Philosophy Updates
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The increasing global biosecurity threat: Room for philosophical input
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/...security-threat-room-for-philosophical-input/
EXCERPT: Almost no country regulates biological threats adequately. Unless we change course, we may sleepwalk into a reality in which affordable gene-editing and synthesis tools (e.g., affordable benchtop DNA printing) can combine long DNA fragments available for purchase into dangerous pathogens or create such pathogens from scratch. On one estimate, tens of thousands of people worldwide will, in coming years, be able to operate accessible machinery that can create new variants... (MORE - details)
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Quantum Mechanics (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/
INTRO: Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics.... (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/]MORE - details)
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(review) Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave: Buddhist-Platonist Philosophical Inquiries
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/crossin...e-buddhist-platonist-philosophical-inquiries/
EXCERPTS: This essay collection is the result of a years-long conversation between scholars of Buddhist and Platonist philosophy. As told in the introduction, the “Buddhist-Platonist dialogues group” met every month for two years, discussing texts from both traditions with experts in each always on hand. This methodological approach aims at capturing something deeper than what generally occurs in one-off or solitary comparative attempts. Rather than merely reaching for translation of distinct ideas or comparison between specific texts, the explicit goal was the “creation of a new philosophical idiom and community of inquirers” [...] he body of the volume presents eleven developed projects authored by individual participants, each of which focuses on a particular comparative theme that stood out to them from the group’s work. The essays cover a range of topics, such as the nature of perception, causality, ethics, or the role of the contemplative in society... (MORE - details)
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(review) The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway: Monism, Vitalism, and Self-Motion
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-met...-anne-conway-monism-vitalism-and-self-motion/
INTRO: This welcome volume examines Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, two mid-17th century British women philosophers who both developed interestingly non-mechanist metaphysical systems. Though Conway’s system is thoroughly theological in a way that Cavendish’s natural philosophy is explicitly not, their systems do share features like the subtitular monism, vitalism, and self-motion at a high level of description, and Marcy Lascano explores the extent to which these correspondences are informative at a more precise level. The volume is important for at least two main reasons. First, it presents what ought to be standard readings on several topics. Second, and I think more importantly, it sets out to do something that no other philosophy monograph has, to my knowledge, tried to do, and that is to let a recently recovered figure set the terms of the debate for understanding other philosophers... (MORE - details)
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https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/...security-threat-room-for-philosophical-input/
EXCERPT: Almost no country regulates biological threats adequately. Unless we change course, we may sleepwalk into a reality in which affordable gene-editing and synthesis tools (e.g., affordable benchtop DNA printing) can combine long DNA fragments available for purchase into dangerous pathogens or create such pathogens from scratch. On one estimate, tens of thousands of people worldwide will, in coming years, be able to operate accessible machinery that can create new variants... (MORE - details)
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Quantum Mechanics (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/
INTRO: Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics.... (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm/]MORE - details)
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(review) Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave: Buddhist-Platonist Philosophical Inquiries
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/crossin...e-buddhist-platonist-philosophical-inquiries/
EXCERPTS: This essay collection is the result of a years-long conversation between scholars of Buddhist and Platonist philosophy. As told in the introduction, the “Buddhist-Platonist dialogues group” met every month for two years, discussing texts from both traditions with experts in each always on hand. This methodological approach aims at capturing something deeper than what generally occurs in one-off or solitary comparative attempts. Rather than merely reaching for translation of distinct ideas or comparison between specific texts, the explicit goal was the “creation of a new philosophical idiom and community of inquirers” [...] he body of the volume presents eleven developed projects authored by individual participants, each of which focuses on a particular comparative theme that stood out to them from the group’s work. The essays cover a range of topics, such as the nature of perception, causality, ethics, or the role of the contemplative in society... (MORE - details)
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(review) The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway: Monism, Vitalism, and Self-Motion
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-met...-anne-conway-monism-vitalism-and-self-motion/
INTRO: This welcome volume examines Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, two mid-17th century British women philosophers who both developed interestingly non-mechanist metaphysical systems. Though Conway’s system is thoroughly theological in a way that Cavendish’s natural philosophy is explicitly not, their systems do share features like the subtitular monism, vitalism, and self-motion at a high level of description, and Marcy Lascano explores the extent to which these correspondences are informative at a more precise level. The volume is important for at least two main reasons. First, it presents what ought to be standard readings on several topics. Second, and I think more importantly, it sets out to do something that no other philosophy monograph has, to my knowledge, tried to do, and that is to let a recently recovered figure set the terms of the debate for understanding other philosophers... (MORE - details)
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Mary the colour scientist
https://academic.oup.com/pq/pages/mary-the-colour-scientist
A collection that encompasses Frank Jackson's original argument, along with other articles concerning it.
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Two giants of 20th-century philosophy correspond
https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/a...giants-of-20th-century-philosophy-correspond/
Never before in print, an extensive series of letters exchanged by Martin Heidegger and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, two pivotal figures in 20th century philosophy, are collected in a new German-language book by the publishing houses Vittorio Klostermann and Mohr Siebeck...
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The metaphysics of talking to aliens
https://iai.tv/articles/the-metaphysics-of-talking-to-aliens-auid-3050?_auid=2020
INTRO: For many, aliens only exist in the realm of science fiction. But regardless of whether aliens exist or not, the potential existence of extraterrestrial species throws into question our entire metaphysical framework, which has long gone unchallenged. In particular, we would need to rethink our understanding of language, which currently determines how we experience our world. But what if there were other languages out there that better captured reality? For theoretical philosopher Matti Eklund, these are the questions philosophy needs to be asking... (MORE - details)
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Knowing things is hard
https://www.bookandsword.com/2025/01/11/knowing-things-is-hard/
INTRO: Knowing things is hard, even about the past. Over the years I have compiled pithy names for some of the reasons why this is. This week I decided to share them in the style of Andrew Gelman’s Handy Statistical Lexicon or Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Right now many entries are blank or just link to other people’s websites and articles. If I ever turn these into a book, I will expand them. Until then I can add entries one at a time as they become necessary... (MORE - details)
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https://academic.oup.com/pq/pages/mary-the-colour-scientist
A collection that encompasses Frank Jackson's original argument, along with other articles concerning it.
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Two giants of 20th-century philosophy correspond
https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/a...giants-of-20th-century-philosophy-correspond/
Never before in print, an extensive series of letters exchanged by Martin Heidegger and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, two pivotal figures in 20th century philosophy, are collected in a new German-language book by the publishing houses Vittorio Klostermann and Mohr Siebeck...
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The metaphysics of talking to aliens
https://iai.tv/articles/the-metaphysics-of-talking-to-aliens-auid-3050?_auid=2020
INTRO: For many, aliens only exist in the realm of science fiction. But regardless of whether aliens exist or not, the potential existence of extraterrestrial species throws into question our entire metaphysical framework, which has long gone unchallenged. In particular, we would need to rethink our understanding of language, which currently determines how we experience our world. But what if there were other languages out there that better captured reality? For theoretical philosopher Matti Eklund, these are the questions philosophy needs to be asking... (MORE - details)
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Knowing things is hard
https://www.bookandsword.com/2025/01/11/knowing-things-is-hard/
INTRO: Knowing things is hard, even about the past. Over the years I have compiled pithy names for some of the reasons why this is. This week I decided to share them in the style of Andrew Gelman’s Handy Statistical Lexicon or Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Right now many entries are blank or just link to other people’s websites and articles. If I ever turn these into a book, I will expand them. Until then I can add entries one at a time as they become necessary... (MORE - details)
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Heh. Don't everybody jump on the democratization of science bandwagon all at once. Might blow the tires.
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The Big Bang theory is not the only game in town
https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-is-not-the-only-game-in-town-auid-3052?_auid=2020
The Big Bang is the prevailing cosmological model of the universe's origins. However, some physicists now argue that the Big Bang model leads to too many inconsistencies with empirical evidence. Though cosmologists have made ad-hoc additions to the theory to make the Big Bang fit with our observations, it is time to consider alternatives, including models in which the universe has no beginning...
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The Big Bang theory is not the only game in town
https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-is-not-the-only-game-in-town-auid-3052?_auid=2020
The Big Bang is the prevailing cosmological model of the universe's origins. However, some physicists now argue that the Big Bang model leads to too many inconsistencies with empirical evidence. Though cosmologists have made ad-hoc additions to the theory to make the Big Bang fit with our observations, it is time to consider alternatives, including models in which the universe has no beginning...
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But Christian missionaries and other vanguards of cultural hegemony were also cohorts of European colonial oppression, which perhaps contributes to the left activist sphere being more favorable toward Islam and other religions (as well as potentially social justice rehabilitated factions of Jesus folk who are repentant about that past role and spurn contemporary realms of intolerance.)
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The debt of the West to Christianity?
https://religionunplugged.com/news/...rans-rights-movements-owe-a-big-debt-to-jesus
EXCERPTS: Tom Holland might be one of the smarter and more engaging guys I’ve heard. The British novelist, popular historian and podcast host, who attended Cambridge and Oxford universities, seems to know everything that can be known about ancient cultures.
[...] I first encountered him during the holidays on a podcast other than his own: Bari Weiss’ “Honestly.” Fortunately, Weiss is as fine an interviewer as Holland is a raconteur. Their topic was “how Christianity remade the world.”
For Holland, that’s not an exaggeration. He says everything from the way we measure time to our fondness for underdogs to the American and French revolutions was generated largely by the life and teachings of Jesus.
In the West, even secular progressives who dismiss Christianity as superstitious mumbo jumbo are actually driven by early Christian assumptions about the nature of God, humans and justice. Without realizing it, such critics “are the slaves of some defunct theologian,” Holland said.
He makes these observations although he doesn’t much believe Christianity is true. He was raised in the Church of England, but developed early on as an atheist... (MORE - details)
COMMENT: In the years after the French Revolution, some of the proto-anarchists and precursor nihilists -- who had a distaste for fabricated "oughts" or invented BS in general -- did seem to border on mocking both Enlightenment liberalism and the early left (pre-Marxist collectivism) as secular continuations of Christian spawned slash inspired morality, social justness, and other sets of principles.
