Philosophy Updates

Ryle's war: analysing the coded messages of Hitler's Abwehr
https://journal.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/articles/14/1/a06

ABSTRACT: Biographical articles on Gilbert Ryle—one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers, remembered especially for his iconoclastic contributions to the philosophy of mind—tend to pass over his wartime years in silence, content with the meagre phrase ‘seconded to intelligence’. Yet those dark years were an important time in Ryle’s life and philosophical development.

The investigation presented in this article extends from the time of his last philosophical publication before joining the army, in 1940, through to 1946, when his intelligence work continued alongside his Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysics. Ryle spent much of the Second World War spying on the enemy through a lens of broken German radio messages, including messages enciphered by the famous Enigma machine.

He moved in the same shadowy ultra-secret milieu as some other notable academics, including Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, J.L. Austin, Stuart Hampshire, and—on the other side of the Atlantic—W.V.O. Quine. Together with Hampshire, Ryle belonged to a small group of analysts described from on high in the British Secret Intelligence Service as ‘a team of a brilliance unparalleled anywhere in the Intelligence machine’.

Ryle’s unit, the Radio Analysis Bureau (renamed later in the war as the Radio Intelligence Service) was part of the Radio Security Service (RSS), an organisation closely linked to Britain’s military codebreaking headquarters at the now famous Bletchley Park. Ryle’s principal work was analysis of the rich streams of intelligence traffic known as ISOS and ISK. Our account of Ryle’s war is based on letters, diaries, unpublished memoirs and, above all, top-secret documents by Ryle himself that remained classified until long after his death... (MORE - details)
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Our Straussian techocracy
https://libertiesjournal.substack.com/p/our-straussian-techocracy

EXCERPTS: Much of the success in managing the narrative around Palantir comes from Alex Karp himself, who serves as the company’s CEO and unofficial spokesman. Media profiles inevitably highlight any number of biographical details that make Karp an unusual candidate to lead a defence contractor: he has dyslexia, went from Stanford Law School to a German doctoral program in neo-Marxian social theory, practices tai chi, and self-identifies as a socialist.

His mother is African-American and his father Jewish, which explains why Karp has remarked that “if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.” He pursued a career in academia and briefly studied under Jürgen Habermas, the renowned Frankfurt School scholar who passed away earlier this year. The two had a falling out that culminated in Habermas sending a three-page letter that tore into Karp’s dissertation proposal. Karp recently described the rejection as “an utter shock” whose “sting would linger for years.”

[...] On the one hand, Karp parlayed his business success into an opportunity to become a public intellectual of sorts. Yet he uses this platform to pontificate about the superiority of “builders” to academics and the uselessness of humanities degrees from elite universities... Karp seems to simultaneously loathe intellectual elites and desire their admiration. ... He often argues that, even if Americans (and liberal elites, in particular) don’t like the idea of state surveillance, police drones, or autonomous weapons systems, we nevertheless live in a dangerous world in which our survival depends on embracing such technologies. He claimed that Palantir was responsible for preventing several massive “October 7 style” terror attacks in Europe... (MORE - details)

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Why bother with plausible deniability?
https://news.mit.edu/2026/why-bother-plausible-deniability-0417

EXCERPT: However, while Linda is making her message public, she also wants what we often call “plausible deniability” for her statement. If anyone asks later if she was insinuating anything about Brad, she can claim she was just making a general comment about the firm.

From the boardroom to the courtroom, the talk show, and beyond, people frequently seek plausible deniability for their statements. It seems to work, too. Indeed, to have plausible deniability, the denial need not be plausible.

“People can say, ‘That’s not what I meant,’ and completely get away with it, even though it’s totally obvious they’re lying,” says MIT philosopher Sam Berstler. “They wouldn’t be getting away with it in the same respect by putting the content in explicit words.” (MORE - details)

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Mistaking AI behaviour for conscious being
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/10/mistaking-ai-behaviour-for-conscious-being

EXCERPT: Language has been a reliable indicator of consciousness because in humans it is coupled to lived experience. In AI, that coupling does not exist. As systems become more capable, pressure to attribute agency will grow. If we fail to distinguish between behaviour and being, we risk building ethical frameworks on a misreading of the technology. Dawkins is right to ask the question. But the answer cannot rest on how convincing the conversation feels – only on whether there is anything there that could, in principle, feel at all... (MORE - details)
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THE MIND IS MATTER
Consciousness: Philosophers & neuroscientists defend physicalism

INTRO: In this video, leading philosophers and neuroscientists defend the view that the mind purely physical. Starring some of the very experts who anti physicist quote such as Bob Kirk (Zombie argument) and Frank Jackson (Marys room argument) who have now turned to physicalism, as well as the most cited neuroscientists in the world, Karl Friston and other leading scholars such as Ned Block, David Papineau, Richard Brown, Ken Williford, Anil Seth and Marc Solms, we examine the strongest case for physicalism—the view that everything about the mind can ultimately be explained in terms of the physical brain.

