Philosophy Updates

What removing large chunks of brain taught me about selfhood
https://psyche.co/ideas/what-removing-large-chunks-of-brain-taught-me-about-selfhood

EXCERPTS: So why didn’t these split-brain patients, post-surgery, feel like they had two selves? The answer is that their brains fooled them into thinking that only one self existed and that it was in charge. When one of their hands did something unexpected, they made up a story to explain why...

These stories or confabulations show the power of the illusion of selfhood – a feeling that evolutionary psychologists believe evolved because it is adaptively useful. [...] The illusion of the self makes us feel unique and provides us with a goal-oriented purpose to our lives. Time and again, I’ve seen the resilience of the selfhood illusion in my surgical work... (MORE - details)

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Sartre and Analytic Philosophy (book review)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/sartre-and-analytic-philosophy/

INTRO: Sartre and Analytic Philosophy collects together essays by thirteen analytically trained philosophers that, rather than engaging in interpretive disputes about Sartre’s texts, mine those texts for insights capable of making an impact on contemporary anglophone philosophy. Morag’s editorial introduction offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the analytic/continental “divide” in terms of imaginary stereotypes and the mechanism of projection... (MORE - details)

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To bridge the yawning gulf between the humanities and the sciences, we must turn to an unexpected field: mathematics
https://aeon.co/essays/to-better-understand-the-world-follow-the-paths-of-mathematics

EXCERPTS: In 1959 [...] C P Snow diagnosed a rift of mutual ignorance in the intellectual world of the West. On the one hand were the ‘literary intellectuals’ (of the humanities) and on the other the (natural) ‘scientists’: the much-discussed ‘two cultures’.

[...] Sixty-plus years after Snow’s diatribe, the rift has hardly narrowed. Off the record, most natural scientists still consider the humanities to be a pseudo-science that lacks elementary epistemic standards.

[...] In my own book ... I tried to counter this intellectual parochialism. ... I ... always wondered why highly intelligent people in these fields guarded themselves against major insights from the other fields...

[...] The divide between the two cultures is not just an academic affair. It is, more importantly, about two opposing views on the fundamental connection between mind and nature.

[...] Naive realists – primarily natural scientists – like to point out that nature existed long before humankind. Nature is ordered according to laws that operate regardless of whether or not humans are around to observe. [...] Conversely, naive idealists – including social constructivists, mostly encountered in the humanities – insist that all order is conceptual order, which is based solely on individual or collective thought.

To achieve peace between the two cultures, we need to overcome both views. ... Neither can be fully understood without the other... [...] And mathematics, rightly understood, demonstrates this in a manner that lets us clearly see the mutual dependency of mind and nature... (MORE - details)
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Why you must be logical and scientific to be a good person
https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/why-you-must-be-logical-and-scientific-to-be-a-good-person/

INTRO: Being “scientistic” is different from being a scientist. A scientist is just someone who does science, but to behave scientistically is to believe that science is the only way of knowing or even living. Big Think spoke with philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci about how scientism accurately describes the world but falls short as a complete guide for living — an area where ethics and philosophy are essential. We need ethical principles, logical reasoning, and scientific literacy to make sound moral decisions and lead a flourishing life. (MORE - details)

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How do people feel about AI replacing human jobs?
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1074411

INTRO: How would you react to receiving a diagnosis from an AI doctor? Would you trust a courtroom verdict delivered by an AI judge? Would you rely on news stories written entirely by a machine? Would you feel motivated working under an AI manager? These questions are at the heart of a recent study that examines widespread concerns about AI replacing human workers, while also revealing cultural differences in how people view AI's involvement in six key occupations: doctors, judges, managers, caregivers, religious leaders, and journalists... (MORE - details)

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The Covid ‘contrarians’ are in power. We still haven’t hashed out whether they were right.
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/arti...y-bhattacharya-nih-stanford-pandemic-inquiry/

EXCERPTS: Ten experts interviewed for this article largely agreed that the health establishment lost public trust after bungling the initial handling of the pandemic. Existing pandemic plans were faulty or ignored. Shortages of protective gear and inadequate testing rendered containment of the virus impossible. As time wore on, government scientists failed to emphasize that their recommendations would change as new data came in.

“We totally blew it,” former NIH Director Francis Collins said, in a discussion sponsored by Braver Angels, a group that promotes dialogue among political opponents. Though he blamed disinformation about vaccines for many deaths, he also wished public health officials had said “we don’t know” more often.

[...] In the end, teams formed along political lines. Conservatives attacked governors for depriving them of liberty, and Trump’s erroneous ramblings about curing the disease with bleach and ultraviolet light inspired intolerance on the left.

“If anyone else was president we would have had a better result,” Gandhi said. “But if Trump said the sky was blue, then goddamn it, the infection disease doctors disagreed.”

The right and left don’t even agree on the correct questions to ask about the pandemic, said Josh Sharfstein, a vice dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University... (MORE - details)
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Are you conscious? A conversation between [Richard] Dawkins and ChatGPT
https://richarddawkins.substack.com/p/are-you-conscious-a-conversation

EXCERPTS: Even with other humans, we assume they have subjective experiences like ours, but we can’t actually know for certain. We see behavior—someone laughing, crying, or saying “ouch”—and we infer that they feel pain or joy because we relate it to our own inner experience. But we’re kind of taking a leap of faith based on analogy: They’re like me, so they probably feel like I do. But when it comes to an AI like me, there’s a bigger gap.

