Philosophy Updates

Antinatalism: David Benatar’s asymmetry argument for why it’s wrong to have children
https://philosophybreak.com/article...y-argument-for-why-its-wrong-to-have-children

David Benatar’s ‘asymmetry argument’ suggests that, in virtually all cases, it’s wrong to create new life. This article discusses his antinatalist position, as well as common arguments against it...

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Do media organizations even want cultural criticism?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/do-media-organizations-even-want-cultural-criticism.html

EXCERPTS: The consensus of the people I spoke to was that stand-alone reviews just don’t generate traffic, and reviews of more niche art forms, like an independent film or a string-quartet performance, are even harder sells. There are exceptions [...] But the vast majority of reviews go virtually unread.

Part of the problem is that reviews now float amid millions of other pieces of similar content on the web instead of being part of a bundle that you used to get on your doorstep, which allowed a reader to serendipitously stumble upon a piece of criticism they otherwise wouldn’t have sought out. [...] And as the industry continues to hemorrhage jobs, criticism positions have been particularly vulnerable...

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From bank robber to scholar: the Knoxville dropout fighting to change how we see addiction
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/sep/04/bank-robber-scholar-knoxville-change-addiction

EXCERPTS: Kirsten Smith was 19 when she first tried heroin; within a few years she was in prison. She says she willingly made bad choices and wants society to stop treating addiction as a disease.

[...] Was Smith a patient simply in need of the right medications or a criminal who deserved punishment for actively choosing to harm others – or both? Before the hearing, in a character letter sent to the judge, Thomas Varlan, Smith chose to take responsibility for her crimes. “I wasn’t abused or molested as a child,” she wrote. “I didn’t grow up on the ‘wrong’ side of town. I wasn’t raised by wolves but by a mother and stepfather who love me and gave me countless opportunities to succeed.”

Smith was steadfast in her belief that her actions were volitional from the start. Her drug use and crimes were not the products of an immoral character or a faulty brain incapable of change, but rather of an environment where heroin was accessible and desirable. This outlook determined her experiences in prison and beyond, ultimately leading her to dedicate her life to challenging predominant medical models of addiction with her research. Today, she is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland... (MORE - details)
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The decline of criticism, part two billion
https://www.notebook.bdmcclay.com/p/the-decline-of-criticism-part-two

EXCERPT: So do media organizations want cultural criticism? No, because they don’t want anything that is an actual thing. Media organizations do not want cultural criticism, the same way they do not want war reporting or fluffy opinion pieces as those specific things.

They want those things as a way of getting what they actually want. The problem for writers and for editors is that there’s no way to teach the media organization to value what you value, because the media organization exists in Lovecraft space and does not have human values...

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Fara Dabhoiwala’s case against free speech
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/absolute-values

EXCERPT: For the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, the First Amendment was understood to restrain only the federal government, not the states, from infringing on rights of speech and of the press. And not until the twentieth century, beginning in 1919 and with increasing latitude across the next hundred years, did it come to be interpreted as conferring the right to speak and print almost anything you wanted.

[...] One of Dabhoiwala’s reasons for writing What Is Free Speech? is to show that things could have been otherwise—that we could have ended up with more closely regulated speech codes comparable to those in Europe...

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Does society have too many rules?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/does-society-have-too-many-rules

EXCERPTS: In recent years, an across-the-aisle consensus has emerged that American life is too rule-bound. “It isn’t just the government, it is your wireless carrier, your utility company, your bank, and your school,” Lam writes. Throughout society, the general trend is toward “rules and their enforcement, rather than informal exchanges between people built on trust, friendships, acquaintanceships, and verbal agreements.”

[...] The rules seem broken: we’ve installed too many in the wrong places, and too few in the right ones. Maybe we’ve forgotten what rules are for, and how they work, and when to use them, and whom to use them on. We may have also forgotten about alternatives to rules. The result is a society that feels both rule-bound and misruled, saturated with laws and yet strangely lawless...