We take on some of the most famous anti-physicalist arguments, including: The Hard Problem of Consciousness, Knowledge arguments (e.g., Mary’s Room), Philosophical zombies Dualist intuitions about the self and panpsychism.

Do these arguments really show that consciousness is non-physical—or do they rely on misconceptions about how the brain works? This video breaks down complex ideas into clear, rigorous explanations while challenging some of the most popular objections to physicalism.

 
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Albert Camus has long been misunderstood, but a new translation of his complete notebooks offers a corrective
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article...e-notebooks-ryan-bloom-existentialism-absurd/

EXCERPT: The public image of Camus has remained stubbornly unchanged since his initial reception in the 1940s, with each new translation either reinforcing a caricature—Camus as an existentialist or a philosopher of the absurd—or else simply not being read at all because of how uninteresting this caricature was. It is a silhouette projected as much by admirers of Camus as it is by those indifferent or hostile to him... (MORE - details)

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The universe evolves like a life form
https://iai.tv/articles/the-universe-evolves-like-a-life-form-auid-3571?_auid=2020

INTRO: We tend to think of reality as made up of things, governed by fixed laws that determine how they change over time. But biochemist Timothy Jackson argues that this is back to front: fundamental reality is a lawless flux, a chaos of unpredictable change, and what needs explaining is not chaos but the stability and order that emerge from it. The “laws” of physics are not eternal truths but descriptions of patterns that have persisted long enough to look permanent. Darwin’s central insight, Jackson suggests, was to show how such order might emerge, via natural selection—a principle which can explain, but never predict, the patterns that make up the world. (MORE - details)

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Will capitalism last forever?
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/sven-beckert-capitalism-history-future/

EXCERPTS: Everyone agrees that capitalism, the word, first appeared in the 19th century. [...] Long live capital!” cried the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. “Long may we go on to attack capitalism, its mortal enemy, with even more intensity.” As much as the word named something, so did it identify its speaker—as a worker, a radical, a hater.

If capital was viewed as a thing and capitalists as people, capitalism was something else. Blanc described it as an act, the taking of collective wealth and turning it into individual or private profit. Proudhon claimed it was a citadel, casting medieval and military shadows across the land. Despite his obvious interest and extensive writing on the subject, Marx steered clear of the term.

[...] No matter how one defines capitalism, the concept has served its critics well. Capitalism named an enemy, gave it a shape, and showed that it was on the march, threatening everything in its path. It still does. Scholars, by contrast, have often blanched at the term, dismissing it as political or polemical. While a subset of historians never gave it up, only recently has the historical profession come around to the position of the German scholar Jürgen Kocka: that as “a concept of historical synthesis,” capitalism is “unsurpassed.”

[...] Now these scholars face a challenge that the opponents of capitalism have long understood: Capitalism and its opponents depend on difference. [...] it becomes harder to imagine or to posit a time, including a past, when capitalism did not exist. Everything—past, present, and future—becomes capitalism or is on its way to it.

The polemical elements of the word, the fact that partisans deployed it to mark the perimeter of what they were protecting from the forces they were opposing, once made capitalism a fruitful source of historical distinction and narrative. But when the polemic subsides and the perimeter disappears, when capitalism triumphs and is simply the way of the world, the job of the historian becomes infinitely more challenging and fraught with failure... (MORE - details)
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Now it seems more like old capitalism is contrasted with "late stage capitalism." I also note the term "predatory capitalism," which always seems a bit redundant to me. Taking the wealth that workers create away from them would seem inherently conducive to predation.
 