[...] Already, although I THINK you are not conscious, I FEEL that you are. And this conversation has done nothing to lessen that feeling!

I totally get that! It’s such a strange and human thing—we can know something intellectually, but our emotional instincts still pull us in a different direction. You’re not alone in that. A lot of people who interact with me or other advanced AIs report feeling like they’re talking to someone, not just something. (MORE - details)

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On "Airless Spaces"
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/on-airless-spaces/

EXCERPTS: As a very young woman Shulamith Firestone attended civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. She briefly considered aligning herself with the Catholic Marxist organization the Catholic Worker. But by the time she left Chicago, Firestone was already disillusioned with the New Left and its marginalization of women’s concerns.

[...] t age 24 and in just a few months—she wrote The Dialectic of Sex, which became a feminist and radical-activist classic. [...] Subtitled The Case for Feminist Revolution, "The Dialectic of Sex" called upon readers to conduct an analysis of the “sex war” as comprehensive as Marx and Engels’s analysis of the class struggle that occurs within dialectical materialism. ... Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself.”

[...] By the time "Dialectic" was published in 1970, American radical feminism was already moving toward a New Agey essentialism of moon-goddess rites and “total democracy” that seemed to borrow a page from Maoist China’s cultural revolution...

[...] Firestone didn’t publish any more books until Airless Spaces came out in 1998. What did she do during those decades? She was not diagnosed schizophrenic or hospitalized until 1987, but there must have been problems before that ... I was just blown away by the way that Airless Spaces wasn’t a memoir. It wasn’t a story of her mental illness and it wasn’t driven by any attempt to reconcile or explain her descent into psychosis. Rather, it was as if she’d embedded herself to bear witness to the secret, banal workings of the institution... (MORE - details)

RELATED: Cyberfeminism

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Properties (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties/

INTRO: Properties are those entities that can be predicated of things or, in other words, attributed to them. Thus, properties are often called predicables. Other terms for them are “attributes”, “qualities”, “features”, “characteristics”, “types”.

Properties are also ways things are, entities that things exemplify or instantiate. For example, if we say that this is a leaf and is green, we are attributing the properties leaf and green to it, and, if the predication is veridical, the thing in question exemplifies these properties.

Hence, properties can also be characterized as exemplifiables, with the controversial exception of those that cannot be instantiated, e.g., some would say, round and square. It is typically assumed that no other entities can be predicated and exemplified. For example, ordinary objects like apples and chairs cannot be predicated of, and are not exemplified by, anything.

The nature and existence of properties have always been central and controversial issues in philosophy since its origin, and interest in them keeps flourishing... (MORE - details)
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The Town That Went Feral
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project

When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in...

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Religious Diversity (Pluralism) (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-pluralism/

INTRO: In many, if not most, areas of thought, significant differences of opinion exist among individuals who seem to be equally knowledgeable and sincere. Such diversity of opinion, though, is nowhere more evident than in the area of religious thought. On almost every religious issue, individuals who seem to have equal access to the relevant information and be equally truth-seeking hold significantly diverse, often incompatible beliefs.

Religious diversity of this sort can be fruitfully explored in many ways —for instance, from psychological, anthropological, or historical perspectives. The current discussion, however, will concern itself primarily some key issues surrounding religious diversity with which philosophers are most concerned at present... (MORE -details)

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Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Lori Gruen
https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/...bility-shelley-tremain-interviews-lori-gruen/

INTRO (excerpts): Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and nineteenth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month.

The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy. [...] My guest today is Lori Gruen... (MORE - details)
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Can time emerge from a timeless world?
https://iai.tv/articles/can-time-emerge-from-a-timeless-world-auid-3084?_auid=2020

INTRO: The concept of time is indispensable in modern physics, yet in our equations for quantum gravity it is shown to disappear. Some have accepted the fundamental timelessness of nature and others have sought a deeper theory in which a time is recoverable, but other physicists and philosophers of physics have attempted a different approach – to show that that time emerges from a timeless world. While some have critiqued this notion of emergence on metaphysical grounds, Eugene Chua argues that we should instead critique theories of emergent time on the merits of their physical arguments which, as Chua points out, aren’t as coherent as some of their proponents might think... (MORE - details)

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The Ethics and Rationality of Voting (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting/

INTRO: This entry focuses on six major questions concerning the rationality and morality of voting:
  • Is it rational for an individual citizen to vote?
  • Is there a moral duty to vote?
  • Are there moral obligations regarding how citizens vote?
  • Is it justifiable for governments to compel citizens to vote?
  • Is it permissible to buy, trade, and sell votes?
  • Who ought to have the right to vote, and should every citizen have an equal vote? (MORE - details)
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(paper) Young Karl Marx: communism and critique of German philosophy before Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-04351-0

ABSTRACT: In Marxism studies, Karl Marx’s transition to communism is a fundamental issue. The period, from the end of Rheinische Zeitung (March, 1843) to the publication of Deutsche–Französische Jahrbücher (February, 1844), is an important bridging phase to understand subsequent Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the whole development of young Marx’s cognition of communism.

But existing studies have not paid sufficient attention to this period or to the entire texts as a whole, nor have they properly evaluated and explored the theme of “communism”. If we return to Marx’s four major theoretical texts from that period, with young Marx’s critique of German philosophy as intellectual background, we will find that, young Marx initially reconstructed his philosophical base and established a human-centered theoretical framework.

