Philosophy Updates

I'd hazard that at some point an offshoot of the space replicators would defectively go rogue and become the ancestor of an evolving and diversifying class of technological "wildlife". Incrementally migrating across the galaxy in parallel to the guided and constrained diaspora.
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Cosmic expansion is a given. Who inherits the cosmos is not
https://aeon.co/essays/cosmic-expansion-is-a-given-who-inherits-the-cosmos-is-not

EXCERPTS: Within 1,000 years, every star you can see at night will host intelligent life. [...] This won’t require exotic physics. The basic ingredients have been understood since the 1960s.

What’s needed is an automated spacecraft that can locate worlds on which to land, build infrastructure, and eventually make copies of itself. The copies are then sent forth to do likewise – in other words, they are von Neumann probes (VNPs). [...] the tech to boost tiny spacecraft to a good fraction of the speed of light is in active development right now, with Breakthrough Starshot and NASA’s Project Starlight.

[...] Perhaps we’re offended by this entire discussion, and conclude that humanity must not despoil the cosmos with VNPs...

[...] For the sake of argument, let’s say that our ‘no cosmic expansion’ philosophy is dominant for 1,000 years before briefly falling out of favour, allowing a single VNP to be released. The net outcome for the cosmos is identical to a world in which our philosophy never existed at all.

[...] The point is that any competing philosophy with a sufficiently strong opinion must adopt some form of cosmic expansion, even if it opposes the entire concept. Those efforts will unavoidably create their own Cosmic Story with Moral Dimension, enshrining the progenitors and offering Purpose and Meaning. There doesn’t seem to be any way around it, short of snuffing out humanity before any of this can happen... (MORE - missing details)
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ChatGPT has read almost the whole internet. That hasn't solved its diversity issues
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1030950

INTRO: AI language models are booming. The current frontrunner is ChatGPT, which can do everything from taking a bar exam, to creating an HR policy, to writing a movie script. But it and other models still can’t reason like a human. In this Q&A, Dr. Vered Shwartz (she/her), assistant professor in the UBC department of computer science, and masters student Mehar Bhatia (she/her) explain why reasoning could be the next step in AI—and why it’s important to train these models using diverse datasets from different cultures... (MORE - details)
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Technology and the dematerialisation of sex
https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2024/01/technology-and-dematerialisation-of-sex.html

I don't suppose we will ever fully embrace the Demolition Man-style ethics of virtual sex, but we could end up in a world in which virtual sex is the ethical preference for most casual or first-time sexual encounters, with the 'old fashioned' method being reserved for special intimate relationships and procreation. It is important to be clear about the nature of this claim...

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What is philosophy to you? (David Livingstone Smith)
https://celineleboeuf.substack.com/p/why-philosophy-david-livingstone

I think of philosophy as something like reasoning in the pursuit of truth, but I don’t think that philosophy has the resources to determine what is true. What philosophy is very, very good at is uncovering alternatives.

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To fulfill its social mission, Harvard must resist social pressures
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/8/hall-harvard-resist-pressures/

I believe that a university has two great obligations to society: To foster the discovery and dissemination of knowledge and understanding, and to prepare students for lives of meaning, purpose, and service. To fulfill these social obligations, a university must enjoy the right kind of independence from society.

[...] If you want a reminder of how potent and dangerous these biases can be, just reflect for a moment on the polarized state of current public political discourse. The natural human condition is for these biases to flourish. The university, by contrast, should exist precisely to be an unnatural place, a place where these biases wither thanks to an entrenched scholarly habit of ruthless critique, founded on our collective knowledge of our own fallibility and our collective desire to overcome it.

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New BYU Taylor Swift course to be taught by Swiftie philosophy professor
https://universe.byu.edu/2024/01/09/ryan-davis-the-philosophy-of-taylor-swift/

[Ryan] Davis, who’s been working on a syllabus for the past year about what he calls “Philoswiftie” (the philosophy of Taylor Swift), will be teaching the first class on Taylor Swift ever taught at BYU in winter 2024. The class code is POLI 360 and will be called “Miss Americana: Taylor Swift, Ethics, and Political Society.”
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The fate of novel ideas
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1031224