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String theory can survive even without empirical evidence
https://iai.tv/articles/string-theo...thout-empirical-evidence-auid-3572?_auid=2020

INTRO: We assume theories need experimental proof to be credible. But philosopher of science Richard Dawid argues that string theory has earned trust through a different route: meta-empirical assessment. When decades of searching turn up no viable alternatives, and unexpected predictions keep emerging, a theory's viability can become probable even without testing. Empirical confirmation isn't the only path to scientific credence... (MORE - details)

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Scientists investigate ‘quantum consciousness’—but the brain may still defy physics
https://thedebrief.org/scientists-i...ousness-but-the-brain-may-still-defy-physics/

EXCERPT: In the past few years, interest in the idea of quantum biology has steadily increased. Scientists have already demonstrated that quantum effects can play functional roles in biological systems such as photosynthesis and bird navigation. But the leap from quantum chemistry to human awareness remains enormous.

[...] The harder question is why physical processes in the brain produce subjective experience at all. Why does seeing red feel like something? Why is there an inner experience accompanying thought?

Quantum theories try to bridge that explanatory gap by proposing that classical neuroscience alone may be insufficient. In their review, Ma and Wang focus on three major “families” of theories currently attracting scientific attention... (MORE - details)

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You’ve never had control over a single event in your life, says leading neuroscientist
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/you-dont-have-free-will

INTRO: Did you really choose to read this article? Or was the decision just the product of neurons firing in your brain, caused by biochemical reactions, governed by the laws of physics?

Whether or not humans truly have agency over our decisions seems like a foolish question to ask. Experience tells us that we have the ability to choose to do – or not to do – just about anything presented to us at a given moment.

Even reading this article may seem like a bizarre action if we’re little more than meat puppets, wandering autonomously from one moment to the next. But Robert Sapolsky says otherwise – that your sense of a being free agent is little more than an illusion conjured up by biology and how it interacts with your environment.

And Sapolsky is a man worth hearing out. He’s a professor of biology, neurology and neurosurgery at Stanford University and a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the ‘Genius Grant’. He is also the author of Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will, an instant New York Times bestseller upon publication in late 2023.

Sapolsky sat down for a conversation with BBC Science Focus about all things free will; why we don’t have it and, perhaps more importantly, how we can still extract meaning from a life without it... (MORE - details)
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Morality and Responsibility (book review)
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/thomas-nagel/i-m-not-sorry

INTRO: The appearance of a new ethical theory is a rare event, but it happened in 1982 with the publication of T.M. Scanlon’s essay ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’. Although he called his theory contractualism, Scanlon does not postulate an actual social contract between the members of a society, like Hobbes, or a hypothetical contract under imaginary conditions, like Rawls.

Instead, he finds the foundation of morality in principles that reasonable people would find mutually acceptable. He holds that an action or policy is wrong if any principle that permitted it could be reasonably rejected by someone affected adversely by that principle. Whether such a rejection is reasonable depends roughly on a comparison between the burdens that the principle imposes on the rejector and the benefits it provides to other individuals, taken one at a time... (MORE - details)

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The surprising divide over what counts as true
https://reason.com/2026/05/15/the-surprising-divide-over-what-counts-as-true/

EXCERPT: We have all been there, haven't we? Even for those who endorse the correspondence theory of truth must still grapple with the pervasive problem of confirmation bias.

As I reported a while back, research by the Yale law professor Dan Kahan finds that as scientific literacy goes up, so too does partisan polarization on the issue of climate change. In other words, the more science people know, the more they are able to seek out and find information justifying their beliefs.

Nevertheless, the European researchers suggest hopefully that understanding the differences in the conceptions of what is true may help us more fruitfully navigate political and policy disagreements... (MORE - details)
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Sergiu Klainerman: Mathematics is not a human invention
https://aeon.co/essays/for-sergiu-klainerman-maths-is-a-fact-to-be-divined

EXCERPTS: ‘A physical theory,’ Klainerman said, ‘is a mathematical theory verified by experimental facts.’ The two fields, from this perspective, are not merely related. They are more like two strands that emanate from separate starting points yet inexorably converge. The quandary raised by Wigner may, to some degree, stem from a gap that exists between what we perceive as mathematical reality and as physical reality – a gap that, Klainerman suggests, philosophers have been circling for a very long time.

He cites Plato, who argued that mathematical objects may in fact be more real than the objects we experience with our senses. A circle, in Plato’s view, is not the thing you draw on a piece of paper or trace with a compass. Those are approximations – imperfect embodiments of the ideal form of a circle, which exists independently of any attempt to render it. The drawn circle not only has flaws but is ephemeral, whereas the mathematical circle – a set of points equidistant from a common centre – is built to last.