At any rate, the religious personification of abstractions as deities -- that goes back to the most ancient of times -- entails that what people were really worshiping all along were the regulating conceptions and values of the creed. Dropping the superficial "godhood" stuff/myths doesn't end genuflection to ideology and interpreting much of what happens in the context of the latter. Bowing to useful, unifying, and governing fiction still persists; and both state and individual can seem to revere such at times, in ways beyond a mere social contract status.
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The debt of the West to Christianity?
https://religionunplugged.com/news/...rans-rights-movements-owe-a-big-debt-to-jesus
EXCERPTS: Tom Holland might be one of the smarter and more engaging guys I’ve heard. The British novelist, popular historian and podcast host, who attended Cambridge and Oxford universities, seems to know everything that can be known about ancient cultures.
[...] I first encountered him during the holidays on a podcast other than his own: Bari Weiss’ “Honestly.” Fortunately, Weiss is as fine an interviewer as Holland is a raconteur. Their topic was “how Christianity remade the world.”
For Holland, that’s not an exaggeration. He says everything from the way we measure time to our fondness for underdogs to the American and French revolutions was generated largely by the life and teachings of Jesus.
In the West, even secular progressives who dismiss Christianity as superstitious mumbo jumbo are actually driven by early Christian assumptions about the nature of God, humans and justice. Without realizing it, such critics “are the slaves of some defunct theologian,” Holland said.
He makes these observations although he doesn’t much believe Christianity is true. He was raised in the Church of England, but developed early on as an atheist... (MORE - details)
COMMENT: In the years after the French Revolution, some of the proto-anarchists and precursor nihilists -- who had a distaste for fabricated "oughts" or invented BS in general -- did seem to border on mocking both Enlightenment liberalism and the early left (pre-Marxist collectivism) as secular continuations of Christian spawned slash inspired morality, social justness, and other sets of principles.
At any rate, the religious personification of abstractions as deities -- that goes back to the most ancient of times -- entails that what people were really worshiping all along were the regulating conceptions and values of the creed. Dropping the superficial "godhood" stuff/myths doesn't end genuflection to ideology and interpreting much of what happens in the context of the latter. Bowing to useful, unifying, and governing fiction still persists; and both state and individual can seem to revere such at times, in ways beyond a mere social contract status.
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The Black Book of Communism Is a Shoddy Work of History
https://jacobin.com/2025/01/black-book-communism-courtois-history
INTRO (excerpts): The British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan had a similar message as he prepared for “the most monstrous of centenaries.” According to Hannan, communism was far worse than slavery or Nazism: “The Atlantic slave trade killed perhaps 10 million people, the Nazis 17 million — but the Communists killed 100 million.” The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which runs a museum in Washington, carries the following message on its website: “Communism Killed Over 100 Million: We’re telling their stories.”
These claims ultimately rest upon a highly influential collection of essays titled The Black Book of Communism that was put together under the direction of French academic Stéphane Courtois. Originally published in French, the Black Book has been translated into multiple languages...
[...] Despite the criticisms directed at the Black Book by many historians, the work is still often presented as a definitive account of the experience of communism, and its arguments have also influenced many people indirectly, even if they have never heard of Courtois or his book. A closer look at the way in which the Black Book was produced and the flaws that scholars have identified in its approach to twentieth-century history is very much in order... (MORE - details)
https://jacobin.com/2025/01/black-book-communism-courtois-history
INTRO (excerpts): The British Conservative politician Daniel Hannan had a similar message as he prepared for “the most monstrous of centenaries.” According to Hannan, communism was far worse than slavery or Nazism: “The Atlantic slave trade killed perhaps 10 million people, the Nazis 17 million — but the Communists killed 100 million.” The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which runs a museum in Washington, carries the following message on its website: “Communism Killed Over 100 Million: We’re telling their stories.”
These claims ultimately rest upon a highly influential collection of essays titled The Black Book of Communism that was put together under the direction of French academic Stéphane Courtois. Originally published in French, the Black Book has been translated into multiple languages...
[...] Despite the criticisms directed at the Black Book by many historians, the work is still often presented as a definitive account of the experience of communism, and its arguments have also influenced many people indirectly, even if they have never heard of Courtois or his book. A closer look at the way in which the Black Book was produced and the flaws that scholars have identified in its approach to twentieth-century history is very much in order... (MORE - details)
- COMMENT: But OTOH, literary intellectual culture acquired a heavy dependence on Marxist and generic socialist offshoots in the 20th-century (critical theory and other adjacent scholarly movements). These biased presuppositions lead it to a pervasively reoccurring theme of apologizing for collectivism gone awry in historically horrible ways, and the usual lamenting that "we just need to get it right, rather than throw it away". It's fundamentally protective about that territory, especially when the evaluation comes from outside the echo chamber.
In light of that, it may be difficult for those capable of actually residing thought-wise outside the Left/Right stranglehold to buy into a potentially cherry-picking counter criticism being fully objective itself, anymore than that in TBBOC.
The advantage of appeal that both old fashioned Marxism and Neo-Marxism have enjoyed is that they operate behind the facade of socioeconomic do-gooderism. The monster is concealed and only revealed after the revolution or other [milder] forms of conquest slash transition. Whereas fascism is arguably out in the open and upfront about its nastiness. There's a section of dialogue from "Billions" that alludes to that dichotomy of style or approach, albeit in a different context of progressive capitalist versus classic capitalist.
- - - BILLIONS (season 7, episode 11) - "Axe Global" - - -
TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT: [Michael] Prince is too smooth. Too confident. He's built different. It's like he ate the Great Man Theory and asked for seconds.
[CHUCKLES] Well, no argument there. But I'm not seeing enough evidence your guy is that different. Which is why I am here.
And I am grateful you are, Governor.
I don't need gratitude. I need clarity.
Clarity. Okay.
Well, Bobby Axelrod doesn't lie to himself. If he says he's gonna do something monstrous, that's what he does.
And that's what he is. A self-aware monster.
If he says we can get you to the White House, it's not to serve his ego. It is simply the truth. An honest cocky son of a bitch.
And there's your difference. Axe has ego, and doesn't pretend otherwise.
[Michael] Prince wants you to believe he is the benevolent, humble servant of the greater good. A selfless billionaire.
If success in politics is the ability to seem sincere when no sincerity actually exists, then Prince is the ultimate politician.
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(review) On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/patricia-lockwood/that-shape-am-i
EXCERPTS: I picked up Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism because I wanted to read it. A survey of historical mystics, examined through the lenses of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot? Sketches of Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Christina of Markyate, Christina the Astonishing, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests?
[...] But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy. ... It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised. This is all down to Meister Eckhart.
The German theologian’s project of negation has held an irresistible allure for him, Critchley explains, ever since he was mock-excommunicated as a second-year undergraduate during a discussion of Eckhart’s sermons. There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin ... This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ (MORE - details)
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Empire's critic: The worlds of Noam Chomsky
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/noam-chomsky-nathan-robinson-myth-american-idealism/
EXCERPT: To some degree, Chomsky and Herman are correct in their claims. As Chomsky and Robinson note in The Myth of American Idealism, mainstream media organizations have dedicated themselves to “reinforcing and spreading the basic doctrines of U.S. foreign policy, portraying our aggression and terror as self-defense”; have “helped the state manufacture new enemies”; have insisted that whatever adversaries we are presently fighting are “diabolical and bent on our destruction”; and have ensured that American “wrongdoing is consigned to the memory hole, or recast as another ‘noble mistake.’”
There is no doubt that all of this is true. But even if propaganda abounds, is it accurate to say that most Americans believe it? Do Americans really consider US power abroad to be a beneficent force? There is ample evidence to suggest they do not... MORE - details)
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Left-wing cancel culture gets canceled
https://www.wsj.com/politics/left-w...c?st=ef29mn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
EXCERPTS: The election of Donald Trump expressed widespread frustration with the censorious methods of progressives. But conservatives have a cancellation problem too.
[...] in the Democratic Party, where it was hazardous just a few months ago to question DEI strictures, it now seems acceptable. There may even be a market for it.
[...] By FIRE’s count, more professors have lost their jobs since 2014 than at any time since the Red Scare of the 1930s. Many were brought down by campaigns and complaints whipped up by their own students. The trend peaked in 2021.
Cancellations began to tick up again last year—though this time from the right, as writers and professors faced sanctions for statements in support of Palestinians and critical of Israel. This trend raises the possibility that cancel culture is not abating but merely shifting from left to right as a new group of scolds gain power... (MORE - details)
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/patricia-lockwood/that-shape-am-i
EXCERPTS: I picked up Simon Critchley’s On Mysticism because I wanted to read it. A survey of historical mystics, examined through the lenses of writers such as Anne Carson and Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot? Sketches of Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux, Christina of Markyate, Christina the Astonishing, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Teresa of Avila, Marie of the Incarnation and Madame Guyon – what could overlap more completely with my interests?
[...] But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy. ... It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised. This is all down to Meister Eckhart.
The German theologian’s project of negation has held an irresistible allure for him, Critchley explains, ever since he was mock-excommunicated as a second-year undergraduate during a discussion of Eckhart’s sermons. There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin ... This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ (MORE - details)
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Empire's critic: The worlds of Noam Chomsky
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/noam-chomsky-nathan-robinson-myth-american-idealism/
EXCERPT: To some degree, Chomsky and Herman are correct in their claims. As Chomsky and Robinson note in The Myth of American Idealism, mainstream media organizations have dedicated themselves to “reinforcing and spreading the basic doctrines of U.S. foreign policy, portraying our aggression and terror as self-defense”; have “helped the state manufacture new enemies”; have insisted that whatever adversaries we are presently fighting are “diabolical and bent on our destruction”; and have ensured that American “wrongdoing is consigned to the memory hole, or recast as another ‘noble mistake.’”