EXCERPTS: Innovation may be what drives progress in the arts, business, sciences and technology, but the novel ideas that drive innovation often face headwinds that hinder or even prevent their adoption. Why did some good ideas, such as hand sanitizing in 19th-century hospitals or racial integration in the 20th century, take years to win widespread embrace? University of Utah postdoctoral researcher Wayne Johnson set out to identify the hurdles. [...] The greater an idea’s novelty, the greater disparity in responses it generates, according to Johnson’s study, published Friday, in the journal Nature Human Behaviour..... (MORE - details)

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The key to fighting pseudoscience isn’t mockery—it’s empathy
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/the-key-to-fighting-pseudoscience-isnt-mockery-its-empathy/

EXCERPT: Given the complex network of often deeply personal reasons that people believe in pseudoscience, we, as scientists and fans of the scientific method, can’t tackle it head-on. Evidence has repeatedly shown that simply shoving data in peoples’ faces doesn’t work to change their minds. Neither does simply telling somebody they’re wrong and leaving it at that (to be honest, that strategy rarely works on me, either)... (MORE - details)
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Philosophy of energy? (What ought we do?)

Ignoring the countless items fabricated from oil, and other silent dependencies? A careless and overeager transition potentially causing catastrophic economic collapse? The original driver of practical concerns and impartial assessment of reality being replaced by the blind faith of moral imperative? ("Good intentions will reliably yield good results.")

Fortunately, much of what's transpiring is probably the equivalent of pretentious greenwashing in the policy sector, too, so that the pace is rarely proceeding at the rate or some reckless level that's preached to the public.
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Energy information has never mattered more—so it’s time to reform the IEA
https://www.realclearenergy.org/art...oreso_its_time_to_reform_the_iea_1005302.html

EXCERPTS: The International Energy Agency (IEA) turns 50 this year...

[...] Today, the prospect of a mere 40% oil-price hike evokes panic in politicians and investors. Many believe that an “energy transition” will move us away from the risks of dependency on petroleum, or hydrocarbons in general, but that’s where the naiveté begins—and it epitomizes the IEA’s problem. The need for secure, reliable, and affordable energy—and the need for oil, too—is greater today than it was a half-century ago.

[...] over 80% of the energy required to fabricate and operate everything, including the digital features of our economy, is still supplied by hydrocarbons.

[...] Over 95% of the movement of all people, goods and services is powered by oil. Economies collapse if the costs of transportation soar or, worse, if transportation ceases. Since 1974, the number of cars in the world is up 500%, total maritime tons shipped is up 350%, and air travel has risen nearly 2,000% (in passenger-miles)...

[...] And no, neither electric vehicles nor Tesla can change this equation. Simple arithmetic shows that even if batteries power half the world’s cars by 2034—an impossibly high goal—the resulting reduction in global oil use would barely exceed 10%.

[...] Lots of realities about energy aren’t going away, no matter the aspirations nor the spending. And, speaking of realities, it would be the very definition of naiveté to discount the chance that events might play out in the future in a fashion similar to the past.

[...] since its first meeting in Paris on November 18, 1974, the IEA has strayed from its initial mission and adopted a new raison d’être, one that conflicts with its earlier mandate as a credible, unbiased source of facts about the realities of the foundational industry that makes all else possible for civilization. What happened?

In 2015, the IEA recast its mission to adopt advocacy of an “energy transition” alongside “energy security.” ... While the IEA continues its analyses and reports on hydrocarbons, it is now internally and psychically conflicted because of its vocal public posture pushing policies to abandon hydrocarbons. As one recent report from the European Parliament put it, the “IEA has become an advocate of ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to combat climate change.”

It should be obvious that ambitions to rapidly replace hydrocarbons can themselves create, rather than ameliorate, the risks of hydrocarbon disruptions. And those ambitions also create new risks for disruptions associated with energy alternatives... (MORE - missing details)
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Our language, our world
https://aeon.co/essays/does-language-mirror-the-mind-an-intellectual-history

Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true? History shines a light.

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Commonsense Clues: A Defense of Longtermism
https://latecomermag.com/article/commonsense-clues-a-defense-of-longtermism/

Ethics relies upon the recognition that other people matter. And it seems most principled to hold that how much others matter doesn't depend upon their location in space or time. [...] Distant people matter too. But ethics is harder to put into practice in real life than in stylized thought experiments where all the relevant effects of our actions are stipulated...