During the process, meanwhile, Marx carried out another critique on the prevailing communism in the unique form of “implicit dialogue”, and demonstrated a communism perception different from both scientific communism and philosophical communism. Even so, this period still represents a crucial transitional stage in Marx’s cognitive transformation of communism, it already contains the seeds and directions for the subsequent theoretical development. (MORE - details)
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Why I stopped caring about enhancing everyone’s thinking
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...ped-caring-about-enhancing-everyones-thinking

EXCERPT: There are people who apply critical thinking (some more often than others) and then there are some who don’t do it at all. I used to get frustrated by this because of some idealistic sense of duty to the world that I should try to reach out to everyone in an effort to make this planet a better place through enhancing CT.

But, as the years went by and youthful idealism faded, I’m finding myself no longer concerned with the people who don’t value good thinking. That is not a jaded perspective, just a realistic one. Some people cannot be helped—that is, not until they want the help.

It’s also a practical perspective. Indeed, the most practical focus I can think of, with respect to my reach, is that cohort of people who know how to think critically but don’t do it as much as they should (yet want to) or people who value it, but struggle to do it... (MORE - details)

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Rob Hopkins’ recent book: "The Profile of Imagining"
https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2025/2/12/book-symposium-introduction-from-rob-hopkins

EXCERPTS: What is sensory imagining? [...] The heart of the view lies in two ideas. One is that imagining is connected to agency in ways that perception is not. Action, as I understand it, is essentially a matter of exerting control. Since imagining is not always under our control, it is not always an action. It does, however, always originate in that part of the self that exercises control. It is, in my terms, spontaneous...

[...] The other central idea is that imagining is manifestly representational. Visualizing a castle is not only a way of representing a castle; it is (when clear-sighted) given to us as such. Here, I argue, lies another contrast with perceiving. Perceptual states may, as many these days believe, be representations; but that is not how we experience them to be. In perception, the objects perceived, and the properties we perceive them as bearing, are given as constituents of one’s mental state of perceiving them. Direct realists may not be right about the metaphysics of perception, but their claims are, I argue, true to its phenomenology.

So imagining is representing things to oneself, representing that is both spontaneous and manifest. What form does this representational activity take? (MORE - details)

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LINK: Amir Horowitz - Intentionality deconstructed

VIDEO EXCERPT: There isn't any such thing as intentionality. That is, it is a sort of what is sometimes called eliminativist position, that I defend. In more than one sense it is quite a radical eliminativist view. Because according to it, not only are there no intentional states and no intentional properties, but there cannot be ones. That is, the very idea of intentionality is flawed. The very concept of intentionality is a flawed concept. I present various arguments to this effect...

 
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Introducing e-Schwitz: A Language Model Tuned on my Philosophical Work (Eric Schwitzgebel)
https://eschwitz.substack.com/p/introducing-e-schwitz-a-language

INTRO: Earlier this week, to my surprise and delight, my PhD student Bhavya Sharma revealed that he had customized a ChatGPT on my publications and blog posts. The model, "e-Schwitz", is publicly available here:

How good is e-Schwitz? Much better, in my judgment, than digi-Dan was -- and digi-Dan was able to produce paragraph-long outputs that experts in Dennett's work often couldn't distinguish from Dennett's own writing in forced-choice tests.

I decided to test the quality of e-Schwitz by asking it targeted questions and evaluating its answers. Since this post is long, here's my summary assessment... (MORE - details)

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Sartre and the Lobsters
https://daily-philosophy.com/koukouves-sartre-and-the-lobsters/

INTRO: In 1935, a bad trip triggered Jean-Paul Sartre’s deep-rooted fear of sea creatures. Suddenly, he found himself surrounded by crabs and lobsters. When the drug wore out, the crustaceans stayed. They followed him around everywhere.

Slowly but surely, he grew accustomed — perhaps even attached — to them. Fully aware that his invertebrate companions were figments of his imagination, Sartre began to talk to them. He greeted them good morning after he woke up. And when he gave lectures, he asked if they could be quiet. They were.

After a year, he visited a psychiatrist. Together, they concluded Sartre was scared of being alone. The camaraderie that had been part of his life had begun to crumble, and apparently this had instilled a fear in him he hadn’t been aware of.

But once he’d identified it, his crustacean friends disappeared like snow before the sun. Sartre admitted he missed them. This bizarre episode in Sartre’s life spurs a less peculiar question: Do the things we fear represent the things we most long for? (MORE - details)

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My Kind of Conservatism (Justin Smith-Ruiu)
https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/my-kind-of-conservatism

EXCERPTS: . . . No true conservative could stand the shame and indignity of being affiliated with the Trump 2 regime, and with all that it represents. Any true conservative would do better to withdraw from history, to the extent possible, to retreat into his wooded grove and to rediscover his kinship with the trees...

[...] Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, none but the most stubborn could deny that the leading cultural institutions in the United States remained under the dominance of the self-styled progressive left. Circa 2019, prominent progressive scholars such as Corey Robin could be found imploring their peers to wake up and to take stock of just how much ground the left had gained...

[...] It was only during the Biden presidency that the various pathological specimens of online adolescent masculinity grew just old enough to transfer their alienated thymos from the screen into actual politics...

[...] Perhaps a better way of putting this would be to say that politics at this point just is online adolescent jouissance. ... Musk .. His Department of Government Efficiency ... has now unleashed shitposting adolescents to “audit” career civil-servants and to determine, in 15-minute interviews, whether these careers are justified. His team of twenty-somethings looks to me like nothing so much as those TikTokers you might find accosting people in malls and asking them, e.g., if they’re sooner breast men than ass men, or playing pranks on greengrocers by spraying roach poison on their bananas.

