Philosophy Updates

The world is not a quantum wave function - Why reality is non-local and the wave function isn't real
https://iai.tv/articles/the-world-is-not-a-quantum-wave-function-auid-3096?_auid=2020

INTRO: The world of quantum physics is a very different world from the day-to-day reality we experience. In the quantum world, interactions across vast distances can occur, non-local interactions. Some quantum ontologies try to explain non-locality using a high-dimensional wave function. But Professor of Philosophy of Science, Valia Allori argues we need to bring our theories back down to three-dimensional Earth, albeit with the inevitable sacrifice of a local universe... MORE - details

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Does the multiverse explain our fundamental constants? (cosmology, philosophy of science)
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/multiverse-explain-fundamental-constants/

KEY POINTS: In our Universe, the values of our fundamental constants dictate the behavior of nature: the strengths of the different forces, the masses of the fundamental particles, the value of the cosmological constant and more. In some cases, these values could be vastly different and our Universe would only be slightly altered; in other instances, even modest differences would lead to an unrecognizable reality. So where do the values of these fundamental constants come from? Is there a physical mechanism or explanation behind them? One possible solution lies in bubble universes from inflation, but is that actually correct? (MORE - details)

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‘Next-level’ chaos traces the true limit of predictability
https://www.quantamagazine.org/next-level-chaos-traces-the-true-limit-of-predictability-20250307/

EXCERPTS: The French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that a sufficiently clever “demon” could predict the entire future given a complete knowledge of the present...

One blow came in the early 1900s with the discovery of quantum mechanics. [...] Another came later that century, when physicists realized how much “chaotic” systems amplified any uncertainties...

In recent years, a third limitation has been percolating through physics — in some ways the most dramatic yet. [...] Known as undecidability, it goes beyond chaos. Even a demon with perfect knowledge of a system’s state would be unable to fully grasp its future... (MORE - details)

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Is climate persuasion a fool’s errand?
https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2025/03/is-climate-persuasion-a-fools-errand/

INTRO: It happens every day. A friend or colleague talks enthusiastically about buying a new gas car, or shivers theatrically on a chilly day and says: “So much for global warming.” Now you’re faced with a choice. Do you engage them with facts and arguments or just smile neutrally and change the subject?

Climate change, perhaps, used to be a topic where reasoned discussion was possible, particularly if people were lacking basic facts about atmospheric chemistry and the scale of fossil fuel use. These days, it can be more of a conversational third rail than religion or sport.

Here we tackle two intertwined questions. First, there’s now been two decades of research on environmental psychology. What have we learned about changing people’s minds on climate? But there’s a second, larger, question looming in the background: Does moving towards a decarbonized planet need everyone to buy into a science-based view anyway? (MORE - details)
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Poor sleep may fuel conspiracy beliefs, according to new research (philosophy of conspiracy theories)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1076323

-EXCERPT- Dr Jolley explained: “Sleep is crucial for mental health and cognitive functioning. Poor sleep has been shown to increase the risk of depression, anxiety, and paranoia - factors that also contribute to conspiracy beliefs. Our research suggests that improving sleep quality could serve as a protective factor against the spread of conspiratorial thinking”. These findings highlight the potential for sleep-focused interventions to mitigate susceptibility to conspiracy theories. By addressing sleep quality, individuals may be better equipped to critically evaluate information and resist misleading narratives. (MORE - details, no ads)

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Want to climb the leadership ladder? Try debate training
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1076739

INTRO: For those looking to climb the corporate ladder in the U.S., here’s an idea you might not have considered: debate training. According to a new research paper, people who learn the basics of debate are more likely to advance to leadership roles in U.S. organizations, compared to those who do not receive this training. One key reason is that being equipped with debate skills makes people more assertive in the workplace... (MORE - details, no ads)

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‘Odd’ objects that adapt and move without a brain (philosophy of robotics)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1076726

INTRO: Inspired by how brainless lifeforms such as starfish and slime moulds move around, physicists at the University of Amsterdam have constructed ‘odd’ objects that autonomously roll, crawl and wiggle over unpredictable terrain, including uphill and over obstacles placed in their way. This solves a key problem of robotic locomotion.... (MORE - details, no ads)

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Black holes: not endings, but beginnings? New research could revolutionize our understanding of the universe (philosophy of cosmology)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1076680