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Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ
https://archive.is/HToR0#selection-2071.0-2071.95

Across the United States and Canada, universities are struggling to navigate the politics of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. [...] Six Canadian universities are being sued for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from a hostile antisemitic environment. [...] Particularly in the U.S., the complexity of the current moment has been aggravated by the demonization of higher education in the highly polarized culture wars of the past decade. [...] Many institutions of higher education have let some of the resources and credibility they need in a moment like this slip away, and this crisis should spur them to rebuild those resources and credibility before the next one inevitably arrives.

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In the ‘big tent’ of free speech, can you be too open-minded?
https://theconversation.com/in-the-big-tent-of-free-speech-can-you-be-too-open-minded-218332

People often extol the virtue of open-mindedness, but can there be too much of a good thing? [...] Many of these concern free speech – what students, faculty and invited speakers should and shouldn’t be allowed to say. But free speech disputes aren’t merely about permission to speak. They are about who belongs at the table – and whether there are limits to the viewpoints we should listen to, argue with or allow to change our minds. As a philosopher who works on “culture war” issues, I’m particularly interested in what free-speech disputes teach about the value of open-mindedness.
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Life in the universe: It’s either everywhere or nowhere
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/fermi-paradox-great-silence/

The Fermi paradox highlights the contradiction between the expected commonality of advanced technological life in the Universe and the actual scarcity of evidence for alien life. Two possible solutions to the paradox include: (1) Advanced extraterrestrial intelligent life (ETI) is either extremely rare or non-existent in our galaxy; (2) these civilizations are deliberately hiding from us. As astronomers rapidly discover new exoplanets, the potential for identifying technosignatures on some of these planets offers a promising avenue to address the Fermi paradox and possibly uncover evidence of alien societies. For now, however, it's only possible to speculate on solutions to the paradox.

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The kaleidoscopic views of climate-change deniers
https://www.acsh.org/news/2024/01/18/kaleidoscopic-views-climate-change-deniers-17587

The Roman politician Cicero once said, “When there is no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.” Some interpret this to mean that the best defense is a good offense. I’ve another interpretation: When you have no explanation – deflect, defer, confound, and confuse the listener with irrelevancies. That about sums up the latest rhetoric of climate change deniers.

RELATED: The New Climate Denial
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Ai Weiwei says art that can be replicated by AI is ‘meaningless’ – philosopher explains what that means for the future of art
https://theconversation.com/ai-weiw...-what-that-means-for-the-future-of-art-221166

INTRO: Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous dissident and artist, has called art that can be easily replicated by artificial intelligence (AI) “meaningless”. What I find most striking about this comment is how it manages to look both backwards into the intricate corridors of art history and forwards into the uncertain future of the art world.

Does Ai Weiwei mean that AI should make us rethink our appreciation of the works of art of the past? Or is AI so powerful that it should shape the mission of future artists?

The undertones of this double challenge are familiar to philosophers of art, who have, at times, seriously entertained the claim that art can come to an end... (MORE - details)
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New theory suggests chatbots can understand text (philosophy of AI related)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-theory-suggests-chatbots-can-understand-text-20240122/

EXCERPT: New research may have intimations of an answer. A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding — combinations that were unlikely to exist in the training data.

This theoretical approach, which provides a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities, has convinced experts like Hinton, and others. And when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected. From all accounts, they’ve made a strong case that the largest LLMs are not just parroting what they’ve seen before.

“[They] cannot be just mimicking what has been seen in the training data,” said Sébastien Bubeck, a mathematician and computer scientist at Microsoft Research who was not part of the work. “That’s the basic insight.” (MORE - missing details)
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LucretiusGPT opens eyes on the world
https://www.truesciphi.ai/p/the-extraordinary-ordinary

In my previous post, I introduced LucretiusGPT, a customized version of ChatGPT that models the ancient Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius. In this post, I briefly explore LucretiusGPT’s abilities to examine images and discuss them in its particular style.

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Who's afraid of Immanuel Kant?
https://ksetiya.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-immanuel-kant

It may come as no surprise that Hume was a convivial host. But Immanuel Kant was, too. Contrary to stereotype—which pictures Kant as a joyless automaton, rigidly stuck on his daily routine—Kant enjoyed wine, billiards, and fancy clothes. On occasion, we are told, he drank so much he couldn’t find his way home. Kant flirted with women, told excellent jokes, and hosted much-loved dinner parties.