There is no doubt that all of this is true. But even if propaganda abounds, is it accurate to say that most Americans believe it? Do Americans really consider US power abroad to be a beneficent force? There is ample evidence to suggest they do not... MORE - details)
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Left-wing cancel culture gets canceled
https://www.wsj.com/politics/left-w...c?st=ef29mn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
EXCERPTS: The election of Donald Trump expressed widespread frustration with the censorious methods of progressives. But conservatives have a cancellation problem too.
[...] in the Democratic Party, where it was hazardous just a few months ago to question DEI strictures, it now seems acceptable. There may even be a market for it.
[...] By FIRE’s count, more professors have lost their jobs since 2014 than at any time since the Red Scare of the 1930s. Many were brought down by campaigns and complaints whipped up by their own students. The trend peaked in 2021.
Cancellations began to tick up again last year—though this time from the right, as writers and professors faced sanctions for statements in support of Palestinians and critical of Israel. This trend raises the possibility that cancel culture is not abating but merely shifting from left to right as a new group of scolds gain power... (MORE - details)
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Social media is making many people more depressed – Buddhist philosophy may offer an explanation
https://theconversation.com/social-...st-philosophy-may-offer-an-explanation-244985
As a Buddhist philosopher who has just completed a PhD with a focus on Buddhist thought, I believe this ancient insight describes our contemporary world more than we might think. [...] Social media encompasses all of these elements of our modern lives. These platforms have become a prominent aspect of our culture and now constitute the primary medium for much of our daily communication. Buddhist philosophy would say they are also responsible for creating and perpetuating feelings of craving...
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Living in Constitutional Moments
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/23/constitutional-moments/
We are living in a time when something fundamental has given way. [...] What’s given way is confidence in existing structures of governance. Liberal democracy, for many people around the world and at home, no longer seems able to sustain its promise of a hopeful future. There are many reasons for this: unsustainable inequality, loss of identity, a sense of powerlessness (because, as populists like to say, “it’s all rigged”), which induces a fear of “obsolescence” or “uselessness” – because “others” are threatening to take one’s place on the ladder to success...
[...] The sense of scarcity and deprivation and resentment that burns like a fever at the heart of neoliberal capitalism is no friend of wonder. It relies, instead, on the highly unstable currency of quick endorphin highs – the fuel that drives the attention economy online based on algorithms designed to nudge behavior toward whatever generates more attention, more likes. It’s an economy steeped in the kind of addiction that causes people to recklessly borrow from the future – theirs and others. Social media, in this respect, is symptomatic of an anti-life drive...
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Who to blame for early modern climate change?
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/who-blame-early-modern-climate-change
Environmental historians and climate scientists now recognise the 17th century as a period of intense climate change, the peak of the Little Ice Age – a period of severe cooling between the 16th and late 18th centuries – in which average yearly temperatures in the northern hemisphere plunged by as much as two degrees Celsius. While such a number might seem small, it had massive local effects. [...] The changing climate of the Little Ice Age forced radical thinkers to reconsider humanity’s place in the universe...
[...] For many, these weather phenomena were fundamentally religious events that called for a godly interpretation. ... climate change during the period led to tragic instances of scapegoating. In southern Germany in 1626, a spring hailstorm followed by sudden Arctic temperatures prompted the swift and horrific torture and execution of 900 men and women, accused of creating the storm by witchcraft. Arndt, for his part, did not attempt to blame vulnerable groups. Instead, he presented an ecological vision in which humans and the cosmos were in intimate interrelation, suffering together even as they did so as a result of human moral failure...
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https://theconversation.com/social-...st-philosophy-may-offer-an-explanation-244985
As a Buddhist philosopher who has just completed a PhD with a focus on Buddhist thought, I believe this ancient insight describes our contemporary world more than we might think. [...] Social media encompasses all of these elements of our modern lives. These platforms have become a prominent aspect of our culture and now constitute the primary medium for much of our daily communication. Buddhist philosophy would say they are also responsible for creating and perpetuating feelings of craving...
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Living in Constitutional Moments
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/23/constitutional-moments/
We are living in a time when something fundamental has given way. [...] What’s given way is confidence in existing structures of governance. Liberal democracy, for many people around the world and at home, no longer seems able to sustain its promise of a hopeful future. There are many reasons for this: unsustainable inequality, loss of identity, a sense of powerlessness (because, as populists like to say, “it’s all rigged”), which induces a fear of “obsolescence” or “uselessness” – because “others” are threatening to take one’s place on the ladder to success...
[...] The sense of scarcity and deprivation and resentment that burns like a fever at the heart of neoliberal capitalism is no friend of wonder. It relies, instead, on the highly unstable currency of quick endorphin highs – the fuel that drives the attention economy online based on algorithms designed to nudge behavior toward whatever generates more attention, more likes. It’s an economy steeped in the kind of addiction that causes people to recklessly borrow from the future – theirs and others. Social media, in this respect, is symptomatic of an anti-life drive...
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Who to blame for early modern climate change?
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/who-blame-early-modern-climate-change
Environmental historians and climate scientists now recognise the 17th century as a period of intense climate change, the peak of the Little Ice Age – a period of severe cooling between the 16th and late 18th centuries – in which average yearly temperatures in the northern hemisphere plunged by as much as two degrees Celsius. While such a number might seem small, it had massive local effects. [...] The changing climate of the Little Ice Age forced radical thinkers to reconsider humanity’s place in the universe...
[...] For many, these weather phenomena were fundamentally religious events that called for a godly interpretation. ... climate change during the period led to tragic instances of scapegoating. In southern Germany in 1626, a spring hailstorm followed by sudden Arctic temperatures prompted the swift and horrific torture and execution of 900 men and women, accused of creating the storm by witchcraft. Arndt, for his part, did not attempt to blame vulnerable groups. Instead, he presented an ecological vision in which humans and the cosmos were in intimate interrelation, suffering together even as they did so as a result of human moral failure...
_
Reconsidering how we think about sexual violence
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/22/reconsidering-how-we-think-about-sexual-violence/
Although this feminist-aligned research program contributed to a transformation in mainstream understanding and management of sexual violence, there is growing concern that the account it presents is seriously distorted. Next, I sketch three developing criticisms of how sexual violence is studied...
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The Role of Decoherence in Quantum Mechanics (Recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/
INTRO: Interference phenomena are a well-known and crucial aspect of quantum mechanics, famously exemplified by the two-slit experiment. There are many situations, however, in which interference effects are artificially or spontaneously suppressed. The theory of decoherence is precisely the study of such situations. It is is relevant (or is claimed to be relevant) to a variety of questions ranging from the measurement problem to the arrow of time, and in particular to the question of whether and how the ‘classical world’ may emerge from quantum mechanics...
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Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
[ur]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/[/URL]
INTRO: The first major work in the history of philosophy to bear the title “Metaphysics” was the treatise by Aristotle that we have come to know by that name. But Aristotle himself did not use that title or even describe his field of study as ‘metaphysics’; the name was evidently coined by the first century C.E. editor who assembled the treatise we know as Aristotle’s Metaphysics out of various smaller selections of Aristotle’s works. The title ‘metaphysics’—literally, ‘after the Physics’—very likely indicated the place the topics discussed therein were intended to occupy in the philosophical curriculum. They were to be studied after the treatises dealing with nature (ta phusika). In this entry, we discuss the ideas that are developed in Aristotle’s treatise...
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The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge (Recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-knowledge-social/
INTRO: Study of the social dimensions of scientific knowledge encompasses the effects of scientific research on human life and social relations, the effects of social relations and values on scientific research, and the social aspects of inquiry itself. Several factors have combined to make these questions salient to contemporary philosophy of science. These factors include the emergence of social movements, like environmentalism and feminism, critical of mainstream science; concerns about the social effects of science-based technologies; epistemological questions made salient by big science; new trends in the history of science, especially the move away from internalist historiography; anti-normative approaches in the sociology of science; turns in philosophy to naturalism and pragmatism. This entry reviews the historical background to current research in this area, features of contemporary science that invite philosophical attention, and philosophical responses to those features....
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https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/22/reconsidering-how-we-think-about-sexual-violence/
Although this feminist-aligned research program contributed to a transformation in mainstream understanding and management of sexual violence, there is growing concern that the account it presents is seriously distorted. Next, I sketch three developing criticisms of how sexual violence is studied...
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The Role of Decoherence in Quantum Mechanics (Recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-decoherence/
INTRO: Interference phenomena are a well-known and crucial aspect of quantum mechanics, famously exemplified by the two-slit experiment. There are many situations, however, in which interference effects are artificially or spontaneously suppressed. The theory of decoherence is precisely the study of such situations. It is is relevant (or is claimed to be relevant) to a variety of questions ranging from the measurement problem to the arrow of time, and in particular to the question of whether and how the ‘classical world’ may emerge from quantum mechanics...
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Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
[ur]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/[/URL]
INTRO: The first major work in the history of philosophy to bear the title “Metaphysics” was the treatise by Aristotle that we have come to know by that name. But Aristotle himself did not use that title or even describe his field of study as ‘metaphysics’; the name was evidently coined by the first century C.E. editor who assembled the treatise we know as Aristotle’s Metaphysics out of various smaller selections of Aristotle’s works. The title ‘metaphysics’—literally, ‘after the Physics’—very likely indicated the place the topics discussed therein were intended to occupy in the philosophical curriculum. They were to be studied after the treatises dealing with nature (ta phusika). In this entry, we discuss the ideas that are developed in Aristotle’s treatise...
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The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge (Recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-knowledge-social/
INTRO: Study of the social dimensions of scientific knowledge encompasses the effects of scientific research on human life and social relations, the effects of social relations and values on scientific research, and the social aspects of inquiry itself. Several factors have combined to make these questions salient to contemporary philosophy of science. These factors include the emergence of social movements, like environmentalism and feminism, critical of mainstream science; concerns about the social effects of science-based technologies; epistemological questions made salient by big science; new trends in the history of science, especially the move away from internalist historiography; anti-normative approaches in the sociology of science; turns in philosophy to naturalism and pragmatism. This entry reviews the historical background to current research in this area, features of contemporary science that invite philosophical attention, and philosophical responses to those features....