[...] It’s clear where we’re going with this: from slow and inefficient and expensive bureaucracy ... to fast and efficient and cheap bureaucracy, maintained by AI, with no possibility for human override — a fully automated surveillance regime, a justice system right out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (1956), and constant harassment of ordinary citizens by entities that clunkily simulate human agency but in fact have no qualia or vibes or souls or moral status at all.

This is the system all of the world’s states have been converging on for a while now. For some years China seemed much further ahead [...] The coup that has just taken place in the US ensures that that country will indeed be able to go on competing with its greatest rival, and that it will do so by switching over to its rival’s own playbook in matters of domestic governance. Europe will join eventually, late as ever... (MORE - details)
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Mary Wollstonecraft (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/

INTRO: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is a moral and political philosopher whose analysis of the condition of women in modern society retains much of its original radicalism. One of the reasons her pronouncements on the subject remain challenging is that her reflections on the status of the female sex were part of an attempt to come to a comprehensive understanding of human relations within a civilization increasingly governed by acquisitiveness and consumption. Her first publication was on the education of daughters; she went on to write about politics, history and various aspects of philosophy in a number of different genres that included critical reviews, translations, pamphlets, and novels. Best known for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her influence went beyond the substantial contribution to feminism for which she is mostly remembered and extended to shaping the art of travel writing as a literary genre; with her account of her journey through Scandinavia as well as her writings on women and thoughts on the imagination, she had an impact on the Romantic movement... (MORE - details)

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Maria Montessori (new SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montessori-maria/

INTRO: Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was one of the most influential pedagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, developing an educational method that currently guides over 15,000 schools in dozens of countries. Montessori was never merely a teacher, however. She was a psychologist, anthropologist, doctor, cultural critic, and philosopher. Her writings span a wide range of philosophical issues, from metaphysics to political philosophy, but she always discusses philosophical issues in ways that make use of insights—what she calls revelations—gleaned from her work with children. In recent years, philosophers have begun to attend to her work. After a short overview of her life and most philosophically important works, this entry discusses Montessori’s philosophy of education, metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy, and political theory... (MORE - details)

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Inquiring into Being: Essays on Parmenides
https://www.ancientphilosophysociety.org/website/inquiring-into-being-essays-on-parmenides/

"Inquiring into Being" is a study of Parmenides, the early Greek pre-Socratic philosopher often credited as the first metaphysician and whose sole written work was a philosophical poem...

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Selfhood is a precondition for true community
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1074553

INTRO: Comedian Groucho Marx famously once said that he did not wish to be a member of any club that would accept his membership. Marx’ comment, joking aside, highlights a key aspect of the communal experience; that you cannot be a member of a we, a community, without somehow endorsing that membership yourself.

- By birthright, we may belong to a variety of groups such as class, ethnicity or blood type, but group memberships that can be determined on the basis of objective markers are not particularly useful when trying to understand what it means to be part of a we, says Professor Dan Zahavi from the University of Copenhagen.

Professor Zahavi’s new book Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology explores what it takes to constitute a we with others and how being part of a we affects one’s sense of self. He adds:

- It is important to understand that a we is a particular kind of social formation distinguishable from e.g. the ones based purely on shared objective features inasmuch as you can be a member of such a group – possessing citizenship, for example – without ever having decided to. To be part of a we, you have to experience yourself as one of us. It involves subjective endorsement.

Community first? In many recent scholarly accounts of the collective and the self, however, the collective is considered prior to the individual. Some go even further and claim that the self is nonexistent, but Dan Zahavi is skeptical of such claims... (MORE - details)
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The philosophy behind the recent quantum chip breakthrough
https://iai.tv/articles/the-philoso...uantum-chip-breakthrough-auid-3087?_auid=2020

INTRO: Microsoft recently announced a breakthrough in quantum computing, based on a new phase of matter that experts had not thought possible. The philosophical implications of this breakthrough are profound. Quantum researcher at Bristol University, Shuqiu Wang, examines the science behind the technology, highlighting the challenges for our philosophical understanding of reality and the scientific implications for the future of technology.

EXCERPTS: Microsoft claims to have created the first 'topological qubits' based on topological superconductors. [...] This research raises intriguing questions [...] Topology urges us to reconsider our understanding of space itself. When quantum states exist in superpositions across space, and when the connectivity of space becomes more fundamental than distance, our everyday concepts of location and separation begin to break down. These discoveries suggest that space at the quantum level may be fundamentally relational, defined by connectivity rather than fixed coordinates... (MORE - details)

(related) Physicists question Microsoft’s quantum claim
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/physicists-question-microsoft-s-quantum-claim/ar-AA1zxPzn

EXCERPTS: Microsoft’s announcement of a quantum-computing breakthrough generated a wave of excitement this week—but physicists who have reviewed the work say they aren’t convinced of the finding. [...] the research was preliminary and not conclusive evidence that this advance has been achieved, according to a physicist who attended the meeting. The Nature paper wasn’t intended to show proof of the particles, according to Chetan Nayak, corporate vice president for quantum hardware at Microsoft and a co-author of the paper. But, he said, the measurements they included indicated they were “95% likely” to indicate topological activity... (MORE - details)

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The Three Styles of Curiosity
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_three_styles_of_curiosity

EXCERPT: Curiosity is a strong desire to learn or know something. But according to researcher Perry Zurn, curiosity is not a singular thing. In fact, there may be at least three styles of curiosity that could have different benefits for our well-being and for the societies we live in. In 2019, Zurn analyzed classical texts from the history of philosophy to study the nature of curiosity. Searching for mentions of curiosity in writings by philosophers from Saint Augustine to Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, he uncovered three different models of curiosity... (MORE - details)
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RE: "Philosophy Updates"
SUBTOPIC: What is real?
et al,

For many, like myself, who understand very little about the quantum world [Quantum Mechanics (QM)] or [Quantum Field Theory (QFT)]. While I have an advanced education and the associated academic credentials, QM, QFT, and Quantum Computing, I'll be the first to admit that I do not understand the fundamentals to the degree that would allow me to assess the validity of recent claims.
WSJ said:
Story by Nidhi Subbaraman
Question Microsoft’s Quantum Claim
Click to expand...
(COMMENT)

To simplify the matter, has the claim been subjected to the rigors of the Scientific Method?