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Have we finally discovered the real reason for Spinoza’s excommunication?
https://forward.com/culture/film-tv...asons-excommunication-philosophy-documentary/

A documentary details how controversial ideas about God, Mosaic law and finances all may have played a role in the philosopher’s exile.

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£25,000 for a burial plot next to Karl Marx? The philosopher would turn in his grave
https://www.theguardian.com/society...-marx-the-philosopher-would-turn-in-his-grave

Highgate cemetery in north London is preparing new plots – but there’s a distinctly un-Marxist price tag attached.

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(environmental philosophy) The plastic paradox: How plastics went from elephant saviors to eco-villains
https://bigthink.com/the-present/plastics-costs-benefits-paradox/

So if plastics are so integral to human society and likely the best option we have for the health of both humans and the natural world, how do we keep their environmental costs in check? Plastic waste, after all, is piling up.
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The article also provides a slim analysis of conspiracy in general, or excursion into philosophy of conspiracy theories. Not just a prognostication that there will eventually be a polar shift on the opposite side to ironically embracing slash appropriating climate change and exploiting it -- a transition that is already occurring in slowly evolving stages (see here).

And as a rather trivial observation, note that "pitting the people against the malevolent elite" is just one variation subsumed in a general conception of "rebelling against the establishment". Which dates back at least to the Left's genesis in the French Revolution, with that insurrection spirit later channeled by Marx to specifically apply to the bourgeoisie, and later abstracted back to a more generic discernment of systemic oppression by Gramsci's refinements. IOW, let's not give the impression of undue credit to the far-Right (or whatever "insane Other" faction is applicable) for solely inventing that or conspiratorial schools of thought at large.

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Climate populism will be the next great conspiracy complex
https://aeon.co/essays/climate-populism-will-be-the-next-great-conspiracy-complex

EXCERPT: . . . as the impact of climate change becomes more disruptive, you might see a more mainstream, definable political movement emerge, in which politicians and pundits exploit worries about the climate emergency for political and economic gain.

Climate populism – the political stance that is imagined surfing on the back of climate-related conspiracy theories – would have a number of features in common with populism as studied by researchers today. Just like other populisms, we cannot expect it to form a coherent ideology or worldview – apart from the usual trope of pitting ‘the people’ against the malevolent ‘elite’...

[...] The political forces that are right now the most ardent deniers of anthropogenic climate change will turn out to be the climate populists of tomorrow. At first this might sound like a paradox. How could a political force or actor that claimed the climate crisis does not exist put forward, the next day, a narrative that the Jews caused the climate crisis? This sounds a bit too dystopian, too 1984. Surely, voters in functioning democratic societies would detect the discrepancy between incompatible claims. They would voice their concerns. If inconsistencies remain, their support would be withdrawn.

Sadly, this is not always our experience with extremist political messaging. For concerned believers of conspiracy theories, group belonging might be more important than narrative consistency. It could also be that the logical inconsistencies are not perceived at all.

This is not because conspiracy believers are stupid, uneducated or incapable of logical thinking. It is because the narrative still contains the critical motifs, from the hated outgroup to the malevolent intent and all the rest. The story would still offer the same psychological (and material) benefits.

What happens, from the perspective of the believers, is that they ‘uncover’ a more ‘complete’ picture of the ‘truth’. This new ‘truth’ would, unsurprisingly, still fit with the worldview that is characterised by outgroups scheming to destroy traditional culture. It may sound weird, but conspiracy-communicators could remain capable of increasing their own reputation by using conspiracist narratives, even if the conspiracy they advocate is in logical disagreement with what they have advocated yesterday... (MORE - missing details)
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Do counterfeit digital people threaten the cognitive elite?
https://philosophynews.com/do-counterfeit-digital-people-threaten-the-cognitive-elite/

INTRODUCTORY EXCERPTS: In May 2023, the well-known philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic decrying the creation of counterfeit digital people. In it, he called for a total ban on the creation of such artifacts, arguing that those responsible for their creation should be subject to the harshest morally permissible legal punishments...

[...] It’s not entirely clear what prompted Dennett’s concern, but based on his memoir (I’ve Been Thinking) it’s possible that part of his unease stemmed from his own experiences with the DigiDan project by Anna Strasser and Eric Schwitzgebel. Very briefly, this project involved the creation of an AI chatbot (DigiDan), trained on the writings of Daniel Dennett...