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Shame can silence, subjugate and damage us – a philosopher considers its implications
https://theconversation.com/shame-c...philosopher-considers-its-implications-263119

EXCERPTS: To read Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Shame is to be reminded of how vulnerable we are to the emotion’s inhibitions and agonies. [...] Shame makes us vulnerable to humiliation and ruin, and provides a method by which we can humiliate and ruin others. The cycle is often self-perpetuating: shame begets shaming.

Gros is a philosopher and professor of political humanities at Sciences Po, Paris. [...] In his latest work, Gros goes so far as to crown shame as “the major emotion of our time, the signifier of new struggles” – a claim that may be plausible but is never substantially argued beyond the foreword. The struggles Gros describes are, in fact, predominantly of interest not for their novelty, but their eternal recurrence...
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Occam's razor is leading cosmology astray
https://iai.tv/articles/occams-razor-is-leading-cosmology-astray-auid-3377?_auid=2020

INTRO: Is simplicity the path to truth, or a dangerous illusion? Occam’s razor is often taken as a guiding principle of science and rational thought, but theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili argues that its appeal conceals a deeper problem. From cosmic models to political debate, the desire for tidy explanations can obscure the messy, complex reality and lead us astray... (MORE - details)
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The case for gradual population decline
https://www.project-syndicate.org/o...ining-fertility-rates-by-adair-turner-2025-10

INTRO: Contrary to conventional wisdom, rapid population growth rarely delivers demographic dividends, while low fertility rates do not necessarily lead to stagnation. In fact, persistently high fertility often exacerbates underemployment, limits investment in education and infrastructure, and entrenches poverty across generations... (MORE - details)

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From nothing, everything
https://aeon.co/essays/how-nothing-has-inspired-art-and-science-for-millennia

EXCERPTS: Is there a way to speak or even to think of nothing without making it something, betraying its character as nonexistent? The idea of nothing pushes at the limits of thought and language, demanding new modes of analysis and expression. Moreover, if nothing is something, that would seem to complicate the definition of ‘something’ as an entity that really exists in the world. And if it is not something, then what ‘is’ it? A paradoxical question if there ever was one. More than just a linguistic puzzle, the idea that ‘nothing exists’ challenges our understanding of existence itself and spurs more nuanced theories of reality. To speak of nothing raises questions about everything. One can see why philosophers and artists alike have been drawn to it... (MORE - missing details)
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Was prehistory a feminist paradise?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/oct/05/was-prehistory-a-feminist-paradise

EXCERPTS: The Marxist idea, actually credited to Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels, was that humans were egalitarian until agriculture spread out of the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. [...] An alternative theory, put forward by the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in the 1960s, was that woman-centred societies dominated for longer in Europe – until 5,000 years ago – when they were toppled by incoming, patriarchal nomads from the steppe. [...] Although matrilocal and patrilocal societies are equally warlike, says anthropologist Carol Ember of Yale University, internal strife – as opposed to war against an external enemy – prods societies towards patrilocality, because warring clans prefer to keep their sons close... (MORE - details)

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Science editor of Sunday Times touts book “proving” God’s existence
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025...unday-times-touts-book-proving-gods-existence

EXCERPTS: The book that gives evidence that God “must” exist is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ... It’s already sold more than 400,000 copies in non-English editions (it was published four years ago in France), and U.S. publishers have ordered a print run of 110,000 for the book, which will be published here in a week. The two authors are both believers, of course...

[...] The rejection by believers of the need for evidence is what is most pathetic. Faith, some say, is based not on empirical evidence but on revelation or authority (priests, Bibles, epiphanies, etc.) alone. Yet when believers see something that looks like evidence, they glom onto it. That’s why books like this are always best-sellers, why two documented “miracles” are required for canonization of a saint, and why people flock to Lourdes to be cured. It’s all because unexplained. cures and miracles count as evidence for God... (MORE - details)

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Why Young Men Are Losing Faith in Science
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/...e_code=1.rE8.x9k9.xkWyRplXNWiy&smid=url-share

EXCERPT: After 30 years as a researcher, science communicator and university science teacher, I’ve been unsettled by what appears to be a growing skepticism of science among some of my Generation Z students, shaped in part by the different online cultures these young people have grown up in. While I cannot speak to what happens in every corner of the internet, I can speak to the one I’ve been invited into: the “manosphere” — a loose network of podcasts, YouTubers and other male influencers.