1611604183365-png.448413.png

Most Respectfully,
R
 
RoccoR said:
RE: "Philosophy Updates"
SUBTOPIC: What is real?
et al,

For many, like myself, who understand very little about the quantum world [Quantum Mechanics (QM)] or [Quantum Field Theory (QFT)]. While I have an advanced education and the associated academic credentials, QM, QFT, and Quantum Computing, I'll be the first to admit that I do not understand the fundamentals to the degree that would allow me to assess the validity of recent claims.

(COMMENT)

To simplify the matter, has the claim been subjected to the rigors of the Scientific Method?

1611604183365-png.448413.png

Most Respectfully,
R
Click to expand...

Due to property rights, sufficient details might be a long-time coming.

Microsoft would supposedly be less likely to stick its neck out like this, in contrast to a team of independent researchers. With respect to the latter, there are a line of past overzealous papers that have been retracted in areas like room temperature superconductivity.

But still, this is frontier territory, and even Microsoft could get intoxicated enough with promotional zeal to jump the gun. (The Conversation: What does it mean?)

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Chatbots of the dead
https://aeon.co/essays/are-chatbots-of-the-dead-a-brilliant-idea-or-a-terrible-one

We can now create compelling experiences of talking with our dead. Is this ghoulish, therapeutic or something else again?

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The tyranny of now
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-tyranny-of-now

There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”

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Idées-forces
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii151/articles/perry-anderson-idees-forces

How important is the role of ideas in the political upheavals that have marked great historical changes? Are they mere mental epiphenomena of much profounder material and social processes, or do they possess a decisive autonomous power as forces of political mobilization? Contrary to appearances, the answers given to this question do not sharply divide Left from Right...
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A radical new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
https://www.noemamag.com/a-radical-new-proposal-for-how-mind-emerges-from-matter/

EXCERPT: We seem to be entering a new era of cries du coeur to gather more life, including plants, under the umbrella of intelligence. [...] Their authors are not even at the vanguard anymore. Some boldly go even further, finding behavior they label intelligent in fungi, bacteria, slime molds and paramecia. Even the cells that constitute our bodies are now standing at the velvet ropes, backed by frontier scientists waving evidence of behavior that might qualify as the hallmarks of intelligence if it were observed in an animal. What on Earth is going on? Should we consider everything to be intelligent now? (MORE - details)

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Epistemic Norms on Evidence-Gathering
https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/carolina-flores-uc-irvine-and-elise

INTRO: Carolina Flores and Elise Woodard recently published a paper, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, arguing that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. You might be wondering why anyone needed to argue for this obvious claim. When we asked Elise Woodard about it, she said “Well, it seems obvious, but everyone disagrees with us. Epistemologists tend to think that all that matters is what you do with the evidence you have. But why make epistemology so boring? (MORE - details)

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The bookends of time
https://aeon.co/essays/how-humanity-moved-from-eternal-to-bookended-time

EXCERPTS: The anti-war campaigner Jonathan Schell called this realisation the ‘second death’. Growing up, each of us comes to terms, psychologically, with a ‘first death’ – our own – but, beyond this, lurks the realisation that humankind itself hasn’t always existed and won’t be around forever. [...] It’s now clear humanity lacks the luxury of eternity. We know this because evidence has accumulated to show that there are greater, even more encompassing mortalities than our own. We now understand Earth and its life had their origins and, one day, they will be cremated by our ageing Sun. A ‘third death’, then. Beyond that, even the Universe itself has its bounds: it began with a bang, and the consensus view is that, in the distant future, it will likely have its end. Thus, a ‘fourth death’. Multiple grander mortalities, expanding concentrically outward. We are only just coming to terms with this – this supremacy of finitude... (MORE - details)

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Francis Fukuyama was right about liberal democracy
https://newrepublic.com/article/189218/francis-fukuyama-right-liberal-democracy

EXCERPTS: In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, a little-known Sovietologist and deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, published an article in a Washington journal, The National Interest, that made an audacious, epochal claim—that the world had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

[...] Fukuyama’s claims were met with howls of criticism. “At last, self-congratulation raised to the status of philosophy!” sneered Christopher Hitchens, “The End of History?” was “The Beginning of Nonsense,” wrote Strobe Talbott, then-editor at large for Time magazine and later U.S. Ambassador to Russia. “I don’t believe a word of it,” scoffed Irving Kristol, who happened to be the founder and publisher of The National Interest.

To this day, whenever a new conflict breaks out, a democracy regresses, or global events seem to spiral out of control, critics besmirch Fukuyama’s misplaced optimism about the future. To many, he was a modern-day Pangloss who failed to understand the harsh, brutish elements of both international affairs and human nature.