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The universe is unknowable from within it (philosophy of space and time)
https://iai.tv/articles/the-universe-is-unknowable-from-within-it-auid-3057?_auid=2020
INTRO: Humanity’s search for a theory of everything is one of the motivating forces behind the whole scientific endeavour. But is it possible for an observer within the universe to know everything about the universe? Philosopher of science JB Manchak here argues that we cannot know the structure of all of spacetime from any specific point within it – and this is the case even if we somehow collected all the possible perspectives, from every point in the universe. Due to arguments made available by Einstein’s general relativity, we cannot know the universe from within it... (MORE - details)
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There’s more than just gravity at work in the Solar System (philosophy of astrophysics)
https://www.universetoday.com/170611/theres-more-than-just-gravity-at-work-in-the-solar-system/
EXCERPT: In the paper authored by David Jewitt from the University of California he explores other forces that shape our Solar System. Gravity certainly describes the motion of planetary mass bodies but there are other forces that impart forces upon smaller bodies that are susceptible to their effects. These forces include, but are not limited to recoil (as per Newton’s third law of motion that every action has an equal and opposite reaction,) torque from mass loss, radiation pressure and more.... (MORE - details)
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How a popular model of cosmic life and intelligence got it wrong (philosophy of exolife)
https://bigthink.com/13-8/how-a-popular-model-of-cosmic-life-and-intelligence-got-it-wrong/
KEY POINTS: The “Hard Steps Model” argues that intelligence is exceedingly rare in the Universe. The model reaches that conclusion by assuming that the timescale for the appearance of intelligence (driven by evolutionary processes) and the timescale for a planet’s habitability (determined by astrophysical factors) are entirely unrelated. Physicist Adam Frank outlines why he thinks the logic behind the Hard Steps Model is flawed... (MORE - details)
COMMENT: Still, even if you take into account the co-evolution of a planet and its biosphere, it can take billions of years -- barring some world that near-miraculously has ideal conditions from the start. (And orange dwarf and red dwarf stars have a main sequence far longer than our yellow dwarf sun.) And it's not a given that intelligence ineluctably falls out of evolution sooner or later. The cherry-picking optimism about complex life and intelligence being scattered all over the galaxy has been around far longer than newer trends toward pessimism (granting the latter is similarly laden with its own eager presuppositions).
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What if the solar system had a super-earth? Here's what would happen. (what-if thought experimentation)
https://www.sciencealert.com/what-if-the-solar-system-had-a-super-earth-heres-what-would-happen
EXCERPTS: "If it's one or two Earth masses, which is still a pretty big planet, our inner Solar System would still remain quite nice," says Simpson. [...] However, the larger-sized super-Earths shifted the positions of the other planets to a significant degree. An extra planet 10 times the mass of Earth could well have pushed our own planet outside the habitable zone and closer to Venus, while also having an impact on its tilt, causing dangerous extremes between seasons... (MORE - details)
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https://iai.tv/articles/the-universe-is-unknowable-from-within-it-auid-3057?_auid=2020
INTRO: Humanity’s search for a theory of everything is one of the motivating forces behind the whole scientific endeavour. But is it possible for an observer within the universe to know everything about the universe? Philosopher of science JB Manchak here argues that we cannot know the structure of all of spacetime from any specific point within it – and this is the case even if we somehow collected all the possible perspectives, from every point in the universe. Due to arguments made available by Einstein’s general relativity, we cannot know the universe from within it... (MORE - details)
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There’s more than just gravity at work in the Solar System (philosophy of astrophysics)
https://www.universetoday.com/170611/theres-more-than-just-gravity-at-work-in-the-solar-system/
EXCERPT: In the paper authored by David Jewitt from the University of California he explores other forces that shape our Solar System. Gravity certainly describes the motion of planetary mass bodies but there are other forces that impart forces upon smaller bodies that are susceptible to their effects. These forces include, but are not limited to recoil (as per Newton’s third law of motion that every action has an equal and opposite reaction,) torque from mass loss, radiation pressure and more.... (MORE - details)
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How a popular model of cosmic life and intelligence got it wrong (philosophy of exolife)
https://bigthink.com/13-8/how-a-popular-model-of-cosmic-life-and-intelligence-got-it-wrong/
KEY POINTS: The “Hard Steps Model” argues that intelligence is exceedingly rare in the Universe. The model reaches that conclusion by assuming that the timescale for the appearance of intelligence (driven by evolutionary processes) and the timescale for a planet’s habitability (determined by astrophysical factors) are entirely unrelated. Physicist Adam Frank outlines why he thinks the logic behind the Hard Steps Model is flawed... (MORE - details)
COMMENT: Still, even if you take into account the co-evolution of a planet and its biosphere, it can take billions of years -- barring some world that near-miraculously has ideal conditions from the start. (And orange dwarf and red dwarf stars have a main sequence far longer than our yellow dwarf sun.) And it's not a given that intelligence ineluctably falls out of evolution sooner or later. The cherry-picking optimism about complex life and intelligence being scattered all over the galaxy has been around far longer than newer trends toward pessimism (granting the latter is similarly laden with its own eager presuppositions).
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What if the solar system had a super-earth? Here's what would happen. (what-if thought experimentation)
https://www.sciencealert.com/what-if-the-solar-system-had-a-super-earth-heres-what-would-happen
EXCERPTS: "If it's one or two Earth masses, which is still a pretty big planet, our inner Solar System would still remain quite nice," says Simpson. [...] However, the larger-sized super-Earths shifted the positions of the other planets to a significant degree. An extra planet 10 times the mass of Earth could well have pushed our own planet outside the habitable zone and closer to Venus, while also having an impact on its tilt, causing dangerous extremes between seasons... (MORE - details)
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Cosmologists try a new way to measure the shape of the universe (philosophy of cosmology)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosm...o-measure-the-shape-of-the-universe-20250127/
Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more complex? We can’t say for sure, but a new search strategy is mapping out the subtle signals that could reveal if the universe had a shape...
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Steven Weinberg’s pointless final theory (philosophy of science)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/steven-weinbergs-pointless-final-theory
EXCERPT: Weinberg’s final theory won’t be meaningful, or even intelligible, except for a tiny, highly trained (indoctrinated?) elite. It won’t offer any consolation, or moral guidance. It won’t yield any practical benefits. Again, why should we care? In the 30 years since I spoke to Weinberg in Austin, the quest for a final theory has lost its glamour. String theory, for a half century the leading contender for a unified theory of physics, appears to be a dead end. But in one sense, Weinberg, who died in 2021, has been vindicated: The world keeps bearing out his tragic take on the human condition... (MORE - details)
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A “dark dimension” could help explain the origin of dark energy (philosophy of accelerated expansion)
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/a-dark-dimension-could-help-explain-the-origin-of-dark-energy/
EXCERPTS: Dark energy is the term scientists use to describe the mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. For decades, researchers have sought to uncover its nature without much success. This is because dark energy doesn’t emit or interact with light, making it incredibly difficult to detect and study directly. However, a recent theory offers a new explanation. [...] “[String theory] ideas have been combined with observational data to suggest the existence of a mesoscopic extra dimension of roughly micron size, the ‘dark dimension’,” the researchers wrote in their study... (MORE - details)
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Time's arrow is not an illusion (philosophy of time)
https://iai.tv/articles/times-arrow-is-not-an-illusion-auid-3059?_auid=2020
INTRO: According to conventional wisdom, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the flow of time is an illusion, and that reality is a fixed block. And philosophers from Augustine to McTaggart have found the idea of time’s passage to be incoherent. However, argues James Sares, the idea that time’s flow is an illusion is itself incoherent. He uses Hegel’s dialectical logic to prove that time is real, since any denial of its reality must fall into self-contradiction... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: But on the flip side, consider how everything disappears for dead people. Since all the manifestations and feelings of the world that a living individual experiences are representations produced by a functioning brain (rather than literally displaying themselves "out there" in a mindless environment), it's hardly seems a challenge for consciousness and and an interpreting memory organization to be responsible for yet one more type of presentation: The appearance or cognitive judgement of moving from one state to the next slightly different one.
An objective rate of time outside the brain would have to accommodate subatomic changes that are of a vastly "speedier" magnitude than the milliseconds-long elephant of the human moment. Just one of the latter would extend over a huge number of the former modifications. In a sense, projecting the brain's slow-poke version of change or a "flow" upon the external world would be akin to a kind of temporal solipsism (or a hugely inflated act of self-importance on our part).
How the brain produces consciousness in time slices: EPFL scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information into our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between...
Space and time? Here’s how they interact in our brain: two fundamental aspects of our experience of the world (space & time), are processed and integrated in the human brain...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosm...o-measure-the-shape-of-the-universe-20250127/
Is the universe flat and infinite, or something more complex? We can’t say for sure, but a new search strategy is mapping out the subtle signals that could reveal if the universe had a shape...