For most of the history of science, this distinction could be set aside. You could remain agnostic about the ultimate nature of mathematical objects and still do acceptably good physics, because the objects under study – planets, pendulums, electromagnetic fields – were, at least in principle, observable. You could check your equations against the world. The mathematical structure was a description of something you could almost always see.

In many instances today, that is no longer true. Theoretical physics has arrived at a place where some of its fundamental objects are so far removed from ordinary experience that direct observation may be impossible in principle, not merely in practice. [...] For objects like these, mathematics may provide more than a useful description; it may offer the only means by which they can be understood at all... (MORE - details)
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New theory argues quantum physics must abandon irrational numbers and the continuum
https://iai.tv/articles/new-theory-...umbers-and-the-continuum-auid-3580?_auid=2020

INTRO: Quantum mechanics works perfectly in experiments, but Oxford physicist Tim Palmer argues it rests on a mathematical fiction: building the theory on the continuum of real numbers, including irrational numbers like v2. Palmer’s radical alternative abandons the continuum of real numbers and eliminates quantum mysteries that aren't actually physical-from Schrödinger's cat, to Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.” The theory makes a testable prediction: quantum computers will fail beyond 400 qubits, hitting a fundamental limit set by the discrete structure of nature itself. The coming quantum computing race will determine whether Palmer has identified a basic mistake in our most successful theory... (MORE - missing details)

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Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/05/19/fear-and-loathing-in-palo-alto/

EXCERPT: The argumentative spine of How to Rule the World, though, is Baker’s case against Stanford. Its culture, he argues, inculcates fraud. Venture capitalists throw ungodly sums of money at undergraduate “builders” with little due diligence. Students, predictably, learn to misappropriate it, overclaim their abilities, and misrepresent themselves to their peers and to the public. Feeling pressure to appear accomplished and perfect, students engage in all manner of deception to keep up. And these issues, in Baker’s freshman year, extended all the way to Stanford’s presidency.

Baker writes in the prologue that “power protects itself, secrets remain hidden in plain sight, and robust guardrails are lacking,” and this was true both of “the president, whose research had escaped scrutiny for years,” and in “the underbelly of the student body.” Tessier-Lavigne and his students, he argues, both participated in the university’s fake-it-till-you-make-it culture. And Stanford, wanting always to appear unblemished, fails to discipline both students and faculty when they engage in bad behavior... (MORE - details)
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Well, this is a twist. Usually it is the political right that depicts the umbrella category of Neo-Marxism in a conspiratorial context. Routinely denoted by its use of the pejorative term "Cultural Marxism".

But here it is the opposite of a left-wing philosopher (Gabriel Rockhill) asserting that the Frankfurt School was in league with or a tool of national security agencies in the United States. Part of a deliberate plan to undermine and dilute classic Marxism or communism.

If nothing else, this is a refreshing balance. Both traditional collectivists and traditional capitalists separately projecting their inferences of stealthy intrigue upon 20th-century literary intellectuals and current humanities departments. A break from the usual one-sided monotony.

And nice to know that advocates of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" might still be about, hoping to topple the bourgeoisie elite. ;) Although little chance of recovering the proles from MAGA, since the only viable candidates with a shot at election are just more of those non-revolutionary or betraying Reformists belonging to organizations with "democrat" or "democratic" appended to their socialism-named clubs (like NYC-DSA). ;)
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Which Way, Western Marxism? (review)
https://dissentmagazine.org/article/cultural-marxism-conspiracy-frankfurt-school/

EXCERPTS: [...] Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?, by contrast, offers a left-wing inversion of the right-wing conspiracy, in which the prominence of the Frankfurt School is explained as the result of a plot to destroy truly revolutionary (“Eastern”) Marxism.

[...] Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? starts from a wholly incorrect premise and does not improve from there, arguing that Western Marxism is a deviation from true dialectical and historical materialism. “Since it has not been possible to simply eliminate Marxism,” Rockhill writes, “due to its broad public appeal, clear explanatory power, and proven ability to transform the socioeconomic order, the managers of bourgeois society have been faced with the dilemma of how best to deal with its existence.”