KEY POINTS: New research suggests black holes may transition into ‘white holes’, ejecting matter and potentially even time back into the universe, defying our current understanding of these cosmic giants. The study by the University of Sheffield proposes a revolutionary link between time and dark energy, suggesting that the mysterious force driving the universe's expansion may be used to measure time. The research could pave the way for groundbreaking new fundamental theories and breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe... (MORE - details, no ads)

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Scientists have definitively taken us beyond the Big Bang (cosmology)
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/scientists-beyond-big-bang/

KEY POINTS: Perhaps, in all the Universe, there’s no question that’s ever loomed larger than the greatest existential question of all: where did all of this, the Universe, the world, and all of us, come from? In the early 20th century, this giant question got its first scientific answer: the Big Bang, or a hot, dense, uniform state early on that led to the Universe we know emerging in its aftermath. But here in the 21st century, we’ve gone far beyond that initial picture of the Big Bang, with cosmic inflation carrying along enormous implications for our ultimate beginnings. Here’s how... (MORE - details)
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Hail Mary
https://petemandik.substack.com/p/hail-mary

INTRO: I love thought experiments, and the Mary thought experiment at the heart of Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument” against physicalism is one of my all-time favorites, even though it utterly fails to disprove physicalism. Unfortunately, most physicalists bypass the best response to the knowledge argument, which I am happy to share here. In case you’d like a re-cap of the argument itself, presented in comic form, scroll down to the end of this article. Then scroll back up to enjoy this response... (MORE - details)

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The necessity of Nussbaum
https://aeon.co/essays/why-reading-martha-c-nussbaums-philosophy-is-pure-pleasure

EXCERPT: Martha Nussbaum’s style is lucid and elegant, and she can be read for pure pleasure (which is certainly not something you could say of all academic philosophers). She has made important contributions in ethics, political philosophy, international development, feminist philosophy, animal rights, philosophy of emotion, and global justice. From her remarkably impressive body of work (at least 28 books and more than 500 papers), I have chosen here to concentrate on three key areas: the capabilities approach, her theory of emotions and, connected with that, her work on anger. Her treatment of each of these topics offers excellent evidence of how Nussbaum’s work challenges settled positions... (MORE - details)

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Banning first cousin marriage would be eugenic and ineffective
https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac....in-marriage-would-be-eugenic-and-ineffective/

EXCERPTS: A bill that proposes to ban first-cousin marriage in the UK [...] follows the introduction of a ban on cousin marriages that came into effect in Norway in 2023 and a planned ban in Sweden from mid-2026.

Different reasons might be given for proposing to ban first-cousin marriage. However, one significant reason given by supporters of these bans is concern for public health. [...] in Bradford, where there has traditionally been a high rate of cousin marriages within the Pakistani community ... children of first cousin parents had higher rates of learning and speech problems and more visits to hospitals and doctors.

The increased incidence of certain genetic illnesses in children of related parents has long been recognised [...] Although it is laudable to wish to seek measures to prevent health and learning problems in future children, there is a fundamental ethical challenge... (MORE - details)

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Philosophy of Macroevolution (recent substantive revision of SEP entry)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/macroevolution/

INTRO: Macroevolution refers (most of the time, in practice) to evolutionary patterns and processes above the species level. It is usually contrasted with microevolution, or evolutionary change within populations. This customary way of drawing the macro/micro distinction is not perfect, however, because species sometimes consist of multiple populations.

Some evolutionary processes, such as the spread of a trait from one population to another, might count as within-species processes but not within-population processes. Population genetics, which emerged during the modern synthesis of the early- to mid-twentieth century, explains within-population microevolutionary change in terms of natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, and migration.

One question that looms over philosophical work on macroevolutionary theory is how macroevolution and microevolution are related... (MORE - details)
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Theodora Thunker: "Geez, this must be the Apologetics Abatis they warned us about!" --Mystery of the Fallow Land
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Religious language is not scientific language
https://iai.tv/articles/wittgenstein-vs-dawkins-is-god-a-scientific-hypothesis-auid-3101?_auid=2020

INTRO: Critics of religion like Richard Dawkins often depict religion as a second-rate science. According to Dawkins, God is a “hypothesis” which is outcompeted by rival scientific explanations. But might this conception of religion be radically mistaken? In this article, philosopher John Cottingham draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to argue that any understanding and evaluation of religious discourse must be sensitive to the form of life in which it is embedded. As such, religious claims are not defective scientific claims, but rather entirely distinct ways of seeing the world... (MORE - details)