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Steven Weinberg’s pointless final theory (philosophy of science)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/steven-weinbergs-pointless-final-theory
EXCERPT: Weinberg’s final theory won’t be meaningful, or even intelligible, except for a tiny, highly trained (indoctrinated?) elite. It won’t offer any consolation, or moral guidance. It won’t yield any practical benefits. Again, why should we care? In the 30 years since I spoke to Weinberg in Austin, the quest for a final theory has lost its glamour. String theory, for a half century the leading contender for a unified theory of physics, appears to be a dead end. But in one sense, Weinberg, who died in 2021, has been vindicated: The world keeps bearing out his tragic take on the human condition... (MORE - details)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
A “dark dimension” could help explain the origin of dark energy (philosophy of accelerated expansion)
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/a-dark-dimension-could-help-explain-the-origin-of-dark-energy/
EXCERPTS: Dark energy is the term scientists use to describe the mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. For decades, researchers have sought to uncover its nature without much success. This is because dark energy doesn’t emit or interact with light, making it incredibly difficult to detect and study directly. However, a recent theory offers a new explanation. [...] “[String theory] ideas have been combined with observational data to suggest the existence of a mesoscopic extra dimension of roughly micron size, the ‘dark dimension’,” the researchers wrote in their study... (MORE - details)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Time's arrow is not an illusion (philosophy of time)
https://iai.tv/articles/times-arrow-is-not-an-illusion-auid-3059?_auid=2020
INTRO: According to conventional wisdom, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the flow of time is an illusion, and that reality is a fixed block. And philosophers from Augustine to McTaggart have found the idea of time’s passage to be incoherent. However, argues James Sares, the idea that time’s flow is an illusion is itself incoherent. He uses Hegel’s dialectical logic to prove that time is real, since any denial of its reality must fall into self-contradiction... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: But on the flip side, consider how everything disappears for dead people. Since all the manifestations and feelings of the world that a living individual experiences are representations produced by a functioning brain (rather than literally displaying themselves "out there" in a mindless environment), it's hardly seems a challenge for consciousness and and an interpreting memory organization to be responsible for yet one more type of presentation: The appearance or cognitive judgement of moving from one state to the next slightly different one.
- Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science
Paul Davies: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'." --New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters
An objective rate of time outside the brain would have to accommodate subatomic changes that are of a vastly "speedier" magnitude than the milliseconds-long elephant of the human moment. Just one of the latter would extend over a huge number of the former modifications. In a sense, projecting the brain's slow-poke version of change or a "flow" upon the external world would be akin to a kind of temporal solipsism (or a hugely inflated act of self-importance on our part).
How the brain produces consciousness in time slices: EPFL scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information into our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between...
Space and time? Here’s how they interact in our brain: two fundamental aspects of our experience of the world (space & time), are processed and integrated in the human brain...
Is AI eroding our critical thinking abilities?
https://bigthink.com/thinking/artificial-intelligence-critical-thinking/
KEY POINTS: As we increasingly offload cognitive tasks to artificial intelligence, researchers are concerned that our critical thinking skills will atrophy. A recent study finds exactly that: Participants who reported higher use of AI scored worse on measures of critical thinking. In an interview with Big Think, study author Dr. Michael Gerlich suggested that AI isn’t inherently bad for our cognitive abilities — like any tool, it needs to be used correctly... (MORE - details)
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What a real-life ‘trolley problem’ reveals about morality
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-a-real-life-trolley-problem-reveals-about-morality
EXCERPTS: For decades, moral philosophers and psychologists have used hypothetical scenarios called ‘trolley problems’ to study how people make moral decisions. [...] These thought experiments have captured the public imagination ... But these dilemmas have one crucial limitation: they’re hypothetical. ... There’s a vast psychological distance .. between imagining what we might do and discovering what we will do when our actions have real consequences. My colleagues and I wanted to find a way to bridge this gap between thought experiments and reality, so we designed a study that would preserve the ethical core of trolley problems while introducing genuine moral stakes... (MORE - details)
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In praise of subspecies (philosophy of biology)
https://aeon.co/essays/the-case-for-subspecies-the-neglected-unit-of-conservation
EXCERPTS: Both scientifically and in broader society, we are tied to the species as the bedrock unit of the animal kingdom. Species are, for want of a better term, easy. Look, for instance, at how we speak about extinction. We talk about the dodo and the great auk, the blue whale and the giant panda. But there are various subspecies that deserve to be better known and protected. Trinomialism – resisted for a long time by some in the establishment – offers not only scientific clarity and variety, but an enriched view of the living world and our relationship with it.
[...] It’s true that the ‘subspecies’ concept opened a large can of worms (interestingly, the taxonomy of worms is itself a particularly fraught field, a can of worms within a can of worms). But there’s another way of looking at trinomials. Splitting – focusing more narrowly on the differences between populations – might bring us closer to a bird’s eye view, a worm’s eye view, an animal’s eye view of nonhuman life. Species-centric thinking means we’re inclined to value an animal’s life relative to the scarcity or abundance of its species. What this ratcheting scale means is that we only really value the individual animal when there’s just a few of them left – that is, when it’s already too late... (MORE - details)
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The scientific fight over whether aging is a disease (philosophy of science)
https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness...9?st=G1oKVZ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
INTRO: A small but growing movement of scientists wants to classify aging as a disease. They face an uphill battle.
An improving scientific understanding of the biology of aging is leading some scientists, doctors and entrepreneurs to argue that aging is a disease. It’s a major driver of illness and death, they say, and classifying it as such could make it easier to get drugs approved to treat aging itself, rather than just age-related health problems.
At the same time, the population is aging and many older Americans remain healthy and active. For many of them, and plenty of healthcare professionals, the idea that aging is a disease is offensive, and there’s nothing inherently bad about growing older.
Such a shift could lead doctors to dismiss health conditions as “just old age,” detractors say, resulting in worse medical care for seniors. Others worry calling aging a disease could lead to financial exploitation by the antiaging industry, capitalizing on quick fixes to “cure” aging... (MORE - details)
ALTERNATIVE LINK OR SOURCE: https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/b...t-over-whether-aging-is-a-disease/ar-AA1xY9ui
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https://bigthink.com/thinking/artificial-intelligence-critical-thinking/
KEY POINTS: As we increasingly offload cognitive tasks to artificial intelligence, researchers are concerned that our critical thinking skills will atrophy. A recent study finds exactly that: Participants who reported higher use of AI scored worse on measures of critical thinking. In an interview with Big Think, study author Dr. Michael Gerlich suggested that AI isn’t inherently bad for our cognitive abilities — like any tool, it needs to be used correctly... (MORE - details)
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What a real-life ‘trolley problem’ reveals about morality
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-a-real-life-trolley-problem-reveals-about-morality
EXCERPTS: For decades, moral philosophers and psychologists have used hypothetical scenarios called ‘trolley problems’ to study how people make moral decisions. [...] These thought experiments have captured the public imagination ... But these dilemmas have one crucial limitation: they’re hypothetical. ... There’s a vast psychological distance .. between imagining what we might do and discovering what we will do when our actions have real consequences. My colleagues and I wanted to find a way to bridge this gap between thought experiments and reality, so we designed a study that would preserve the ethical core of trolley problems while introducing genuine moral stakes... (MORE - details)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
In praise of subspecies (philosophy of biology)
https://aeon.co/essays/the-case-for-subspecies-the-neglected-unit-of-conservation
EXCERPTS: Both scientifically and in broader society, we are tied to the species as the bedrock unit of the animal kingdom. Species are, for want of a better term, easy. Look, for instance, at how we speak about extinction. We talk about the dodo and the great auk, the blue whale and the giant panda. But there are various subspecies that deserve to be better known and protected. Trinomialism – resisted for a long time by some in the establishment – offers not only scientific clarity and variety, but an enriched view of the living world and our relationship with it.
[...] It’s true that the ‘subspecies’ concept opened a large can of worms (interestingly, the taxonomy of worms is itself a particularly fraught field, a can of worms within a can of worms). But there’s another way of looking at trinomials. Splitting – focusing more narrowly on the differences between populations – might bring us closer to a bird’s eye view, a worm’s eye view, an animal’s eye view of nonhuman life. Species-centric thinking means we’re inclined to value an animal’s life relative to the scarcity or abundance of its species. What this ratcheting scale means is that we only really value the individual animal when there’s just a few of them left – that is, when it’s already too late... (MORE - details)
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The scientific fight over whether aging is a disease (philosophy of science)
https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness...9?st=G1oKVZ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
INTRO: A small but growing movement of scientists wants to classify aging as a disease. They face an uphill battle.
An improving scientific understanding of the biology of aging is leading some scientists, doctors and entrepreneurs to argue that aging is a disease. It’s a major driver of illness and death, they say, and classifying it as such could make it easier to get drugs approved to treat aging itself, rather than just age-related health problems.
At the same time, the population is aging and many older Americans remain healthy and active. For many of them, and plenty of healthcare professionals, the idea that aging is a disease is offensive, and there’s nothing inherently bad about growing older.
Such a shift could lead doctors to dismiss health conditions as “just old age,” detractors say, resulting in worse medical care for seniors. Others worry calling aging a disease could lead to financial exploitation by the antiaging industry, capitalizing on quick fixes to “cure” aging... (MORE - details)
ALTERNATIVE LINK OR SOURCE: https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/b...t-over-whether-aging-is-a-disease/ar-AA1xY9ui
_
Curious that the "night" metaphor is used with respect to being trapped inside the skull. As far as the mainstream "anti-panpsychism" view goes -- it is consciousness that is usually referred to as "light", and the normal state of the (non-conscious) material world -- beyond the neural activity -- is what is considered as existing in the dark (lacking manifestations of itself).
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Reality is in the eye of the beholder
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/reality-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/
EXCERPTS: It’s always night inside my skull — yours too, unless there are actual gaping holes in it. [...] that the sensory reality that I inhabit is virtual. To put it less gently, I am living a lie...
[...] The senses gather and make good use of enough information about what is happening on the outside to keep the virtual reality rig alive and kicking. If there is still any unease left, it comes from too much thinking, and too much worrying, about far-out things like ultimate truth.
One such worry that arises out of thinking about perception is this: Given that everything we perceive is a virtual construct, how can we keep believing that our senses reveal to us the world as it really is? [...] If different species, or even different individuals belonging to the same species, inhabit different perceptual worlds, what can we know about what the real world is like? (MORE - details)
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People who can't 'see with their mind's eye' have different wiring in the brain (philosophy of mind)
https://www.livescience.com/health/...-minds-eye-have-different-wiring-in-the-brain
EXCERPTS: People with aphantasia lack the ability to summon crisp images in their "mind's eye." But even though they can't visualize in this way, the blueprints for those imaginary images might still be nestled in their brains, a new study suggests.