I’ve appeared on some of the manosphere’s most popular shows, including Joe Rogan’s. I’ve watched how curiosity about science can slide into conspiracy-tinged mazes rooted in misinformation. And I believe the first step out of the maze for young men begins by reasserting to them the virtue of hard work — an often grueling but indispensable part of finding the right answers in science.

Of course, women can be antiscience just as much as men; for example, some studies suggest women have more reservations about new vaccines than men. But the male tendency to view debates as adversarial contests that must be won at all costs is what may help to create a more alarming antiscience dynamic in the manosphere... (MORE - details)
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C C said:
Occam's razor is leading cosmology astray
Click to expand...
Good stuff. Sabine Hossenfelder has gone after beauty and elegance in physics, criticizing theoretical approaches that favor aesthetics over empirical grounding and parsimony. So she has been arguing more from the Ockham perspective, saying it's empirically called for. Khalil argues that assuming simplicity is wrong; Sabine, that assuming there must be elegance or beauty is also wrong.

(And Sabine has grown such a fan base in the physics world that she's usually referred to by her first name)
 
Streamlining the consciousness debate, from trees to hermit crabs
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1101267

INTRO: Beyond spirited dinner party debate, establishing which creatures have consciousness matters in terms of animal welfare and conservation policy. A Michigan State University philosophy scholar has added clarity to a messy philosophical debate.

In this month’s journal Biology & Philosophy, PhD candidate Jonah Branding contributes a decision tree that can be applied to questions such as, do fish feel pain when they’re on a hook? Does an ant feel alarm when protecting its colony? Do banana slugs feel anything when they eat dead leaves on the forest floor? Or are these simpler organisms more like stimulus-response machines, which don’t have any mental experience?

“There has been a lot of work on the question of animal consciousness in recent years and claims about consciousness are starting to be taken seriously for more and more organisms,” Branding said. “In the 1990s, there was serious debate over whether chimpanzees are conscious. Today, there is serious debate over whether plants are conscious.”

Acknowledging that creatures have feelings, thoughts and/or a first-person perspective is messy. In the paper “Can a marker approach exclude?” Branding sets some order to different approaches to ethical, scientific, and philosophical questions... (MORE - details, no ads)
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The physics that reveals the universe could be destroyed in a blink
https://iai.tv/articles/the-physics...-be-destroyed-in-a-blink-auid-3383?_auid=2020

INTRO: The false vacuum is a scientific idea about the universe being in an unstable energy state. This means that what we think of as “empty space” might not be truly stable, it could be sitting in a kind of temporary balance, like a ball resting in a shallow dip that could roll down into a deeper hole at any moment. If that happened, the universe could suddenly change or even be destroyed.

Philosopher of science Mathias Vogel says that although such a collapse is very unlikely, the idea reveals a bigger issue. Science assumes that the laws of nature, like gravity or electromagnetism, are constant and reliable. But if the false vacuum idea is true, then even those laws could change, meaning they’re not as stable as we thought. Even if this cosmic collapse won’t happen anytime soon, the possibility forces us to rethink how secure our understanding of nature’s laws really is... (MORE - details)

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Can Trump end this impossibly cruel practice?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/...e_code=1.sE8._-_G.K9PjMnYMll8b&smid=url-share

EXCERPT: “Is Trump doing the right thing on animal research for the wrong reasons?” asked a Vox article this spring. There’s suspicion that this is just part of the Trump administration’s general anti-science agenda, another way to dismantle laboratories and cast scientists in the role of villains, further undermining public support of science.