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The multiverse may not remove the need for a personal creator
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/03/13/the-multiverse-may-not-remove-the-need-for-a-personal-creator/

EXCERPT: It is incorrect to assume that Eternal Inflation eliminates the need for a prime mover to create the universe because it is eternal and, therefore, does not need a cause. Its own creator says it must have a beginning. The idea of eternal inflation raises several problems, and various solutions are being considered, but what I want to talk about in this post is whether Eternal Inflation or other Multiverse ideas are better ideas than that of an uncaused intelligent being—”God”, if you will—creating the universe... (MORE - details)

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Sir Isaac Newton letter from 1704 predicts when world will end – and it’s not far away (philosophy of prophecy)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/sir-isaac-newton-letter-world-end-date-b2698307.html

EXCERPTS: Renowned scientist Sir Isaac Newton predicted when the world would end in a letter dating back more than 300 years ago. A letter from the famous mathematician and physicist - who was best known for formulating the laws of gravity - revealed he believed the world would end in 2060, as he scrawled the warning above a series of mathematical calculations in 1704.

[...] Also a theologian, Sir Isaac based his predictions for the end of the world on his Protestant interpretation of the Bible. Sir Isaac calculated the year in question using maths and dates in biblical history to land on the prophesied apocalypse, which he put in the middle of the 21st century... (MORE - details) ..... RELATED: Isaac Newton: The Dark Heretic

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JD Vance vs the Pope: The myth of moral absolutes
https://iai.tv/articles/jd-vance-vs-the-pope-the-myth-of-moral-absolutes-auid-3100?_auid=2020

INTRO: Amid the United States’ turn towards isolationism – cutting off allies and slashing foreign aid – Vice-President J.D. Vance has clashed with Pope Francis over the question of whether we should love our own family and country more than strangers in distant countries. Vance and the Pope speak as though there is one true morality but, argues Steven Hales, the impossibility of resolving their dispute shows this isn’t the case. Instead, evolution has landed us all with incompatible moral instincts, both to favor our own families and to treat everyone equally. Appeals to a single moral truth are really just ways of trying to persuade others to embrace one or other of these competing internal drives... (MORE - details)
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‘Once in a Century’ Proof Settles Math’s Kakeya Conjecture (philosophy of mathematics)
https://www.quantamagazine.org/once-in-a-century-proof-settles-maths-kakeya-conjecture-20250314/

The deceptively simple Kakeya conjecture has bedeviled mathematicians for 50 years. A new proof of the conjecture in three dimensions illuminates a whole crop of related problems...

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Could the universe ever stop expanding? New theory proposes a cosmic 'off switch' (cosmology)
https://www.livescience.com/space/c...nding-new-theory-proposes-a-cosmic-off-switch

Dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that powers the expansion of the universe, may undergo periodic 'violent transitions' that reverse the growth of the cosmos, a new pre-print study hints...

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Who’s afraid of lab-grown meat? Mississippi became the third state to ban cell-derived meat. (philosophy of food)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/...e_code=1.4E4.V-h2.0nMVzqkBugfH&smid=url-share

,The bans are unconstitutional, proponents say, and won’t survive court challenges, some already underway. “It’s a whole lot of political theater,” said Suzannah Gerber, executive director of the Association for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation, a trade group. The opposition to cultivated meat has mostly taken hold in red states, but the trend defies easy categorization...
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Consciousness, the brain, and our chimeric selves (philosophy of mind)
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-the-brain-and-our-chimeric-selves-auid-3102?_auid=2020

INTRO: The genetic code that goes on to create our brains, our selves, and our consciousness, is not only hereditary. Anna M. Hennessey argues that microchimerism, where non-hereditary DNA is introduced into our bodies through cells exchanged during pregnancy between the mother and fetus and vice versa, is ripe for scientific and philosophical enquiry. For Hennessey, these exchanges do not only alter our brain but our consciousness itself, and how we experience the world... (MORE - details)

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A new scientific field is recasting who we are and how we got that way (nature versus nurture)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/...e_code=1.304.Kvbg.dePS9V7AlweI&smid=url-share

EXCERPT: Today, however, a new realm of science is poised to upend the debate — not by declaring victory for one side or the other, nor even by calling a tie, but rather by revealing they were never in opposition in the first place. Through this new vantage, nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don’t operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other.