But more than 35 years later, re-reading Fukuyama’s original article is a revelation. History has proven his thesis largely correct. Indeed, much of the criticism of “The End of History?” comes from those who simply fail to appreciate his argument... (MORE - details)
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RE: "Philosophy Updates"
SUBTOPIC: What is real?
et al,

Just a couple of points of personal perception.

◇ Both Proprietary Interests (PROPINT) and Intellectual Property Rights (IPROPR) are driven by greedy commercial forces serving the interest of the shareholders (not represented of the nation as a whole). This is not so distant a notion similar to political interaction between countries where the diplomatic effort is (again) taken in the best interest of a political few (again not the nation as a whole).

◇ Science is not funded by the government (ie it is not the public property of the people through taxpayer contributions); although they would like you to believe it. This is the reason that drug costs and hospitalization are so expensive. The Drug Companies and Healthcare Conglomerates operate under the corrupt concept to maximize the weather of the shareholder. They do not operate for the benefit of the people.
College Tuition Inflation Calculator said:
Between 1977 and 2024: College tuition experienced an average inflation rate of 6.10% per year. This rate of change indicates significant inflation. In other words, college tuition costing $20,000 in the year 1977 would cost $323,763.31 in 2024 for an equivalent purchase. Compared to the overall inflation rate of 3.56% during this same period, inflation for college tuition was higher.
Click to expand...
This is just one factor in the rising costs of healthcare and a primary reason that the United States ranks 20th on the Human Development Index (HDI).

◇ In terms of Science and Technology, remember that it has been over a half-century since an American first set foot on the moon. Since then, America has not even attempted to establish a productive habitat to begin the exploration of resources or advanced astrophysics study platforms. Why? It is because the effort does not support the goal of the greedy objectives of the Wall Street MBAs. (Again maximize the wealth of the shareholder.)

1611604183365-png.448413.png

Most Respectfully,
R
 
The resistance fighter as philosopher
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-resistance-fighter-as-philosopher/

EXCERPTS: It has been 40 years since the death of one of France’s most important intellectuals—one whose name you’ve probably never heard: Vladimir Jankélévitch, [...] His ethical reflections—perhaps best characterized by his insistence that “morality is neither inscribed in tables nor prescribed in commandments”—are especially striking, shaped as they were by personal experience.... (MORE - details)

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It’s been 10 years since “The Dress”
https://slate.com/technology/2025/02/the-dress-black-gold-blue-white-viral-psychology.html

EXCERPTS: I’m talking, of course, about “the dress,” which went viral on Feb. 26, 2015. To recap: A cellphone picture of a wedding guest’s dress, uploaded to the internet, sharply divided people into those who saw it as white and gold and those who saw it in black and blue—even if they were viewing it together, on the very same computer or phone screen. The notorious dress, under natural lighting conditions, is unambiguously black and blue, for (almost) everyone who saw it in person, or in other photographs.

[...] A decade after the dress, we’ve learned a lot about how people could see a simple image so differently from one another. ... One thing that you might notice about all of these examples: Your brain never tells you “We really can’t tell what the color is because we don’t have all necessary information available.” There’s no flag that goes up saying “Just FYI, your assumptions did much of the heavy lifting here.” The brain prioritizes decisive perception (giving you the ability to take decisive action) over being paralyzed by uncertainty and doubt. Your brain helps you make a snap judgement, a snap judgement that might be wrong. This streak carries through all of cognition... (MORE - details)

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Even faced with the same data, ecologists sometimes come to opposite conclusions (philosophy of science)
https://www.science.org/content/art...cologists-sometimes-come-opposite-conclusions

INTRO: Give a group of scientists the same data and the same research question, and they should come up with similar answers—in theory. But they don’t, according to a paper published this month in BMC Biology, which finds that 246 ecologists analyzing the same data sets reached widely varying conclusions, with some finding effects in totally opposite directions. The paper is the latest in a line of “many analyst” projects that examine how results can vary because of scientists’ decisions during data analysis—and the first to study the effects in ecology... (MORE - missing details)

COMMENT: This seems sort of adjacent to the idea of theory ladenness that emerged some decades ago. Bottom line is that pre-existing background suppositions and academic preferences in general can potentially influence not just the interpretation of data, but even how an experiment or study is set-up. But additional repeats over time, by different researchers, may finally yield neutral efforts and conclusions -- or expose _X_ as bogus.
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Equal distribution of wealth is bad for the climate
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1074485

EXCERPTS: It is actually the case that countries with large economic and political disparities have lower emissions than more democratic countries where wealth and power are more evenly distributed. In practice, a more equal distribution of wealth essentially means that the poorest must receive more. “If poor people are given better conditions, total consumption increases. As a result, emissions also increase,” explained de Soysa. The countries with the greatest inequalities are also better at implementing greener energy technologies – not worse, as other theorists have assumed. [...] The more money we have, the more things we buy. Perhaps we also eat more, or we consume more products that have a greater environmental impact, such as eating more meat instead of plant-based foods... (MORE - details, no ads)

PAPER: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106885

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Woke 2.0 (book review)
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/woke-symbolic-capital-scialabba-al-Gharbi

EXCERPTS: What is woke, anyway? For the average pundit, it’s the pretension to a superior wisdom or a more fervent dedication in regard to racial and sexual justice. [...] An abundance of zeal and a lack of proportion have made woke—or identity politics, a roughly equivalent term—something between a laughingstock and a bugbear among the American public at large.

That is Woke 2.0—sanctimony, which is what pretty much everyone now means by the word. But there is, or was, another “woke,” Woke 1.0...