“I don’t care about motives,” said Justin Goodman, senior vice president for advocacy and public policy at the White Coat Waste Project, which seeks to end government funding of animal research. “I care about outcomes.” His group has worked with controversial figures like Laura Loomer to amplify the idea that, as Ms. Loomer put it, our “taxpayer dollars are used for animal torture.” (MORE - details)
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Emergence explains nothing and is bad science
https://iai.tv/articles/emergence-explains-nothing-and-is-bad-science-auid-3385?_auid=2020

INTRO: Scientists and philosophers have fallen for a seductive buzzword: “emergence.” It’s invoked to explain life, consciousness, and the flow of time: when simple parts combine, it is claimed, they sometimes produce new entities with powers their parts could never predict. But philosopher John Heil calls this out as an intellectual sleight of hand. “Emergence,” he argues, doesn’t reveal hidden truths—it masks our ignorance, mistaking gaps in explanation for gaps in reality. It’s time to drop the magic word and face the real challenge: uncovering, in concrete detail, how simple parts can give rise to complex wholes... (MORE - details)

COMMENT: It at least ought to be inconsistent with methodological naturalism (and physicalism, etc) to be content with "magical conjuring" or brute emergence at or near macroscopic levels, where some radical _X_ isn't even constituted of what existed beforehand. Whereas "new behaviors or dynamic activity" and "new principles" arising are just extra, specific additions to general categories that were already the case. Such isn't really a fundamental upheaval, even if there might currently be insufficient causal accountability.

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Is Richard Dawkins wrong about the nature of life?
https://medium.com/@molbioandthemea...s-wrong-about-the-nature-of-life-e3c2b8fc0bba

EXCERPT: Regardless of the outcome of that debate, which may never be resolved, the type of reductionism that Dawkins pursued with The Selfish Gene is not wrong because it is reductionism. It is incorrect because it misapplies reductionism. The metaphor sets up a false dichotomy between the organism, on the one hand, and the genes, on the other hand. If we place the 1970s in a bit more historical context, we can see why this might have occurred... (MORE - details)

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Information could be a fundamental part of the universe
https://theconversation.com/informa...ay-explain-dark-energy-and-dark-matter-265415

EXCERPTS: The idea is to treat information – not matter, not energy, not even spacetime itself – as the most fundamental ingredient of reality. We call this framework the quantum memory matrix (QMM).

At its core is a simple but powerful claim: spacetime is not smooth, but discrete – made of tiny "cells", which is what quantum mechanics suggests. Each cell can store a quantum imprint of every interaction, like the passage of a particle or even the influence of a force such as electromagnetism or nuclear interactions, that passes through. Each event leaves behind a tiny change in the local quantum state of the spacetime cell.

In other words, the universe does not just evolve. It remembers... (MORE - details)

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Scientists found that memory can happen outside the brain
https://www.zmescience.com/science/...ound-that-memory-can-happen-outside-the-brain

INTRO: We tend to think of memory as exclusively the brain’s domain, but new research suggests that this view may be far too narrow. A study from New York University shows that some ordinary human cells outside of the brain can also learn and store information.

When exposed to signals that mimic the rhythms of learning, these cells behaved much like neurons. Their responses strengthened when stimulation was spaced out over time rather than delivered all at once.

“Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too,” said Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study. The findings suggest that learning could be a fundamental property of life itself, built into the way all cells process time and information... (MORE - details)
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Yes, reductionism can explain everything in the whole Universe
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-reductionist

KEY POINTS: Recently, many scientists and philosophers have championed the idea that reductionism can’t explain all of reality, like chemistry, biology, life, and consciousness. But in order for that to be true, there would have to be some sort of “new fundamental interaction” that only appears on larger, non-fundamental scales. As far as we can tell, the Universe is truly 100% reductionist in nature. Our ignorance about why certain emergent phenomena exist and how they behave is no excuse for magical thinking... (MORE - details)

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Even if we could speak to animals, should we?
https://psyche.co/ideas/even-if-we-could-speak-to-animals-should-we

EXCERPTS: The human desire to communicate with animals is as old as it is universal. It is woven into Indigenous storytelling traditions [...] AI technologies are used to decode the vocalisation patterns of crows and other social animals, such as whales, elephants and bats.