The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics that I have been closely involved with for over a decade. Though the field is still in its infancy, its philosophical implications are staggering.

It has the potential to rewrite a great deal of what we think we know about who we are and how we got that way. For all the talk of someday engineering our chromosomes and the science-fiction fantasy of designer babies flooding our preschools, this is the real paradigm shift, and it’s already underway... (MORE - details)

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An artificial heart may save your life. But it can also change you in surprising ways
https://theconversation.com/an-arti...can-also-change-you-in-surprising-ways-252165

INTRO: This week, doctors announced that an Australian man with severe heart failure had left hospital with an artificial heart that had kept him alive until he could receive a donor heart.

The patient, a man from New South Wales in his 40s, was not the world’s first person to receive this type of artificial heart. However, he is said to be the first with one to be discharged from hospital to wait for a heart transplant, which he’s since had.

I am a philosopher and bioethicist. I completed my PhD on artificial hearts – particularly how these implants can change people’s lives in profound ways. Here’s what patients and their families need to consider... (MORE - details)
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Learning from AI’s bullshit
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/03/13/learning-from-ais-bullshit/

EXCERPTS: Anyone who has used modern AI knows how unreliable they are. They might recommend adding glue to pizza sauce to keep the cheese from sliding off, generate Shrek when asked to recreate the Mona Lisa, or give completely wrong answers to mathematical questions. While new models of AI are getting better at many of these tasks, research has also found AI models are increasingly more likely to willingly answer questions they get wrong.

[...] LLMs are not intelligent agents or advanced search engines. Modern LLMs just make predictions of what the next token will be, and choose one of the likelier tokens...

[...] Because these LLMs are nothing more than predicting the likely next words, when they tell you what the capital of Canada is, whether or not they get the question right, they do not care about telling you the right answer. There’s nothing there to do the caring. They are bullshitting.

The interesting epistemological question, given the ubiquity of AI’s bullshit (to say nothing about the ubiquity of bullshit more generally), is can we learn from bullshit? Can we end a session using AI knowing more than when we started? (MORE - details)

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Ghosts among the philosophers
https://aeon.co/essays/when-psychical-research-and-analytic-philosophy-shared-cambridge

EXCERPTS: Why did Turing feel the need to talk about telepathy? Why did he consider extrasensory perception a serious objection to his thought experiment? And what about his peculiar mention of ghosts?

[...] Cambridge was one of the birthplaces of analytic philosophy, which prides itself on dispensing with speculative metaphysics, and putting a heavy emphasis on scientific precision and empiricism.

But ‘spooky’ topics like telepathy, after-death survival and ghosts permeated the philosophical ecosystem in Cambridge and beyond long into the 1960s. It pushed many of the thinkers interested in it towards new and creative explorations of the nature of time, matter and language... (MORE - details)

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Spacetime is not a continuum, it's made up of discrete pieces (philosophy of space and time)
https://iai.tv/articles/spacetime-i...de-up-of-discrete-pieces-auid-3108?_auid=2020

INTRO: Much of modern physics hinges on the notion of a smooth ‘continuum’. But as Professor of Theoretical Physics Sumati Surya argues, our lived experience point to something else: discreteness. Surya argues that spacetime isn’t infinitely divisible but instead built from discrete elements and their causal relationships – there is a “fundamental minimal size below which spacetime loses its meaning”... (MORE - details)
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Fine tuning against the multiverse?
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/03/fine-tuning-against-the-multiverse.html

EXCERPTS: Swenson helpfully put the argument like this. There are four possibilities: (i) There is a God and a multiverse, (ii) There is a God and only one universe, (iii) There is no God and there is a multiverse, and (iv) There is no God and only one universe. [...] only (ii) is it not surprising. That there is a God and only one universe, in other words, is more likely than the alternatives... (MORE - details)

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‘We remember as true things that never even happened’: Julian Barnes on memory and changing his mind
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...julian-barnes-on-memory-and-changing-his-mind

EXCERPTS: I have one brother – three years older, a philosopher by profession [...] As he explained to me, he had come to distrust memory as a guide to the past. By itself, unsubstantiated, uncorroborated memory was in his view no better than an act of the imagination. [...] I have come round to my brother’s point of view.