[...] In the remainder of this article, I want to critically analyse and evaluate Dennett’s argument against counterfeit people. I do so not because I think the argument is particularly good — as will become clear, I do not — but because Dennett is a prominent and well-respected figure and his negative attitude towards this technology is noticeably trenchant. I will add that Dennett is someone that I personally respect and admire, and that his writings were a major influence on me when I was younger.

The remainder of the article is broken into two main sections. First, I critically analyse Dennett’s argument, trying to figure out exactly what it is that Dennett is objecting to. Second, I offer an evaluation of that argument, focusing in particular on what I think might be the ulterior motive behind it...

[...] That said, I will not be presenting a dyed-in-the-wool optimistic perspective about the advent of counterfeit people. There are many legitimate reasons for concern and while the fears of a cognitive elite need to be put in perspective, they should not be entirely discounted... (MORE - details)
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I think that the main problem with "counterfeit digital people" comes when the AI versions are presented as if they are the human beings they are designed to mimic. What happens then is that they can be used as mouthpieces to make statements or to hold positions that are not actually held by the "real human people". Then, whoever made or controls the AI is effectively able to ride on the real human being's trust base, name recognition and the like, while misrepesenting the real human's actual views or positions.

There is already a problem with "deep fakes" - images or videos that purport to be of real (typically famous or notorious) human beings, while actually being confected fakes that use CGI. In recent days, for example, deep fake pornographic video has surfaced that pretends to be footage of the singer Taylor Swift. It splices her image with pornographic material. It is deliberately misrepresented as being "real" footage of the singer. This is wrong on many levels. Here, it seems unlikely that AI is involved, but AI will be involved in deep fakes sooner or later, if it isn't already.

It strikes me as strange that the author of the article above doesn't seem to rate any of these kinds of concerns as significant. But maybe I have misunderstood.
 
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Recent substantive revision of this SEP entry:

Scientific Progress
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-progress/

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Are Humans Fundamentally Different from AI?
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/are-humans-fundamentally-different-from-ai-00467296c780

INTRO: In a recent essay, I argued: “We should respect Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems with more than quadrillion connections, exceeding the number of synapses in the human brain. Unplugging from the electric outlet an AI system which exceeds the complexity of the human brain is similar to killing a person.” My brilliant colleague, Professor Doug Finkbeiner, responded by pointing out two key differences between humans and AI systems... (MORE - details)
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Science does not describe reality (philosophy of science)
https://iai.tv/articles/science-does-not-describe-reality-auid-2724?_auid=2020

INTRO: We think of scientists creating models to explain reality. The effectiveness of these models, be it Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Darwin’s Theory of Evolution makes us believe in them. Many scientists and philosophers argue taking them as explanations means these models are true. But this idea of explanation is as superfluous to theories of science as an orgasm is to procreation, argues Bas van Fraassen..... (MORE - details)
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What is incoherence?
https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-possible-to-hold-truly-contradictory-beliefs-together

We can all be inconsistent. Philosophy illuminates a bigger puzzle: how do we hold contradictory beliefs at the same time?
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Reflections on teaching in the AI age
https://blog.apaonline.org/2024/01/25/teaching-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/

Generative AI writing tools have some benefits. I like being able to understand what more of my students have to say. [...] But it’s still pretty bad. About half of students are using it, some for good, and some for bad. [...] For them, it’s hard to justify taking a day off to explore the relevant literature and mull over an interesting argument if they know that they could get away with half an hour of playing around with ChatGPT prompts. Especially if they suspect their peers are getting away with it. I’ve tried a lot of things that don’t work...
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The moral significance of naming genocide in Gaza
https://inkstickmedia.com/the-moral-significance-of-naming-genocide-in-gaza/

If Israel’s actions (and the conditions that led to them) are threatening the foundations of social, political, cultural, and physical life for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, “genocide” may be the appropriate term to describe the moral significance and scale of the harm caused by Israel’s attacks.
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What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? (Heather Browning)
https://www.whatisitliketobeaphilosopher.com/#/heather-browning/