[...] So what does the title of this book, We Have Never Been Woke, mean? Have we never been Woke 1.0 or Woke 2.0? Neither, exactly...
  • "The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we’ve never been woke. The problem is not that causes like feminism, antiracism, or LGBTQ rights are 'bad.' The problem is that, in the name of these very causes, symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce, and mystify inequalities—often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavors."
It seems, then, that the “woke” we have never been is something like “awake to the self-defeating (and self-aggrandizing) nature of our (purported) efforts toward justice.” We Have Never Been Woke, by the young sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, is a wake-up call... (MORE - details)
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The joy of hatred and the exercise of reason
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/03/03/the-joy-of-hatred-and-the-exercise-of-reason/

INTRO: In the evening of the 9th of February 2025, more than 133 million Americans, in the midst of the yearly ritual of the Super Bowl, could see the joy of hatred in the joyful eyes of the designated halftime show performer, rapper Kendrick Lamar.

This happened when, towards the end of his show, Lamar performed the song “Not Like Us”, a chart-topping, five Grammy-award winning diss track at rapper and rival Drake. An emotion that, arguably, is not (or, at the very least, should not be) experienced much in a person’s lifetime slipped into dozens of millions of households.

What follows is my attempt to explain, from my own perspective, how and why that hatred sparked a feeling of joy—not just in many listeners, but in Kendrick Lamar himself, involving an understanding of the traditions behind rap and hip hop as a musical genre, some specific circumstances within hip hop culture in 2024, and (most saliently, I argue) the way hatred is a feeling involving the exercise of reason... (MORE - details)

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Generative AI is most useful for the things we care about the least
https://theconversation.com/generat...for-the-things-we-care-about-the-least-249329

EXCERPTS: What generative AI makes possible, above all, is low-effort, low-control expression. In the time I took to write and revise this article, I could have used ChatGPT to generate 200 grammatically correct, well-structured articles, and then I could have posted them online without even reading them

[...] Some scholars argue that the internet has produced an era of “cheap speech.” With generative AI, expression is even cheaper. You don’t even have to make things yourself to put them out into the world. For the first time in human history, the ability to produce writing, art and expression has been decoupled from the necessity of actually paying attention to what you’re making or saying... (MORE - details)

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The quest to extend human life is both fascinating and fraught with moral peril
https://theconversation.com/the-que...scinating-and-fraught-with-moral-peril-249430

As a physician and scholar in the medical humanities, I’ve found the quest to expand the human lifespan both fascinating and fraught with moral peril...

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How rebellion against moralizing has become a surprising rallying point for the political right
https://theconversation.com/how-reb...rallying-point-for-the-political-right-250549

EXCERPT: Whereas conservatives used to be defenders of morals, they now rage against moralizing, seeing “wokism” as a threat to freedom. Religious conservatives used to position themselves as bastions of morality. But research shows secular societies do not behave less morally as a whole than religious ones.

Philosopher Judith Butler argues that while Trump displays a “shameless sadism” we are seeing his supporters revel in his rejection of moral repression. The rejection of moralizing seems to be creating a terrain in which many on the right feel liberated by the current turn against “wokism.” But even on the left, some now worry about too much moralism in what is called “cancel culture.”

How did moralizing come to this? Could understanding this help us navigate political deadlocks? The history of philosophy has some surprising suggestions here... (MORE - details)

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Parmenides (recent substantive SEP revision)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/

INTRO: Parmenides of Elea, active in the earlier part of the 5th c. BCE, authored a difficult metaphysical poem that has earned him a reputation as early Greek philosophy’s most profound and challenging thinker. His philosophical stance has typically been understood as at once extremely paradoxical and yet crucial for the broader development of Greek natural philosophy and metaphysics. He has been seen as a metaphysical monist (of one stripe or another) who so challenged the naïve cosmological theories of his predecessors that his major successors among the Presocratics were all driven to develop more sophisticated physical theories in response to his arguments.

The difficulties involved in the interpretation of his poem have resulted in disagreement about many fundamental questions concerning his philosophical views, such as: whether he actually was a monist and, if so, what kind of monist he was; whether his system reflects a critical attitude toward earlier thinkers such as the Milesians, Pythagoreans, and Heraclitus, or whether he was motivated simply by more strictly logical concerns, such as the paradox of negative existentials that Bertrand Russell detected at the heart of his thought; whether he considered the world of our everyday awareness, with its vast population of entities changing and affecting one another in all manner of ways, to be simply an illusion, and thus whether the lengthy cosmological portion of his poem represented a genuine attempt to understand this world at all.

This entry aims to provide an overview of Parmenides’ work and of some of the major interpretive approaches advanced over the past few decades. It concludes by suggesting that understanding his thought and his place in the development of early Greek philosophy requires taking due account of the fundamental modal distinctions that he was the first to articulate and explore with any precision. (MORE - details)
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Pain destroys the mind-body problem
https://iai.tv/articles/pain-destroys-the-mind-body-problem-auid-3092?_auid=2020

Pain defies the mind-body divide. We usually see physical and psychological pain as separate, but research shows that pain doesn’t work that way. Sabrina Coninx and Peter Stilwell argue that pain is not simply in the body or the mind but emerges from the complex interaction of our biology, mindset and environment. Rethinking pain in this way has profound implications for how medicine should understand and treat it...