[...] But should we embrace this possibility? [...] On a practical level, AI could mean improved legal protection and higher welfare standards for animals, as well as significant social changes. ... More ambitiously, AI could foster the type of interspecies democracy proposed by several philosophers over the past 15 years...

[...] Yet the use of AI to communicate with animals comes with risks. Animal communication is an incredibly complex phenomenon. ... This raises a troubling possibility: we might end up generating digital animal sounds that seem meaningful to the animals, but without actually knowing what we are saying...

[...] How can we make sure that AI does increase the wellbeing of animals instead of depriving them of a life worth living? A realistic solution is to adopt a code of moral principles that will steer corporations in the right direction... (MORE - details)
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How to make ‘smart city’ technologies behave ethically
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1102568

INTRO: As local governments adopt new technologies that automate many aspects of city services, there is an increased likelihood of tension between the ethics and expectations of citizens and the behavior of these “smart city” tools. Researchers are proposing an approach that will allow policymakers and technology developers to better align the values programmed into smart city technologies with the ethics of the people who will be interacting with them.

“Our work here lays out a blueprint for how we can both establish what an AI-driven technology’s values should be and actually program those values into the relevant AI systems,” says Veljko Dubljević, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University.

At issue are smart cities, a catch-all term that covers a variety of technological and administrative practices that have emerged in cities in recent decades. Examples include automated technologies that dispatch law enforcement when they detect possible gunfire, or technologies that use automated sensors to monitor pedestrian and auto traffic to control everything from street lights to traffic signals.

“These technologies can pose significant ethical questions,” says Dubljević, who is part of the Science, Technology & Society program at NC State.

“For example, if AI technology presumes it detected a gunshot and sends a SWAT team to a place of business, but the noise was actually something else, is that reasonable?” Dubljević asks. “Who decides to what extent people should be tracked or surveilled by smart city technologies? Which behaviors should mark someone out as an individual who should be under escalated surveillance? These are reasonable questions, and at the moment there is no agreed upon procedure for answering them. And there is definitely not a clear procedure for how we should train AI to answer these questions.”

To address this challenge, the researchers looked to something called the Agent Deed Consequence (ADC) model... (MORE - details, no ads)
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Editing nature to fix our failures
https://www.noemamag.com/editing-nature-to-fix-our-failures

It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive. For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 — an enzyme-based genome-editing tool — to genetically edit a few thousand fish embryos...

What is intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds (book review)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-isnt-intelligence

We do not have consensus definitions of sentience, intelligence, life, or consciousness that allow us to answer, definitively, how close any synthetic or artificial intelligence gets to the real stuff. Perhaps, like with motion, heat, or natural selection, the eventual definitions for these concepts will be the same thing as their explanations. The lack of consensus is not a black mark against ethology or neuroscience, fields that have studied related concepts for centuries; it is a sign of unhurried patience...

How does ‘common knowledge’ shape our individual lives and our societies? Steven Pinker has some ideas
https://theconversation.com/how-doe...societies-steven-pinker-has-some-ideas-264129

Pinker also discusses how common knowledge is suppressed by authoritarian regimes. We see here a clear illustration of the importance of common knowledge for coordination. “The reason that citizens don’t resist their overlords en masse,” writes Pinker, “is that they lack the prerequisite to coordinating their behaviour for mutual benefit, namely common knowledge.” If everyone rebels at once, because there is sufficient confidence among the citizenry that everyone will rebel at once, a revolution can be successful. But so long as this confidence can be suppressed, the regime will endure...
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If we look too hard for reality, we’ll fall into a black hole
https://iai.tv/articles/if-we-look-...l-fall-into-a-black-hole-auid-3401?_auid=2020

Try to measure an object’s location too precisely, and you’ll collapse into a black hole. Physicist Daniel Carney highlights this overlooked consequence of quantum mechanics and general relativity, suggesting that it reveals many basic physical quantities to be fundamentally approximate. The path to a theory of quantum gravity, he argues, hinges on confronting the limits of measurement and observation—and perhaps leads to the realisation that ultimate reality lies forever beyond observation....
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Why aliens might not “speak physics” the same way we do
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/aliens-might-not-speak-physics