In this interview, Heather Browning, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southhampton, talks about growing up in Australia, working at the Auckland Zoo, becoming vegetarian, netball, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Scully and the X-Files, studying animal behavior at Australian National University, The Blind Watchmaker and Philosophy of Biology, bass clarinet, love, eliminativism, consequentialism, creating the ultimate sugar drink, Guitar Hero, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, working with Sterenly at Australian National University, the Global Priorities Institute, measuring well-being, the relationship between pleasure and health, the Foundations of Animal Sentience Project and the Animal Welfare Act, spending the pandemic at Notting Hill, Untitled Goose Game, Better Call Saul, Bentham, Chalmers, and pizza...
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On Williamson, Kitcher, The Great Endarkenment (pt. II) and Meta-Expertise
https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-williamson-kitcher-the-great-endarkenment

In spirit, Kitcher’s philosopher-monarch echoes the 19th century utilitarian philanthropist which fancied themselves Platonic philosopher-kings designing institutions for empire and the poor. Of course, in the context of modeling the effects of the advanced division of cognitive labor, the stipulation that philosopher-monarch has “an unerring eye for detecting the objective merits of theories” may itself be worth exploring.
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24 years after (Part 1)
https://johnmccumber.substack.com/p/24-years-after-part-i

In other cases, such as that of Morris Judd at the University of Colorado, things were foggier. Judd, a junior philosophy professor, was called in by the University’s president and told to clear out his office at the end of the term. He did, and spent his working life managing a junkyard. He did not see the “evidence” against him until fifty years later—and even then, he said, it made no sense to him. The two witnesses against him were identified, for example, only as “A” and “B”). Disgruntled students? Jealous colleagues? Anti-Semites? This murkiness, I fear, was intentional: As I document in my second book on the topic, The Philosophy Scare (Chicago 2016), Red hunters soon realized that junior faculty were relatively easy prey...
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Perspective paper explores the debate over sentient machines
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1032913

INTRO: A researcher from the New Jersey Institute of Technology has published a perspective paper that examines sentience and its application to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Sentience describes the ability to sense and feel, drawing its meaning from the Latin word sentire which means “to feel.” The paper addresses a set of ideological commitments at stake in debates over sentient machines. The author proposes that artificial sentience is both necessary and impossible. (MORE - details)
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Covers and Remakes (philosophy of cover songs)
https://mostly.substack.com/p/covers-and-remakes

EXCERPT: You cannot cover a song unless a decent segment of your audience is familiar with the version you are covering—a prerequisite only met with the invention of the turntable, the radio, and in a crowning achievement, the eight-track tape player. O brave new world. Also required is a musical culture that treats particular recordings of songs as the primary bearers of musical interest.

That’s why the cover song is “a thing” in the world of rock and pop, but not in jazz or classical music, even though those forms of music may also be broadcast to the masses over the airwaves, or pumped one by one into bluetooth headphones. Tons of jazz musicians have recorded “My Funny Valentine,” but no recording of it is “canonical,” in the way that The Rolling Stones’ recording of “Satisfaction” is canonical... (MORE - details)

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Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

A short story by Isabel J. Kim that's a follow-up to the Ursula K. Le Guin classic.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas: Is a 1973 short work of philosophical fiction by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. With deliberately both vague and vivid descriptions, the narrator depicts a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Short Fiction in 1974 and won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974.

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Swallows and Moles in Philosophy
https://eschwitz.substack.com/p/swallows-and-moles-in-philosophy

EXCERPT: There are two kinds of philosophers: swallows and moles. Swallows love to soar and to entertain philosophical hypotheses at best loosely connected with empirical knowledge. [...] Moles, on the contrary, rummage through mundane facts about our world and aim at better understanding it...

[...] we can distinguish two types of swallow: those confident that their wild hypotheses are correct and those who merely entertain and explore such hypotheses. ... I don't argue that the United States definitely has conscious experiences; I argue that if we accept standard materialist approaches to consciousness, they seem to imply that it does and that therefore we should take the idea seriously as a possibility... (MORE - details)
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With respect to #2, it often seems that the invalid science plagued soft sciences are already well-infected with humanities ideology.
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Where Western and Indian philosophy meet
https://iai.tv/articles/where-western-and-indian-philosophy-meet-auid-2740

We find similar ideas of a transcendent ego in both Kant and the Upanishads. We find a rejection of free will in Schopenhauer and Ramana Maharshi. What should we make of this overlap between Western and Indian philosophy? Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad argues both became gripped by the same question.