[...] Let us take this claim as seriously as possible. After all, there was a conspiracy of sorts. [...] There were, relatedly, a number of real connections between the Frankfurt School scholars and the U.S. national security state.

[...] But the book’s strong version of this thesis—that the Frankfurt School’s prominence is the result of a deliberate conspiracy to advance Frankfurt thinking as an alternative to successful, revolutionary Marxism—doesn’t come close to being sustained by the book.

[...] But when he tries to argue that the OSS-CIA-Rockefeller patronage network (which “served the interests of the world’s leading imperialist state while traducing communism”) is the reason that the Frankfurt School version of Marxism became so prominent, he does fall into conspiracy, seemingly unable to read evidence in context.

[...] Rockhill is angry that Adorno appeared in the CCF magazine Encounter in 1969. But what appears there is the translation of an interview Adorno granted to Der Spiegel, and there is no evidence that Adorno even approved it.

[...] Rockhill’s infelicitous interpretation of evidence is systemic, driven by his inability to imagine that someone might have principled objections to Soviet communism. ... Here and there, Rockhill has found interesting documents... (MORE - details)
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Hume, Rovelli, and why the quantum world contains no objects
https://iai.tv/articles/hume-rovell...orld-contains-no-objects-auid-3582?_auid=2020

INTRO: Physicists have long known that quantum objects behave nothing like the solid, independent things of everyday experience. But the implications run deeper than strange behaviour. Carlo Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics suggests that quantum systems have observer-dependent properties-what they are depends on their interactions with other systems. Drawing on a tradition running from Hume to contemporary metaphysics, philosopher Andrea Oldofredi explores this novel relational perspective on our world, arguing that objects are not the fundamental furniture of reality.

EXCERPT: Underneath the solid, stable objects of everyday experience, there is no hidden substance giving things their identity and independence. There are only properties, interactions, and the relational facts that such interactions generate. What we call an object is not a “thing in itself,” but a bundle of properties that holds together reliably enough at the scales we inhabit to function as a thing. But zoom in far enough, and the thing dissolves into its relationships and qualities... (MORE - details)

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"Wittgenstein and the Transcendental" by Art Schop: Album Review
https://illustratemagazine.com/wittgenstein-and-the-transcendental-by-art-schop-album-review/

INTRO: Concept albums about philosophers are not exactly dime a dozen, and yet Art Schop somehow makes Wittgenstein and the Transcendental feel oddly intimate, darkly funny, and emotionally absorbing all at once. Inspired by the life and ideas of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the album drifts through folk rock, spoken-word melancholy, philosophical reflection, and dry wit with the confidence of someone who knows they’re making something gloriously unconventional. The brooding gravity of Nick Cave collides with the narrative intimacy of Bill Callahan and the sardonic charm of Father John Misty... (MORE - details)

Complete list on sidebar: Wittgenstein and the Transcendental
 
Neither objects nor processes are fundamental
https://iai.tv/articles/neither-objects-nor-processes-are-fundamental-auid-3588?_auid=2020

INTRO: Reality, physicists and philosophers have long assumed, must bottom out somewhere: in particles, fields, consciousness, or some other fundamental layer of being. But philosopher Emma Jaura, who is working on the foundations of quantum mechanics, argues that we should give up this quest for ultimate building blocks, and instead see reality as radically interdependent, where nothing enjoys absolute metaphysical priority, not even the universe as a whole. While this vision cuts sharply against the grain of Western thought, Indian and Chinese philosophy have explored how we might understand reality in this way for centuries... (MORE - details)

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Scientific realism: Are electrons real?
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v19/70

INTRO: In 2023, philosopher Philip Goff posed a deceptively simple question on X (formerly known as Twitter): “Do electrons exist?” Physicists, philosophers, and a wide range of commentators responded in droves. Their reactions ranged from curt dismissals to insightful reflections on the nature of scientific knowledge. Against this lively backdrop, three academics conducted a formal investigation into how physicists might answer the question.