I now agree that memory, a single person’s memory, uncorroborated and unsubstantiated by other evidence, is a feeble guide to the past. I think, more strongly than I used to, that we constantly reinvent our lives, retelling them – usually – to our own advantage. I believe that the operation of memory is closer to an act of the imagination than it is to the clean and reliably detailed recuperation of an event in our past... (MORE - details)

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Reflections on Jewish Complicity: On the relation between mainstream Jewish politics and authoritarian assaults on universities and free speech.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-158966694

EXCERPTS: This process is not complete, but its possibility depended on a vivid, urgent, and largely successful campaign by major Jewish organizations and Jewish leaders to train Americans to read peaceful college protests in solidarity with Palestinians as incipient pograms, as the latest iteration of an eternal cycle of mass Jewish killing.

Had Jewish organizations, and Jews more generally, rejected the canard that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism then this process would not have reached the point at which Trump can hold Columbia University ransom under the pretext that he is protecting Jews. [...] But the counterfactual is just that: a counterfactual. We Jews enabled the current authoritarian power grabs under the guise of anti-anti-semitism. We are complicit... (MORE - details)

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Bioethics
https://www.apollosurveys.org/bioethics/

EXCERPTS: Bioethicists influence practice and policies in medicine, science, and public health. However, little is known about bioethicists' views in aggregate. Leah Pierson and colleagues recently surveyed 824 U.S bioethicists on a wide range of ethical issues, including topics related to abortion, medical aid in dying, and resource allocation...

[...] Primary results:
  • A large majority (87%) of bioethicists believed that abortion was ethically permissible.
  • 82% thought it was permissible to select embryos based on somewhat painful medical conditions, whereas only 22% thought it was permissible to select on non-medical traits like eye color or height.
  • 59% thought it was ethically permissible for clinicians to assist patients in ending their own lives.
  • 15% of bioethicists thought it was ethically permissible to offer payment in exchange for organs (e.g. kidneys)... (MORE - details)
 
A dilemma for nonlocal theories of consciousness
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-dilemma-for-nonlocal-theories-of.html

Call a theory of consciousness nonlocal if two entities that are molecule-for-molecule perfectly similar in their physical structure could nonetheless differ in their conscious experiences. My thought today is: Nonlocal theories of consciousness face an unattractive dilemma between (a.) allowing for physically implausible means of knowledge or (b.) allowing for the in-principle introspective inaccessibility of consciousness...

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Ary a Word
https://amysshadowbook.blogspot.com/2025/03/ary-word.html

It bothers me to have all this language lost and gone. [...] language is part of constructing the world as we experience it, what sense we make of it and, also, the more nebulous felt quality of what the world seems like. Lose the speaker, lose the language. Lose the language, lose the world. That’s an idea I could develop into a chapter for my book on grief, an idea I could trace through several philosophers historical and wise...

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The shame felt in addiction often isn’t toxic – it’s healing
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-shame-felt-in-addiction-often-isnt-toxic-its-healing

The shame of addiction often does make sense – and it can be therapeutically useful. Furthermore, addiction, if it is a disease, is not the kind of disease for which experiencing shame makes no sense. Let me explain...
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When robot becomes boss: Research on authority, obedience and relationships with machines
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1076950

INTRO: How does a robot perform as a boss at work? The results of research by Polish scientists published in Cognition, Technology & Work suggest that while robots can command obedience, it is not as strong as in the case of humans. The level of obedience towards them is generally lower than towards human authority figures, and work efficiency under the supervision of a robot is lower... (MORE - details, no ads)

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A curious tendency among Western philosophers?
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/17/a-curious-tendency-among-western-philosophers/

So the question remains: why were so many major Western philosophers childless? One simple and obvious answer is that philosophy requires solitude for thought. Children are a huge distraction! Basically the Room Of One’s Own argument. I don’t buy it for a moment...

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Diverging views of democracy fuel support for authoritarian politicians, Notre Dame study shows
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1077375

Why do people living in democratic countries vote for political candidates who openly violate democratic standards? A new study by a University of Notre Dame researcher found that diverse understandings of democracy among voters can lead to votes for authoritarian-leaning political leaders...
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Engraving the digital world in stone
-- Ben Landau-Taylor --

INTRO: I’m working on a project to preserve online text in stone for future civilizations. For the last couple decades, most of our cultural and intellectual crown jewels have been published digitally, not physically. This is great for accessibility but bad for long-term storage. If you want to find a post from 2025 in 2045, then you’d better hope the Internet Archive keeps backing up all our stuff for free, because no one else bothers to keep hosting anything once it’s mildly inconvenient. If you want to find it in 2200 or 3000 then forget about it... (MORE - details)

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Slopaganda: The interaction between propaganda and generative AI
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01560

ABSTRACT: At least since Francis Bacon, the slogan 'knowledge is power' has been used to capture the relationship between decision-making at a group level and information. We know that being able to shape the informational environment for a group is a way to shape their decisions; it is essentially a way to make decisions for them.