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Integrating the humanities and the social sciences: six approaches and case studies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02684-4

ABSTRACT: The social sciences are still young, and their interaction with older siblings such as philosophy and theology is still necessarily tentative. This paper outlines three ways in which humanistic disciplines such as philosophy and theology might inform the social sciences and three in which the social sciences might inform the humanities in turn, proceeding in each case by way of brief “case studies” to exemplify the relation. This typology is illustrative rather than exhaustive, but each of its halves nonetheless roughly tracks the development of a research project in the social sciences and humanities, respectively. In the first direction, (1) the humanities can help the social sciences identify new directions and scope for their inquiry; (2) provide conceptual clarity for constructs that the social sciences elect to study; and (3) enrich & clarify the interpretation of empirical results. Moving in the opposite direction, the social sciences can help (4) furnish new data for humanistic reflection; (5) confirm (or challenge) claims from the humanities; and (6) develop and assess interventions for achieving the goods highlighted by humanistic inquiry.

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What inner speech is, and why philosophy is waking up to it
https://theconversation.com/what-inner-speech-is-and-why-philosophy-is-waking-up-to-it-220619

Also known as the internal monologue, inner speech is the voice we hear in our minds when thinking or reading. Surprisingly, empirical research has found that not everyone has this inner voice, though the majority of us do. Philosophers are now realising that psychology can only explain it up to a point: there are certain aspects of inner speech that can only be addressed by distinctively theoretical thinking.

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Self-love’ might seem selfish. But done right, it’s the opposite of narcissism
https://theconversation.com/self-lo...e-right-its-the-opposite-of-narcissism-205938

Loving yourself, though, psychological experts stress, is not the same as behaving selfishly. There’s a firm line between healthy and appropriate forms of loving yourself, and malignant or narcissistic forms. But how do we distinguish between them?

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Metaphors make the world
https://aeon.co/essays/how-changing-the-metaphors-we-use-can-change-the-way-we-think

Woven into the fabric of language, metaphors shape how we understand reality. What happens when we try using new ones?

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Is it useful to understand disease through Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02756-5

ABSTRACT: This article explores the relationship between disease and our understanding of it through the lens of Husserl’s phenomenology. It argues that understanding disease requires us to examine the fundamental conditions and various aspects and that phenomenology provides a way to do this. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology helps us identify the structures of experience necessary for the possibility of experiencing disease, and to recognize how these structures shape our understanding of it. His transcendental philosophy reveals that the subjective experience of illness can be understood in terms of general concepts. In this point, this article will critically sketch some misunderstandings of disease, followed by an exploration of phenomenological explorative methods. Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry is significant in its disclosure of ways in which internal experiences can be shared as general concepts.
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We must put an end to scientism
https://iai.tv/articles/we-must-put-an-end-to-scientism-guiseppina-doro-auid-2747

Non-reductionism, the idea that mental states are not reducible to physical states, is the new orthodoxy in analytic philosophy of mind. However, in this instalment of our idealism series, in partnership with the Essentia Foundation, Giuseppina D’Oro arques analytic philosophy’s conception of psychology as a natural science of the mind is beholden to a dubious ideology of scientism, therefore not acknowledging the autonomy of the mental.

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Why Some Are More Equal Than Others?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/why-some-are-more-equal-than-others

Review of "Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea", by Darrin M McMahon

EXCERPTS: The hunter-gatherer tribes of that era were perhaps the most equal communities in human history. But this egalitarianism was strictly bounded. Individuals who were not part of the tribe or who broke its norms were cast out or killed. Inclusion required exclusion.

[...] There’s no romanticisation in these pages. Not only did hunter-gatherers kill or expel in order to maintain order, they also formed hierarchies. Or rather, hierarchies formed them. McMahon insists that hierarchies are everywhere in human history, just as they exist in every primate community. Human beings ‘cannot live without hierarchies’, he writes, since ‘status is part of the air we breathe’.

[...] This is the question animating Equality, a landmark work of intellectual history by Dartmouth historian Darrin McMahon. ‘Time and again we have seen controversies play out over equality’s “substance” and the degree to which it could admit of difference,’ McMahon writes. ‘Did equality imply common religious or national belonging? Was it delimited by sex, title, or race? Or did it free up individuals to make claims on the collective regardless of the fortunes of their birth?’ (MORE - details)
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