The work, published in the journal Current Biology, provides early evidence that the brains of people with aphantasia can light up as if they were generating mental images in their primary visual cortex — the main part of the brain responsible for processing visual information. However, these signals may be getting lost in translation.
[...] people with aphantasia showed slightly weaker brain activity during perception than those without the condition. This suggests there is a "different level of processing — or type of processing — in that group" when they're directly observing an image... (MORE - details)
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Antikythera
https://longnow.org/ideas/antikythera/
INTRO: Antikythera: For a new speculative philosophy of computation (which is to say of life, intelligence, automation, and the compositional evolution of planets)
Sciences are born when philosophy learns to ask the right questions; their potential is suppressed when it does not. Today the relationship between the Humanities and Science is one of critical suspicion, a state of affairs that retards not only the development of philosophy but of new sciences to come.
And so for Antikythera, the most important philosophical project of the next century is based on understanding the profound implications of new scientific and technological accomplishments. This means not just applying concepts but inventing them.
This puts our work in a slightly heretical position in relation to the current orientations of the Humanities, but one that is well placed to develop the school of thought for the speculative philosophy of computation that will frame new and fertile lines of inquiry for a future where science, technology and philosophy convene within whatever supersedes the Humanities as we know it. New things outrun the nouns available to contain them.... (MORE - details)
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The brain holds no exclusive rights on how to create intelligence (philosophy of AI)
https://www.thetransmitter.org/neur...clusive-rights-on-how-to-create-intelligence/
EXCERPTS: . . . many of the recent developments that have contributed to the explosive success of AI have diverged from neuroscience as a source of computational principles. A decade ago, inspired by the brain, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) seemed to be the way forward as AI tackled time-dependent problems such as speech recognition and natural language processing. This direction changed quickly, however, with the landmark transformer paper in 2017: “Attention is all you need.”
The introduction of the transformer architecture marked an important inflection point in the history of AI. Transformers are notable both in their surprising power and in how un-brain-like they are. They lack the recurrent connections of RNNs and operate in discontinuous time—that is, through discrete time steps without any “memory” of the states from the previous time step. They are also devoid of any form of working memory; they cleverly externalize working memory by iteratively increasing the length of the input at each iteration. Most notably perhaps, transformers lack any internal dynamics or ability to tell time...
[...] By design, transformers are, in a sense, timeless. To use an analogy with terms from the philosophy of time, transformers operate in a block universe where the past, present and future (in the case of bidirectional transformers) are all simultaneously available. By contrast, RNNs operate in a presentist universe in which only the current input is available, and computations unfold in continuous time.
The so-called attention mechanism of transformers sounds biological, but it does not really refer to what most cognitive neuroscientists would consider attention. It essentially assigns a value to the strength of the relationship between all word pairs in a sentence ... Furthermore, the implementation of the attention mechanism also lacks biological plausibility... (MORE - details)
RELATED: Time's Arrow Is Not An Illusion
_
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Reality is in the eye of the beholder
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/reality-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/
EXCERPTS: It’s always night inside my skull — yours too, unless there are actual gaping holes in it. [...] that the sensory reality that I inhabit is virtual. To put it less gently, I am living a lie...
[...] The senses gather and make good use of enough information about what is happening on the outside to keep the virtual reality rig alive and kicking. If there is still any unease left, it comes from too much thinking, and too much worrying, about far-out things like ultimate truth.
One such worry that arises out of thinking about perception is this: Given that everything we perceive is a virtual construct, how can we keep believing that our senses reveal to us the world as it really is? [...] If different species, or even different individuals belonging to the same species, inhabit different perceptual worlds, what can we know about what the real world is like? (MORE - details)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
People who can't 'see with their mind's eye' have different wiring in the brain (philosophy of mind)
https://www.livescience.com/health/...-minds-eye-have-different-wiring-in-the-brain
EXCERPTS: People with aphantasia lack the ability to summon crisp images in their "mind's eye." But even though they can't visualize in this way, the blueprints for those imaginary images might still be nestled in their brains, a new study suggests.
The work, published in the journal Current Biology, provides early evidence that the brains of people with aphantasia can light up as if they were generating mental images in their primary visual cortex — the main part of the brain responsible for processing visual information. However, these signals may be getting lost in translation.
[...] people with aphantasia showed slightly weaker brain activity during perception than those without the condition. This suggests there is a "different level of processing — or type of processing — in that group" when they're directly observing an image... (MORE - details)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Antikythera
https://longnow.org/ideas/antikythera/
INTRO: Antikythera: For a new speculative philosophy of computation (which is to say of life, intelligence, automation, and the compositional evolution of planets)
Sciences are born when philosophy learns to ask the right questions; their potential is suppressed when it does not. Today the relationship between the Humanities and Science is one of critical suspicion, a state of affairs that retards not only the development of philosophy but of new sciences to come.
And so for Antikythera, the most important philosophical project of the next century is based on understanding the profound implications of new scientific and technological accomplishments. This means not just applying concepts but inventing them.
This puts our work in a slightly heretical position in relation to the current orientations of the Humanities, but one that is well placed to develop the school of thought for the speculative philosophy of computation that will frame new and fertile lines of inquiry for a future where science, technology and philosophy convene within whatever supersedes the Humanities as we know it. New things outrun the nouns available to contain them.... (MORE - details)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
The brain holds no exclusive rights on how to create intelligence (philosophy of AI)
https://www.thetransmitter.org/neur...clusive-rights-on-how-to-create-intelligence/
EXCERPTS: . . . many of the recent developments that have contributed to the explosive success of AI have diverged from neuroscience as a source of computational principles. A decade ago, inspired by the brain, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) seemed to be the way forward as AI tackled time-dependent problems such as speech recognition and natural language processing. This direction changed quickly, however, with the landmark transformer paper in 2017: “Attention is all you need.”
The introduction of the transformer architecture marked an important inflection point in the history of AI. Transformers are notable both in their surprising power and in how un-brain-like they are. They lack the recurrent connections of RNNs and operate in discontinuous time—that is, through discrete time steps without any “memory” of the states from the previous time step. They are also devoid of any form of working memory; they cleverly externalize working memory by iteratively increasing the length of the input at each iteration. Most notably perhaps, transformers lack any internal dynamics or ability to tell time...
[...] By design, transformers are, in a sense, timeless. To use an analogy with terms from the philosophy of time, transformers operate in a block universe where the past, present and future (in the case of bidirectional transformers) are all simultaneously available. By contrast, RNNs operate in a presentist universe in which only the current input is available, and computations unfold in continuous time.
The so-called attention mechanism of transformers sounds biological, but it does not really refer to what most cognitive neuroscientists would consider attention. It essentially assigns a value to the strength of the relationship between all word pairs in a sentence ... Furthermore, the implementation of the attention mechanism also lacks biological plausibility... (MORE - details)
RELATED: Time's Arrow Is Not An Illusion
_
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The story of advice
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/in-need-of-repair/articles/the-story-of-advice
EXCERPTS: In a column for The Point magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, comes out against advice. [...] Advice, for Callard, occupies nebulous terrain between what she terms “instructions” and “coaching.”
“You give someone instructions,” she writes, “as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to some...further goal,” whereas “coaching...effects in someone a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value: an athletic or intellectual or even social triumph.” The problem with advice, according to Callard, is that it tries to reduce and condense the time-intensive, personal work of coaching into instructions... (MORE - details)
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‘The Word of Dog’ Review: Four-legged philosophers
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/bo...5?st=8jx8xs&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
EXCERPT: Can this canine instinct help us think more clearly about the complexities of being human? Absolutely, argues Mark Rowlands in “The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life.”
Although he doesn’t cite Schleiermacher by name, Mr. Rowlands—a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami and the author of several books about animal psychology, as well as a memoir about his decadelong relationship with a wolf—is less interested in the ethical considerations of the “good life” than he is in Schleiermacher’s more psychological account of human loss.
Dogs, Mr. Rowlands argues—by way of several deeply moving and lyrically written accounts of his own dogs, especially his German Shepherd, Shadow—have access to a kind of joy and immediacy we humans do not... (MORE - details)
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Vibe shift: The birth of a retarded avant-garde
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-shift-to-vibes
EXCERPT: They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy.
From much of the tone and content, going as it does from dazed and out-of-it to intense and desiring, one sadly suspects that that scourge of all Bohemias, heroin, is doing its grim work. Then there’s the pro-anorexia stuff, itself a throwback to the MySpace and Livejournal-era, but now combining Simone Weil’s mystical asceticism with teenage neurosis. If it did not confer something sexy and dangerous, one might propose Freud’s death drive, a will to annihilation, is behind all this: the word “extinction” recurs frequently.
Are they being ironic? As always, yes and no, but if when are it seems partly a self-protective move: one can detect in the pseudo-intellectualism, esoterica, faux-mysticism, and general atmosphere of hocus-pocus a strong self-serious streak and a real egotistical lust for power and prominence.
The term “vibe shift,” which was apparently created by the members of the scene and sort of stolen by journalists and interpreters, is itself telling... (MORE - details)
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“Anarchism means that you should be free.” On the literature of liberation
https://lithub.com/anarchism-means-that-you-should-be-free-on-the-literature-of-liberation/
EXCERPTS: Anarchism has a dizzying array of sects. [...] Yet compared to their sometimes-comrades and often-times adversaries the Marxist-Leninists, who at the height of their power governed over a third of the globe, anarchism—at least in the modern world—has been rarely attempted. And so, a certain imaginative impulse is necessitated, a lyric sensibility, a literary perspective.
While the communist finds salvation in the state and the capitalist in the corporation, the anarchist understands redemption as imparted by friends and neighbors, family and comrades. Whether violent or pacificist, “Anarchism means that you should be free,” writes Berkman in his charmingly titled ABC of Anarchism, “that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you.”