This paper focuses on strategies that are intentionally, by design, impactful on the decision-making capacities of groups, effectively shaping their ability to take advantage of information in their environment. Among these, the best known are political rhetoric, propaganda, and misinformation. The phenomenon this paper brings out from these is a relatively new strategy, which we call slopaganda.

According to The Guardian, News Corp Australia is currently churning out 3000 'local' generative AI (GAI) stories each week. In the coming years, such 'generative AI slop' will present multiple knowledge-related (epistemic) challenges. We draw on contemporary research in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to diagnose the problem of slopaganda, describe some recent troubling cases, then suggest several interventions that may help to counter slopaganda... (MORE - details)

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Wolff and the First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics (book review)
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/wolff-and-the-first-fifty-years-of-german-metaphysics/

INTRO: In the history of German philosophy between Leibniz and Kant, Christian Wolff (1679–1754) is no doubt the most important philosopher. Wolff offers a comprehensive and consistent system of human knowledge that extends to mathematics, logic, metaphysics, physics, natural theology, ethics, law, and politics.

Corey Dyck’s aim in his book, Wolff & the First Fifty Years of German Metaphysics, is to offer a reappraisal of Wolff’s philosophy and its importance for the German intellectual landscape from roughly 1700 to 1750. Dyck’s specific focus is on Wolff‘s Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, usually simply called the Deutsche Metaphysik (German Metaphysics) of 1719, and its (critical) reception. This means that he excludes Wolff’s Latin volumes that were intended for learned circles throughout Europe.

Dyck’s work is a laudable effort to restore the important role that Wolff played in shaping German philosophical and intellectual thought like hardly anyone before him. Dyck’s careful reconstruction of Wolff’s philosophy and its influence on figures such as Georg Meier, Anton Amo, Moses Mendelssohn but also women philosophers such as Luise Gottsched and Johanna Unzer uncovers many forgotten aspects of Wolff’s thought and its intellectual heritage... (MORE - details)
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Why don’t we remember being a baby? New study provides clues
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1077179

EXCERPT: “Statistical learning is about extracting the structure in the world around us,” he said. “This is critical for the development of language, vision, concepts, and more. So it’s understandable why statistical learning may come into play earlier than episodic memory.”

Even still, the research team’s latest study shows that episodic memories can be encoded by the hippocampus earlier than previously thought, long before the earliest memories we can report as adults. So, what happens to these memories? (MORE - details)

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Consciousness before birth? Imaging studies explore the possibility
https://www.science.org/content/article/consciousness-birth-imaging-studies-explore-possibility

EXCERPTS: A recent meeting here on consciousness started from a relatively uncontroversial premise: A newly fertilized human egg isn’t conscious, and a preschooler is, so consciousness must emerge somewhere in between. But the gathering, sponsored by New York University (NYU), quickly veered into more unsettled territory.

[...] How to define consciousness is itself the subject of debate. ... Further complicating the picture, the nature of consciousness could be different for infants than adults, researchers noted at the meeting. And it may emerge gradually versus all at once, on different timescales for different individuals.

[...] Most do agree that certain features of the brain are crucial for consciousness. ... But whether those structures are sufficient for consciousness isn’t clear, so investigators are finding creative ways to search for possible markers of consciousness in brain activity.. (MORE - details)

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Can animals make art?
https://theconversation.com/can-animals-make-art-248503

EXCERPTS: Scottish philosopher W.B. Gallie once suggested it [art] might be an “essentially contested concept” – an idea for which there is no correct definition. That being said, some popular views have emerged.

[...] Philosopher Brian Skyrms has pointed out that communication arises even in animals that plausibly do not have sophisticated intentions like our own. For example, fireflies signal to mates with flashes, and this seems to be largely an evolved behavior. Communication can even emerge via simple reinforcement learning, as when a dog learns to associate a certain call with dinner.