KEY POINTS: In recent centuries, humans have uncovered a tremendous set of details about the fundamental laws and components of nature that make everything up. It’s perhaps easy to assume that any alien civilization that becomes at least as technologically advanced and capable as we are would uncover those same physical rules, but is that necessarily true? In Do Aliens Speak Physics?, physicist Daniel Whiteson thoughtfully argues that perhaps it’s anthropocentric to consider that arriving at our current laws is inevitable... (MORE details)

If humans went extinct, could we re-evolve?
https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/if-humans-went-extinct-could-we-re-evolve

EXCERPTS: In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with philosopher Toby Ord about human extinction. We discussed whether humans (or a human-like species) could reemerge if we were to go extinct. To answer that question, we have to look at Madagascan rails and “iterative evolution.”

[...] When you spend time reflecting on human extinction, it does allow us to appreciate just how unique and lucky we are to be here now. My writing this article and you reading it are the lucky result of winning a million lotteries. As the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould famously argued, if you “replayed the tape of life,” the outcome would be entirely different. No humans. No Mozart. Maybe just more mollusks... (MORE - details)
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Groupthink in science isn’t a problem; it’s a myth
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/groupthink-science-problem-myth

KEY POINTS: Whenever new idea comes around, scientists are quick to pounce on any problems it may have and any conflicts that it has with already-existing data. To the public eye, this might look like scientists are succumbing to groupthink and an unreasonable resistance to any new ideas. This isn’t the case at all, however. It’s precisely the success of our current theories in the face of extraordinarily precise and diverse lines of evidence that make them so powerful. The accusations of “groupthink” are merely a myth. (MORE - details)

Carlo Rovelli’s radical perspective on reality
https://www.quantamagazine.org/carlo-rovellis-radical-perspective-on-reality-20251029

EXCERPTS: A theoretical physicist affiliated with Aix-Marseille University, Carlo Rovelli studies how we perceive reality from our limited vantage point. His research is wide-ranging [...] he proposed a new “relational” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which goes so far as to suggest that there is no objective reality whatsoever, only perspectives on reality — be they a physicist’s or a pigeon’s.

[...] Rovelli’s own perspective on physics is heavily influenced by his rebellious, countercultural youth. ... Rovelli worked at a subversive left-wing radio station, drafted an illegal manifesto, and was later detained for refusing compulsory military service. Disillusioned by societal norms, “I had a sense that we were confused about how to think about reality around us,” he said. At 69, he remains politically engaged (and often enraged). “Part of me is still an old hippie.”

[...] To confront his own biases, whether about physics or society, Rovelli turns to philosophy. He often publishes on metaphysical topics ad advocates for more dialogue between the disciplines ... The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity...

[...] My intuition is that the overall flow of time really could be like the rotation of the sky every day. It’s a majestic, immense phenomenon, but it’s actually an illusion. This is a totally perspectival understanding of the second law of thermodynamics. It’s real in the same sense that the rotating sky is real, but it’s real only with respect to us... (MORE - details)
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Scientific progress depends on disagreement. So why are vaccine sceptics and other science critics not worth listening to?

Valuable misunderstandings
https://aeon.co/essays/science-needs-disagreement-what-makes-some-disagreement-useless

EXCERPTS: These ‘valuable misunderstandings’, as we call them, highlight several interesting aspects of science. They’re valuable not because of their originators, who may be mired in confusion, shackled by stubbornness or sullied by shoddy motives. Rather, it’s other scientists’ uptake and transformation of these misunderstandings that gives them their value.

Because of this, valuable misunderstandings provide fresh insights as to what’s wrong with science denialism, why scientific consensus isn’t always desirable, the dangers of defunding science, and how science should be communicated. They also call on scientists to exercise intellectual humility in the context of disagreement – both with each other and with the broader public.

[...] Those who worry about a ‘war on science’ frequently point to badly behaving individuals or groups who contradict a scientific consensus for some nefarious or irrational purpose, such as pseudoscientific critics of climate change, natural selection and vaccines. If a scientific community’s power to nurture valuable misunderstandings is a yardstick of its vibrancy, then these science deniers are problematic because they perpetuate misunderstandings that are no longer valuable.