[...] Marxism is an ideology for economists, but anarchism is for poets—a rhetoric that’s thundering and denunciatory, excoriating and profane. ... As Berkman’s hatred of authority indicates, Marxists may despise the capitalists, and capitalists the state, but anarchism has the wisdom to detest both.
[...] One man’s nihilistic terrorist is another man’s romantic freedom fighter, and so it has been in the literature of those who’ve been ground down by the system lashing out in righteous violence. William Godwin, the eighteenth-century English novelist never used the word “anarchism,” yet has been claimed as a forerunner... (MORE - details)
_
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/in-need-of-repair/articles/the-story-of-advice
EXCERPTS: In a column for The Point magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, comes out against advice. [...] Advice, for Callard, occupies nebulous terrain between what she terms “instructions” and “coaching.”
“You give someone instructions,” she writes, “as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to some...further goal,” whereas “coaching...effects in someone a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value: an athletic or intellectual or even social triumph.” The problem with advice, according to Callard, is that it tries to reduce and condense the time-intensive, personal work of coaching into instructions... (MORE - details)
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‘The Word of Dog’ Review: Four-legged philosophers
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/bo...5?st=8jx8xs&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
EXCERPT: Can this canine instinct help us think more clearly about the complexities of being human? Absolutely, argues Mark Rowlands in “The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life.”
Although he doesn’t cite Schleiermacher by name, Mr. Rowlands—a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami and the author of several books about animal psychology, as well as a memoir about his decadelong relationship with a wolf—is less interested in the ethical considerations of the “good life” than he is in Schleiermacher’s more psychological account of human loss.
Dogs, Mr. Rowlands argues—by way of several deeply moving and lyrically written accounts of his own dogs, especially his German Shepherd, Shadow—have access to a kind of joy and immediacy we humans do not... (MORE - details)
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Vibe shift: The birth of a retarded avant-garde
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-shift-to-vibes
EXCERPT: They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy.
From much of the tone and content, going as it does from dazed and out-of-it to intense and desiring, one sadly suspects that that scourge of all Bohemias, heroin, is doing its grim work. Then there’s the pro-anorexia stuff, itself a throwback to the MySpace and Livejournal-era, but now combining Simone Weil’s mystical asceticism with teenage neurosis. If it did not confer something sexy and dangerous, one might propose Freud’s death drive, a will to annihilation, is behind all this: the word “extinction” recurs frequently.
Are they being ironic? As always, yes and no, but if when are it seems partly a self-protective move: one can detect in the pseudo-intellectualism, esoterica, faux-mysticism, and general atmosphere of hocus-pocus a strong self-serious streak and a real egotistical lust for power and prominence.
The term “vibe shift,” which was apparently created by the members of the scene and sort of stolen by journalists and interpreters, is itself telling... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Anarchism means that you should be free.” On the literature of liberation
https://lithub.com/anarchism-means-that-you-should-be-free-on-the-literature-of-liberation/
EXCERPTS: Anarchism has a dizzying array of sects. [...] Yet compared to their sometimes-comrades and often-times adversaries the Marxist-Leninists, who at the height of their power governed over a third of the globe, anarchism—at least in the modern world—has been rarely attempted. And so, a certain imaginative impulse is necessitated, a lyric sensibility, a literary perspective.
While the communist finds salvation in the state and the capitalist in the corporation, the anarchist understands redemption as imparted by friends and neighbors, family and comrades. Whether violent or pacificist, “Anarchism means that you should be free,” writes Berkman in his charmingly titled ABC of Anarchism, “that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you.”
[...] Marxism is an ideology for economists, but anarchism is for poets—a rhetoric that’s thundering and denunciatory, excoriating and profane. ... As Berkman’s hatred of authority indicates, Marxists may despise the capitalists, and capitalists the state, but anarchism has the wisdom to detest both.
[...] One man’s nihilistic terrorist is another man’s romantic freedom fighter, and so it has been in the literature of those who’ve been ground down by the system lashing out in righteous violence. William Godwin, the eighteenth-century English novelist never used the word “anarchism,” yet has been claimed as a forerunner... (MORE - details)
_
Inverted Qualia (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/
INTRO: Qualia inversion thought experiments are ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy of mind (largely due to the influence of Shoemaker 1982 and Block 1990). The most popular kind is one or another variant of Locke’s hypothetical case of “spectrum inversion”, in which strawberries and ripe tomatoes produce visual experiences of the sort that are actually produced by grass and cucumbers, grass and cucumbers produce experiences of the sort that are actually produced by strawberries and ripe tomatoes, and so on. This entry surveys the main philosophical applications of what Dennett has called “one of philosophy’s most virulent memes”.. (MORE - details)
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François Poulain de la Barre (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francois-barre/
INTRO: François Poulain de la Barre (1648–1723) is known for his treatises De l’égalité des deux sexes [On the Equality of the Two Sexes] (1673), De l’éducation des dames [On the Education of Ladies] (1674) and De l’excellence des hommes [On the Excellence of Men] (1675). Despite its name, the third treatise continues his defense of equality between the sexes by overturning rhetorically presented arguments on the behalf of the excellence of men.
Together the three books constitute one of the most detailed analyses of the subjugation of women written in the seventeenth century. Poulain’s thought was deeply influenced by René Descartes’ philosophy. He used Descartes’ methods of doubt and right reasoning in order to reject prejudices about the inferiority of women, and his arguments in defense of the equality of the sexes use many insights drawn from Descartes’ account of the nature of the human being... (MORE - details)
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Loneliness and human nature
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/29/loneliness-and-human-nature/
INTRO: John Dewey, in his 1938 essay, “Does Human Nature Change?”, answered in a way consistent with his presupposition of Darwin’s theory of evolution, i.e. yes. Human nature is malleable, insofar as the current iteration of humanity is itself a product of an extremely long period of adaptive change. The label “unnatural,” attached by conservatives to stigmatize certain behaviors, is just an artificial limitation on a flexible and self-transcending human nature.
Yet, in spite of Dewey’s thin conception of human nature, he did believe in certain universals and constants. The common theme of these constants, which I will unpack here, is a kind of loneliness, not one that is not only an aberrant state of social isolation, but one that is inherent to the human condition... (MORE - details)
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Feminist Perspectives on Science (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-science/
INTRO: Feminists have critically and constructively reflected upon and engaged with the social and natural sciences in many ways. They have detailed the historically gendered participation of women in the practice of the sciences—the marginalization or exclusion of women from the profession, or disappearance when they have participated.
Feminists have also noted how the sciences have been slow to study women’s lives, bodies, and experiences. Thus from both the perspectives agents, and the perspectives of subjects of knowledge, women face two issues of equity: limitations on the freedom to participate, and relative lack of attention.
Feminist perspectives encompass more than equity issues however. They extend to questions about the methodology, epistemology, and ontology of scientific inquiry as well. Feminists have scrutinized explicit ways that scientific research has been affected by sexist and gendered presuppositions about the subject matter and the methods appropriate to the sciences.
Such investigations have sometimes revealed how scientific practice has failed to meet standards of good science. Additionally, and more radically, feminists have questioned traditional methodologies and offered alternative approaches better suited to feminist subject matter and goals.
Feminist perspectives on scientific knowledge production have been constructive where criticisms have motivated alternative conceptualization of subject matter, greater attention to the goals of scientific research, and reflection on the epistemological and ontological commitments of methodology.
Feminists are united in urging recognition of the social contexts in which scientific research takes place and scientific knowledge is received. As such, feminist approaches to science are situated in broader movements in philosophy of science and science studies that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century... (MORE - details)
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-inverted/
INTRO: Qualia inversion thought experiments are ubiquitous in contemporary philosophy of mind (largely due to the influence of Shoemaker 1982 and Block 1990). The most popular kind is one or another variant of Locke’s hypothetical case of “spectrum inversion”, in which strawberries and ripe tomatoes produce visual experiences of the sort that are actually produced by grass and cucumbers, grass and cucumbers produce experiences of the sort that are actually produced by strawberries and ripe tomatoes, and so on. This entry surveys the main philosophical applications of what Dennett has called “one of philosophy’s most virulent memes”.. (MORE - details)
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François Poulain de la Barre (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francois-barre/
INTRO: François Poulain de la Barre (1648–1723) is known for his treatises De l’égalité des deux sexes [On the Equality of the Two Sexes] (1673), De l’éducation des dames [On the Education of Ladies] (1674) and De l’excellence des hommes [On the Excellence of Men] (1675). Despite its name, the third treatise continues his defense of equality between the sexes by overturning rhetorically presented arguments on the behalf of the excellence of men.
Together the three books constitute one of the most detailed analyses of the subjugation of women written in the seventeenth century. Poulain’s thought was deeply influenced by René Descartes’ philosophy. He used Descartes’ methods of doubt and right reasoning in order to reject prejudices about the inferiority of women, and his arguments in defense of the equality of the sexes use many insights drawn from Descartes’ account of the nature of the human being... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Loneliness and human nature
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/01/29/loneliness-and-human-nature/
INTRO: John Dewey, in his 1938 essay, “Does Human Nature Change?”, answered in a way consistent with his presupposition of Darwin’s theory of evolution, i.e. yes. Human nature is malleable, insofar as the current iteration of humanity is itself a product of an extremely long period of adaptive change. The label “unnatural,” attached by conservatives to stigmatize certain behaviors, is just an artificial limitation on a flexible and self-transcending human nature.
Yet, in spite of Dewey’s thin conception of human nature, he did believe in certain universals and constants. The common theme of these constants, which I will unpack here, is a kind of loneliness, not one that is not only an aberrant state of social isolation, but one that is inherent to the human condition... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Feminist Perspectives on Science (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-science/
INTRO: Feminists have critically and constructively reflected upon and engaged with the social and natural sciences in many ways. They have detailed the historically gendered participation of women in the practice of the sciences—the marginalization or exclusion of women from the profession, or disappearance when they have participated.