These aren’t instances of art. But they reveal how meaningful signs or representations can operate without the need for complex intentions. Given that much art also serves a communicative role, I argue that there’s reason to think that art might be able to come about in less intention-demanding ways too... (MORE - detail)
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An invitation to take the question of secession seriously
https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/03/20/an-invitation-to-take-the-question-of-secession-seriously/

EXCERPTS: There are too many secessionist (or, alternatively, autonomist or separatist) movements to list out here. [...] Centrally, the question of secession is about the self-determination of peoples and what that principle demands of our political practices.

The usual question of political philosophy, to simplify, is about what a just state, if any, looks like. It does not ask, however, who deserves what state, particularly a state of their own. This is why it is particularly surprising that philosophers concerned about justice do not pay closer attention to this question. It is as if many philosophers tacitly think that any state can fulfill the need for justice.

I seriously doubt that is a feasible position though: peoples are not unified in their interests in a way that would enable this to be true. A state of any size inevitably has serious competing interests... (MORE - details)

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Long before debates over ‘wokeness’, Epicurus built a philosophy that welcomed slaves, women and outsiders
https://theconversation.com/long-be...at-welcomed-slaves-women-and-outsiders-250772

According to Epicurus, unhappiness comes because we are afraid of things which should not be feared, and desire things which are not necessary and are beyond our control. Most notably, he rejected the idea of an afterlife, arguing the soul did not continue to exist after death. He also argued it was wrong to fear death as it "gives no trouble when it comes [and] is but an empty pain in anticipation".

Instead of fearing punishment in the beyond, he said we should focus on the possibilities for pleasure in the here and now. But that doesn’t mean chasing every pleasure which comes our way; the task of the Epicurean is to understand which pleasures are worth pursuing... (MORE - details)

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When medieval scholars sought to understand the nature of angels, they unwittingly laid the foundations of modern physic
https://aeon.co/essays/why-physics-today-stands-on-the-wings-of-angels-and-demons

EXCERPT: While most physicists would now baulk at angelic forces as an explanation of any natural phenomena, without the medieval belief in angels, physics today might look very different. Even when belief in angels later dissipated, modern physicists continued to posit incorporeal intelligences to help explain the inexplicable.

Malevolent angelic forces (ie, demons) have appeared in compelling thought experiments across the history of physics. These well-known ‘demons of physics’ served as useful placeholders, helping physicists find scientific explanations for only vaguely imagined solutions. You can still find them in textbooks today.

But that’s not the most important legacy of medieval angelology. Angels also catalysed ferociously precise debates about the nature of place, bodies and motion, which would inspire something like a modern conceptual toolbox for physicists, honing concepts such as space and dimension. Angels, in short, underpin our understanding of the cosmos... (MORE - details)

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Antarctic bases are hotbeds of stress and violence. Space stations could face the same challenges (philosophy of isolation)
https://theconversation.com/antarct...tations-could-face-the-same-challenges-252720

EXCERPTS: This latest incident fits within a broader pattern of crime and misconduct in Antarctica. Research stations on the icy continent are often portrayed as hubs of scientific cooperation. But history has shown they can also become pressure cookers of psychological strain and violence. [...] Research suggests several psychological and social factors contribute to conflict in remote locations such as Antarctica. These include prolonged isolation, extreme environmental conditions, and the necessity of constant close contact... (MORE - details)
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The need for practical epistemology
https://noahpgordon.substack.com/p/the-need-for-practical-epistemology

EXCERPTS: What methods should people today be using in their daily lives to reliably get at the truth? This question is even more urgent now because we find ourselves in an utterly degraded information environment.

Our sources of information are structured by algorithms optimized not to give us an accurate picture of what’s happening, but to get us to engage by clicking, commenting, and sharing. They push us into bubbles which distort our views through selection effects and polarize us. They platform the voices and events that are most intriguing, shocking, and exciting, not the most representative.

[...] Imagine if practical epistemology were given a place in schools as central as history or math. You would start by learning the basics of analyzing arguments and evidence. You would advance to studying informal fallacies, cognitive biases, and balanced methods for gathering evidence in the online environment. Eventually, in late high school you could be studying Bayesian methods of handling inductive evidence and formal deductive methods. I don’t know, I’m not a curriculum designer but it seems like there’s enough material even now to support a healthy series of courses like that... (MORE - details)

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On Isaac Newton as Philosopher, and the split between philosophy and physics
https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-isaac-newton-as-philosopher-and

EXCERPTS: One may well wonder why it matters to include Newton in the history of philosophy, especially because Newton did not write a major philosophical work. After all, not every person who was a significant interlocuter in his own day should be subject of study by a community of historians of philosophy today...

