical evidence from wild bonobos explaining the rare phenomenon: females maintain power by forming alliances with other females. The study found that females outranked males when they formed gangs, which the authors named “coalitions.” In the vast majority of coalitions—85% of those observed—females collectively targeted males, forcing them into submission and shaping the group’s dominance hierarchy.

“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that female solidarity can invert the male-biased power structure that is typical of many mammal societies,” says Surbeck, the study’s first author. “It’s exciting to find that females can actively elevate their social status by supporting each other.” (MORE - details, no ads)
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