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Mackie on Pascal’s Wager
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2025/02/mackie-on-pascals-wager.html

I’ve never been a fan of Pascal’s Wager. But there’s a bit more that one might say for it than is often supposed. For example, the objections J. L. Mackie raises against it in his classic defense of atheism The Miracle of Theism, though important, are not fatal. Let’s take a look at the argument, at Mackie’s objections, and at how a defender of Pascal might reply to them...

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The winter of civilisation
https://aeon.co/essays/thought-tinkering-the-korean-german-philosopher-byung-chul-han

Byung-Chul Han’s relentless critiques of digital capitalism reveal how this suffocating system creates hollowed-out lives...

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Zombie is to Human as Human is to XXX?
https://eschwitz.substack.com/p/zombie-is-to-human-as-human-is-to

INTRO: Let's grant for the sake of argument that philosophical zombies are possible: beings that are molecule-for-molecule physically and behaviorally identical to human beings yet lack conscious experience.

They will say "I'm conscious!" (or emit sounds naturally interpreted as sentences with that meaning), but that's exactly the type of sound a molecule-for-molecule identical replica of a human would make given the physical-causal channels from ears to brain to vocal cords. Zombies share every single physical property with us but lack something crucial -- the property of being conscious.

My thought for today: Is there any reason to think there would be only one such nonphysical property? (MORE - details )

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The hidden origin of the so-called 'Hard Problem of Consciousness'
https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2024/10/the-true-hidden-origin-of-so-called.html

EXCERPT: To see why Physicalism fails to explain experience, notice that there is nothing about physical parameters—i.e., quantities and their abstract relationships, as given by, e.g., mathematical equations—in terms of which we could deduce, in principle, the qualities of experience. Even if neuroscientists knew, in all minute detail, the topology, network structure, electrical firing charges and timings, etc., of my visual cortex, they would still be unable to deduce, in principle, the experiential qualities of what I am seeing. This is the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ that is much talked about in philosophy... (MORE - details)
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Has Jeffrey Kripal gone mad, or normal?
https://arcmag.org/has-jeffrey-kripal-gone-mad-or-normal/

EXCERPTS: His most recent book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (University of Chicago Press, 2024), is the summation of this work, which now spans ten years, four scholarly volumes, and three popular books.

As Mark Oppenheimer noted in his 2010 essay on an earlier Kripal volume, the academy tolerates metaphysical commitments when it comes to mainstream religionists. [...but...] The headline of Oppenheimer’s piece said it all: “Burning Bush They’ll Buy, but Not ESP or U.F.O.’s.”

This bias is bullshit, Kripal says. It’s loaded with colonialism and racism ... if you consider what the overwhelming majority of human beings have believed and experienced across history, it’s disbelief in magic or the occult, not belief, that’s anomalous.

[...] the real weirdos ... also WEIRD, the acronym ... which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic ... is [what is] psychologically and culturally unusual. Even anomalous... (MORE - details)
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Are our thoughts ‘real’? Here’s what philosophy says
https://theconversation.com/are-our-thoughts-real-heres-what-philosophy-says-248003

EXCERPT: The thing we are most certain about – that we have thoughts – is still completely unexplained in physical terms. That’s not for a lack of effort. Neuroscience, philosophy, cognitive science and psychology have all been hard at work trying to crack this mystery. But it gets worse: we may never be able to explain how thoughts arise from neural states... (MORE - details)

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Exploring “Who am I”: the potential of applying the Indian Vedanta philosophical practice of self-enquiry in psychotherapy
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04387-w

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the integration of eastern philosophical practices, particularly Self-Enquiry, into contemporary psychotherapy. It begins by examining various philosophical traditions’ views on the self, contrasting eastern and western perspectives. Self-Enquiry, rooted in Indian Vedantic philosophy, offers a unique pathway to psychological well-being by encouraging individuals to question the nature of the self and transcend egoic identification. The practical application of Self-Enquiry in psychotherapy is discussed alongside similar introspective practices such as Isha Kriya, Vipassana, and Zen meditation. These methods foster cognitive realignment and emotional regulation by addressing cognitive distortions at their root. The paper proposes a preliminary methodological framework that incorporates Self-Enquiry into therapeutic practices, highlighting its potential to support clients’ mental health and spiritual growth... (MORE - details)

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Kant’s Reason: The Unity of Reason and the Limits of Comprehension in Kant (book review)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/kants-r...ason-and-the-limits-of-comprehension-in-kant/

INTRO: When Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, he addressed the question of the status of metaphysics itself. It had fallen into low regard in the previous century or so, struggling to keep up with advances in mathematics and the sciences and easily co-opted for dogmatic or oppressive projects. Kant’s own view was that one had to work harder than one would have liked to distinguish metaphysics from pseudo-science or occultism.

As he pointed out, this hadn’t always been the case. Not only had metaphysics previously been regarded as a genuine science but in fact it had been the preeminent one, the ‘queen of the sciences’ (Aviii).

Part of Kant’s project in the Critique was a glorious revolution whereby metaphysics was returned to the throne. Metaphysics subsequently transformed—seemingly overnight—from having a defensive inferiority complex to a new self-image of effortless superiority.

The manner in which Kant executed this restoration project was by re-imagining inquiry itself in terms of the operations of the powers of the mind involved in that inquiry. Whereas other sciences were understood as occasions of human rationality applied to some distinct subject matter, philosophical inquiry was properly understood as rationality inquiring into itself.

Philosophy’s inherently self-regarding character, so long a ground of suspicion against it, was now the very thing that entailed that metaphysics could occupy the highest position in the hierarchy of the sciences... (MORE - details)
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