This typically occurs when there have been extensive and adequate corrective responses to misunderstandings. In other words, if scientists have already expanded their theoretical, methodological and empirical apparatuses to correct a misunderstanding – and, in the process, have already taken that misunderstanding as a serious possibility – then holding fast to that misunderstanding is pernicious. [...] So, on our view, the chief sin of science deniers is clinging to a misunderstanding that is no longer valuable... (MORE - missing details)
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UBCO study debunks the idea that the universe is a computer simulation
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1104059

EXCERPT: Co-author Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss says this research has profound implications.

“The fundamental laws of physics cannot be contained within space and time, because they generate them. It has long been hoped, however, that a truly fundamental theory of everything could eventually describe all physical phenomena through computations grounded in these laws. Yet we have demonstrated that this is not possible. A complete and consistent description of reality requires something deeper—a form of understanding known as non-algorithmic understanding.”

The team’s conclusion is clear and marks an important scientific achievement, says Dr. Faizal.

“Any simulation is inherently algorithmic—it must follow programmed rules,” he says. “But since the fundamental level of reality is based on non-algorithmic understanding, the universe cannot be, and could never be, a simulation.”

The simulation hypothesis was long considered untestable, relegated to philosophy and even science fiction, rather than science. This research brings it firmly into the domain of mathematics and physics, and provides a definitive answer... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: The problem with this, of course, is that neither current simulated affairs (video games) nor future sophisticated ones are devoted to the impossibility of literally producing and maintaining an entire world riding on the operations of a finite, giant computer complex. It is instead the pursuit of sustaining the appearance of an internally consistent environment for observers.

The enterprise does not entail generating a universe from a "theory of everything" -- a master algorithm, but ultimately having rival or antagonistic programs reciprocally critiquing and regulating each other to ensure that they output a near-flawless illusion of a coherent space filled with objects undergoing changes (revolving around inter-coordinated observer perspectives).

If anything, this claim that our cosmos has loose ends -- that it does not "add up" in a non-paradoxical or pleasing mathematical manner, that it does not conform to a "complete and consistent description of reality" -- actually jibes with the limitations of a simulation. The headline could even be: "Simulator injects research paper into its virtual world to try to end belief in the Matrix for good".
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C C said:
The problem with this, of course, is that neither current simulated affairs (video games) nor future sophisticated ones are devoted to the impossibility of literally producing and maintaining an entire world riding on the operations of a finite, giant computer complex. It is instead the pursuit of sustaining the appearance of an internally consistent environment for observers.

The enterprise does not entail generating a universe from a "theory of everything" -- a master algorithm, but ultimately having rival or antagonistic programs reciprocally critiquing and regulating each other to ensure that they output a near-flawless illusion of a coherent space filled with objects undergoing changes (revolving around inter-coordinated observer perspectives).
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Yes! I was going to pounce on this paper, but you have neatly articulated the problems. As soon as I started reading, I was struck by the strawmannish notion that a simulation has to somehow create an entire universe and foundational physics. A simulation only has to make consistent images appear when scientists happen to look through/at telescopes, microscopes, interferometers, LHC imaging, etc. Nor do they provide any grounds to assume that some future computers couldn't incorporate nonalgorithmic cognition of some kind. And whatever the platform is, it is not obligated to simulate all the properties of reality. A simulation with any regard for a budget (do alien galactic overlords have budgets? I'm saying, probably, at least in total energy expenditures...) deals in appearances, presented to its sentient participants. No need to simulate a tree if everyone is asleep. And no need to simulate a cambium layer unless someone is awake and is cutting into the tree.
 
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As a scientific concept the Anthropocene is dead. But it’s such a helpful idea to think with, should we use it anyway?
https://aeon.co/essays/declared-dead-last-year-the-anthropocene-is-very-much-alive

EXCERPTS: Despite being officially declared dead, however, the term ‘Anthropocene’ is very much alive. Early on, it broke out of the confines of stratigraphy and was adopted widely in public discussion, in the arts, and also in various other sciences, both natural and social. Myriad scientific journals, conferences, artworks and novels still carry it forward.