Feminists have also noted how the sciences have been slow to study women’s lives, bodies, and experiences. Thus from both the perspectives agents, and the perspectives of subjects of knowledge, women face two issues of equity: limitations on the freedom to participate, and relative lack of attention.
Feminist perspectives encompass more than equity issues however. They extend to questions about the methodology, epistemology, and ontology of scientific inquiry as well. Feminists have scrutinized explicit ways that scientific research has been affected by sexist and gendered presuppositions about the subject matter and the methods appropriate to the sciences.
Such investigations have sometimes revealed how scientific practice has failed to meet standards of good science. Additionally, and more radically, feminists have questioned traditional methodologies and offered alternative approaches better suited to feminist subject matter and goals.
Feminist perspectives on scientific knowledge production have been constructive where criticisms have motivated alternative conceptualization of subject matter, greater attention to the goals of scientific research, and reflection on the epistemological and ontological commitments of methodology.
Feminists are united in urging recognition of the social contexts in which scientific research takes place and scientific knowledge is received. As such, feminist approaches to science are situated in broader movements in philosophy of science and science studies that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century... (MORE - details)
_
Logic is nothing without metaphysics
https://iai.tv/articles/logic-is-nothing-without-metaphysic-auid-3064?_auid=2020
INTRO: The laws of logic are believed to be the basis of rational thought. But what grounds logic itself? Surely logic cannot be grounded in logic, for that would be circular reasoning, and therefore illogical. Yale Professor Jacob McNulty argues there is no logical foundation for logic. Instead we should look to Hegel for a solution to this dilemma, according to which logic is derived from metaphysics... (MORE - details)
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Think your efforts to help the climate don’t matter? African philosophers disagree
https://theconversation.com/think-y...t-matter-african-philosophers-disagree-247042
EXCERPT: Complementarity has been used by African philosophers like Jonathan Chimakonam, Aïda Terblanché-Greeff, Diana-Abasi Ibanga and Kevin Gary Behrens to develop environmental philosophies based on shared relationships. According to these philosophers, a view of the world based on complementarity neither foregrounds nor diminishes humans. Rather, it sketches a relationship of equals defined by the mutual participation of all.
This thinking is averse to hierarchy. No individual can claim to have more value than another. Anything that exists serves as an important part of the environment and matters equally, whether alone or collectively. Complementarity holds that the relationships that unite individual things can extend to prove the value of every contribution, no matter its size.
And so, complementarity rejects the argument that anything you do to help the climate is pointless... (MORE - details)
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A robot lover's sociological argument for robot consciousness
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-robot-lovers-sociological-argument.html
EXCERPT: Imagine a future replete with such robot companions, whom a significant fraction of the population regards as genuine friends and lovers. Some of these robot loving people will want, presumably, to give their friends (or "friends") some rights.
Maybe the right not to be deleted, the right to refuse an obnoxious task, rights of association, speech, rescue, employment, the provision of basic goods -- maybe eventually the right to vote. They will ask the rest of society: Why not give our friends these rights? Robot lovers (as I'll call these people) might accuse skeptics of unjust bias: speciesism, or biologicism, or anti-robot prejudice.
Imagine also that, despite technological advancements, there is still no consensus among psychologists, neuroscientists, AI engineers, and philosophers regarding whether such AI friends are genuinely conscious. Scientifically, it remains obscure whether, so to speak, "the light is on" -- whether such robot companions can really experience joy, pain, feelings of companionship and care, and all the rest. (I've argued elsewhere that we're nowhere near scientific consensus.)
What I want to consider today is whether there might nevertheless be a certain type of sociological argument on the robot lovers' side... (MORE - details)
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https://iai.tv/articles/logic-is-nothing-without-metaphysic-auid-3064?_auid=2020
INTRO: The laws of logic are believed to be the basis of rational thought. But what grounds logic itself? Surely logic cannot be grounded in logic, for that would be circular reasoning, and therefore illogical. Yale Professor Jacob McNulty argues there is no logical foundation for logic. Instead we should look to Hegel for a solution to this dilemma, according to which logic is derived from metaphysics... (MORE - details)
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Think your efforts to help the climate don’t matter? African philosophers disagree
https://theconversation.com/think-y...t-matter-african-philosophers-disagree-247042
EXCERPT: Complementarity has been used by African philosophers like Jonathan Chimakonam, Aïda Terblanché-Greeff, Diana-Abasi Ibanga and Kevin Gary Behrens to develop environmental philosophies based on shared relationships. According to these philosophers, a view of the world based on complementarity neither foregrounds nor diminishes humans. Rather, it sketches a relationship of equals defined by the mutual participation of all.
This thinking is averse to hierarchy. No individual can claim to have more value than another. Anything that exists serves as an important part of the environment and matters equally, whether alone or collectively. Complementarity holds that the relationships that unite individual things can extend to prove the value of every contribution, no matter its size.
And so, complementarity rejects the argument that anything you do to help the climate is pointless... (MORE - details)
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A robot lover's sociological argument for robot consciousness
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/01/a-robot-lovers-sociological-argument.html
EXCERPT: Imagine a future replete with such robot companions, whom a significant fraction of the population regards as genuine friends and lovers. Some of these robot loving people will want, presumably, to give their friends (or "friends") some rights.
Maybe the right not to be deleted, the right to refuse an obnoxious task, rights of association, speech, rescue, employment, the provision of basic goods -- maybe eventually the right to vote. They will ask the rest of society: Why not give our friends these rights? Robot lovers (as I'll call these people) might accuse skeptics of unjust bias: speciesism, or biologicism, or anti-robot prejudice.
Imagine also that, despite technological advancements, there is still no consensus among psychologists, neuroscientists, AI engineers, and philosophers regarding whether such AI friends are genuinely conscious. Scientifically, it remains obscure whether, so to speak, "the light is on" -- whether such robot companions can really experience joy, pain, feelings of companionship and care, and all the rest. (I've argued elsewhere that we're nowhere near scientific consensus.)
What I want to consider today is whether there might nevertheless be a certain type of sociological argument on the robot lovers' side... (MORE - details)
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TheVat
Valued Senior Member
This was great. Thanks for posting. The concept also could encourage the formation of extended political coalitions where each person feels they matter and therefore find more context for personal action. Though likely bogus, the 100th monkey effect could be at least a related metaphor to this.
Hundredth monkey effect - Wikipedia
We don't understand matter any better than mind
https://iai.tv/articles/we-dont-understand-matter-any-better-than-mind-auid-3065?_auid=2020
It is commonly believed that there is a mind-body problem because we can give an explanation of matter but not of the mind. But according to John Collins, we don’t understand matter either. Materialism was refuted by Newton in the 17th century, and the physicalism which has replaced it is not a substantive doctrine. There are gaps in our understanding of the mental – we still do not have a good theory of what the mind is – but after Newton, there is no ‘mind-body problem’...
COMMENT: This sounds at least superficially akin to Russelian monism.
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What if we’re alone? The philosophical paradox of a lifeless cosmos
https://bigthink.com/thinking/what-if-were-alone-the-philosophical-paradox-of-a-lifeless-cosmos/
From the discovery of exoplanets to the sheer vastness of the cosmos, we have good reasons to suspect that humanity is not alone in the Universe. Still, we’ve yet to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, raising the possibility that we are a singular rarity in an otherwise barren cosmos. If that’s true, it presents humanity with both a philosophical problem and opportunity...
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https://iai.tv/articles/we-dont-understand-matter-any-better-than-mind-auid-3065?_auid=2020
It is commonly believed that there is a mind-body problem because we can give an explanation of matter but not of the mind. But according to John Collins, we don’t understand matter either. Materialism was refuted by Newton in the 17th century, and the physicalism which has replaced it is not a substantive doctrine. There are gaps in our understanding of the mental – we still do not have a good theory of what the mind is – but after Newton, there is no ‘mind-body problem’...
COMMENT: This sounds at least superficially akin to Russelian monism.
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What if we’re alone? The philosophical paradox of a lifeless cosmos
https://bigthink.com/thinking/what-if-were-alone-the-philosophical-paradox-of-a-lifeless-cosmos/
From the discovery of exoplanets to the sheer vastness of the cosmos, we have good reasons to suspect that humanity is not alone in the Universe. Still, we’ve yet to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, raising the possibility that we are a singular rarity in an otherwise barren cosmos. If that’s true, it presents humanity with both a philosophical problem and opportunity...
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Trolley problems have always been a pet peeve of mine--well, until some 20-odd years ago, moral philosophy in general was a pet peeve of mine, but then Derrida started writing about some moral shit andI though, "well, this is kind of interesting..." But back to trolley problems: the real problem is that like more than half the people who allude to them miss the point entirely. There is no correct answer! Jesus Christ. Also just tip the balance with your silly little examples one way or the other, and pretty much everyone will abandon their stupid ass, previously held "convictions" re: utilitarianism or deontological silliness or whatever. Why don't they design a study that fixes that?
Edit: Just gonna add this, cuz I'm in a mood: People are weak, stupid and fickle. Tailor your trolley problem to the individual, and you get very predictable responses. Make a scenario involving a hundred human babies and one dog--on either side of the equation, I don't care--and I will always opt for killing the stupid babies and saving the dog. Says absolutely nothing about my alleged "reasoning processes" or ethical foundations, I simply favor dogs--and most every other mammal or bird, and probably also reptiles, amphibians, etc.--over humans. It's a lame and utterly pointless exercise.
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Yeah, right (re: bolded portion). In music, anarchists are invariably bougie posh fuckers (Crass) or semi-literate dolts (everything else, mostly). Marxists and Maoist leaning sorts have always been way cooler--from Brecht/Weill/Eisler and Woodie Guthrie to Phil Ochs, the Minutemen, Robert Wyatt, Henry Cow, et al.
Also, why do we always relegate Mary Wollstonecraft to the footnotes, while William Godwin gets all the glory? For that matter, Mary Shelley was way beyond her whiny posh husband, but only Frankenstein is remembered. Sad.