[...] For a long time my own preferred explanation was that the reception of Newton decisively changed something about the way philosophy was practiced in two closely related ways (see here for a scholarly account of what follows).

First, a certain kind of argument from authority which could block or silence certain moves became popular in philosophy—the authority was Newton’s works or how they were taken by others. This move was diagnosed early by Berkeley (critically) and Toland (ironically). And detestation of this move animates much of that is great in Hume’s work.

Second, as this indicates, Newton, perhaps unintentionally, sets up a split between what came to be known and institutionalized as ‘science’ (especially mathematical physics) and what came to be known and (partially) institutionalized as ‘philosophy.’ (MORE - details)

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Galileo, Einstein, and the unexpected origins of relativity (philosophy of science)
https://iai.tv/articles/galileo-ein...ed-origins-of-relativity-auid-3117?_auid=2020

INTRO: One of Galileo Galilei’s many contributions to science was his understanding of relative motion – that the physics within a system do not depend on the speed at which the system moves relative to external systems, provided the original system is not accelerating. This idea would go on to form the foundations for Einstein’s Relativity Principle which required that the physics of the system does not depend on the inertial frame chosen to study it.

Though subtly different, modern physics often conflates these ideas leading to conflicting resolutions to Galileo’s initial problem. Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez argues that by distinguishing between an "internal" and "external" version of the principle, we can right this, clarify its original meaning and appreciate just how far ahead of his time Galileo truly was... (MORE - details)

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New study compares people’s views on voluntary childlessness across Europe (antinatalism)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1077077

EXCERPTS: More and more people in Europe are choosing not to have children, prompting researchers to study how attitudes towards voluntary childlessness may be evolving. However, such attitudes can be nuanced, and it has been unclear how to measure people’s perspectives most effectively. To shed new light, Szalma and colleagues conducted a new analysis of data from 27 countries that had been collected for two prior surveys.

[...] The analysis revealed that certain sociodemographic characteristics were statistically linked in different ways to prescriptive versus proscriptive attitudes towards voluntary childlessness. People in countries with higher childlessness rates tended to have higher acceptance of voluntary childlessness in a proscriptive sense, but no such trend was seen for prescriptive attitudes about consequences.

[...] These findings suggest that distinguishing between prescriptive and proscriptive attitudes on voluntary childlessness can more precisely capture people’s viewpoints. This study could therefore help shape ongoing research into how such attitudes may change over time, in Europe and elsewhere... (MORE - details)
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Language creates an altered state of consciousness (philosophy of mind)
https://iai.tv/articles/language-creates-an-altered-state-of-consciousness-auid-3118?_auid=2020

INTRO: We tend to think of language as a transparent tool—a neutral medium for expressing thoughts and describing reality. While philosophers have (more or less) come to agree that “the map is not the territory” more recent thinkers have argued that language does play a fundamental role in shaping our perception of the world and our notion of self. By drawing parallels between language loss from brain injuries and the experiences reported during deep meditation or psychedelic states, UCL neuroscientist Jeremy I Skipper argues language creates an altered state of consciousness. Only by losing language can we start to dismantle the scaffolding that supports our notion of the world and the self... (MORE - details)

And yes, Sapir and Whorf are mentioned in it.

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Demythologizing quantum history (philosophy of physics; history subcategory)
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/44150/Demythologizing-quantum-history

EXCERPTS: Despite efforts from historians to tell a nuanced story about the birth of modern quantum mechanics, the tale that’s seeped into the popular consciousness seems to stem from Heisenberg himself...

[...] Although textbooks and popular articles alike continue to repeat the Helgoland myth and perpetuate hero worship, the real story of the genesis of matrix mechanics in 1925 was one of collaboration and teamwork between Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, and even Pauli. That lesson holds true for the history of quantum mechanics writ large.

Historians estimate that between 1925 and 1927, almost 200 papers were published—many of which were authored by long-forgotten individuals—that advanced the new theory and applied it to various problems in atomic dynamics. [...] There are many other early quantum innovators who aren’t part of the standard canon. If we’re going to recognize the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics this year, let’s broaden the scope of our celebration... (MORE - details)
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