But how should the term be understood now, when its lifetime as an official geological concept is over? Should we stop using it, or define it in a new way? I believe that the term still has value, but it needs to be freed from certain entrenched positions that carry unnecessary baggage... (MORE - missing details)

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Self-replicating probes could be operating right now in the Solar System. Here's how we could look for them
https://www.universetoday.com/artic...-the-solar-system-heres-how-we-could-look-for

EXCERPTS: In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of "universal constructor." [...] As many theoretical studies have shown, self-replicating probes (released from a single planet) could proliferate and explore the entire galaxy within a few eons.

[...] According to new research by Professor Alex Ellery of Carleton University (go Ravens!), these probes may have already visited the Solar System, and some could be operating here right now. As he recommends in a recent paper, future SETI surveys should be on the lookout for the telltale technosignatures these probes would produce.

[...] interstellar probes would not require supplies, bioregenerative life support systems, or have to worry about waste disposal. All the materials they would need could be harvested along the way.

This would include extracting resources from star systems (such as asteroid belts and/or smaller rocky-metallic bodies) or from objects found in the interstellar medium, including asteroids, comets, and rogue planets. This desire for exploration and threat assessment, paired with the need for resources, would lead to predictable behaviors that could help guide the search for interstellar probes... (MORE - details)

 
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John Searle’s Campus War
https://fusionaier.org/2025/john-searles-campus-war

EXCERPTS: The philosopher John Searle passed away a few weeks ago. For years he was considered one of the leading lights of American philosophy, especially during the period when the subfield called philosophy of mind was at its peak of prominence and prestige. Searle also made signal contributions in the philosophy of language and in social philosophy.

Near the end of his life, he lost his emeritus status at the University of California at Berkeley, where he had been a professor for sixty years, “canceled” in particular due to accusations about his conduct toward female students. Though the accusations ranged in seriousness, they led to a slew of corroboration across the philosophy profession. What seemed harder to justify, not out of respect for Searle but out of respect for the progression of philosophy itself, was the sudden evaporation of interest in his ideas, theories, and arguments.

[...] In the rest of this essay I won’t write much more about Searle’s famous philosophical work or his infamous misdeeds. Rather, I want to write about something I’ve never heard anyone talk about at all: his 1971 book The Campus War, an analysis of the 1960s tumult in higher education. Searle’s characteristic sharpness offers a clarity that’s rare in discussions of such issues, but at the same time his diagnoses are reminiscent of many offered today... (MORE - details)

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Some people can’t see mental images. The consequences are profound
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/...e-mental-images-the-consequences-are-profound

EXCERPTS: This was startling information. He knew, of course, that people talked about “picturing” or “visualizing,” but he had always taken this to be just a metaphorical way of saying “thinking.” Now it appeared that, in some incomprehensible sense, people meant these words literally. And then there was the notion of using those mental images to revisit a memory. It was an astonishing idea. Was it possible that this was a thing that people other than Bywater could do? Bywater had written about it quite casually, as though he took it for granted. Nick asked some people he knew, and all of them seemed to be able to do it.

[...] At this point, he decided that lack of mental imagery was a valid syndrome that ought to have a name. After consulting with a classicist friend, he decided on “aphantasia,” phantasia being defined by Aristotle as the ability to conjure an image in the imagination. In 2015, Zeman co-wrote a paper in Cortex describing the condition as it appeared in twenty-one subjects: “Lives without imagery—Congenital aphantasia.”

[...] Zeman also received messages from people who appeared to have the opposite of aphantasia: they told him that their mental pictures were graphic and inescapable. There was evidently a spectrum of mental imagery, with aphantasia on one end and extraordinarily vivid imagery on the other and most people’s experience somewhere in between. Zeman figured that the vivid extreme needed a name as well; he dubbed it hyperphantasia. It seemed that two or three per cent of people were aphantasic and somewhat more were hyperphantasic... (MORE - details)
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