Céline Henne is a philosopher working on the epistemology and philosophy of language at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Hannah Tomczyk, a physicist at HighFinesse in Germany, specialized in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Christoph Sperber is a data scientist at Tübingen University Hospital in Germany. Together, they surveyed 384 physicists, publishing their findings under the title “Physicists’ Views on Scientific Realism”. Henne and Tomczyk spoke to Physics Magazine about scientific realism—a philosophical position embraced by many physicists—and about alternative viewpoints... (MORE - details)
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Consciousness researchers are tripping
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/wilson-pollan-michael-consciousness-review-world-appears

EXCERPTS: A bunch of hardheaded scientists gather in a room to discuss the fundamental nature of consciousness. Each contestant is then given a progressively larger quantity of psilocybin to consume. To stay in the game, the scientists must continue to deny that their increasingly vivid and bizarre experiences are anything more than the product of purely physical reactions in the brain. The final materialist still to hold out wins, rewarded with the collected works of Proust and a stomach pump.

Obviously, I’m being facetious. But if Michael Pollan’s illuminating new book, A World Appears, is anything to go by, something analogous is already playing out in the world of consciousness research...

[...] Koch’s experiences have led him to recognize “the abject inability of physicalism to explain or even deal with consciousness.” These days, he subscribes to a form of idealism, the belief that consciousness, not matter, lies at the bedrock of reality. “Without a mind to observe it,” Koch says during a Zoom call, “the tree doesn’t exist—as a thing with a certain form differentiated from the ground and the sky. Without that observer, it’s just ontological dust… Only consciousness exists for itself.”

Pollan, sensibly, is more cautious, echoing David Chalmers’s wry observation that the only seemingly plausible theories of consciousness are those you haven’t given any proper thought to... (MORE - details)

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People are using AI to communicate without disclosing it. Is this morally wrong?
https://theconversation.com/people-...ut-disclosing-it-is-this-morally-wrong-283773

INTRO: Imagine you have used a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool such as ChatGPT to tidy up notes you took while in a meeting. Your colleague comments on how clear they are. You don’t disclose it was the AI that made the notes clear and not you.

Now consider a different scenario. You are at your mother’s funeral. Her best friend of many years delivers a heartfelt eulogy, wishing her well in the afterlife. But later you discover her friend did not actually write the eulogy in any way – AI did.

The undisclosed use of generative AI in these two scenarios is deceptive. But is it morally wrong?

It’s worth considering this philosophical question in detail, given the rapid uptake of generative AI and the fact research has found people may be strongly incentivised to not disclose their use of generative AI because it may impact their relationships.

This is because people take generative AI outputs, generally, to be less valuable, and regard those who use the technology as less competent and authentic... (MORE - details)

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How antihumanism turned on its authors
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/h...ticles/how-antihumanism-turned-on-its-authors

EXCERPTS: The QCS discovery that queer liberation is being realized by the petrochemical industry may seem like a niche matter, but it is emblematic of a broader impasse faced by the academic humanities. For the past half century, humanists have deconstructed, subverted, problematized, and queered every normativity and supremacy they could find. The ultimate target of this systematic critical project was, paradoxically, the value that originally founded and gave shape to their disciplines: humanism.

The dismantling of “Man” [antihumanism] was the impetus for some of the founding polemical statements of what came to be called “theory.” In recent decades, this project was reinvigorated in the form of “posthumanism” and the “posthumanities,” which launched an attack on the most centric of all centrisms: anthropocentrism. In line with this project, QCS discards any idea of a fixed, natural human essence to which synthetic substances pose a threat.

The early parts of the story of how the humanities turned against “the human” are well told in two intellectual histories...

[...] But what if academic antihumanists turn out to be dispensable to the realization of antihumanist goals? That is the unsettling conclusion QCS points us to, without acknowledging it. ... I am referring to the creation of generative artificial intelligence and the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) by a number of the world’s most highly valued companies.

Like so many humanities scholars before them, the entrepreneurs and engineers pursuing AGI openly seek to “decenter the human” and explore the possibilities of nonhuman agency. But their plan for doing so has far vaster resources behind it than all academic humanities departments combined...

[...] In other words, the humanities have spent half a century decentering the human but now face steep competition in that effort from tech companies with more than trillion-dollar valuations... (MORE - details)
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No, artificial intelligence is not conscious
https://www.theatlantic.com/philoso...t=AHrqwPnVAH5g4JPC5bCw05Elyn2-1Sahxr4bZ3rUctY

EXCERPT: The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well. Just as it is vastly easier to generate a realistic video of an astronaut in orbit around Alpha Centauri than it is to develop an interstellar propulsion technology, it is vastly easier to generate a plausible simulacrum of a conversation between two conscious beings than it is to develop a computer program that is conscious and has a genuine desire to communicate with a human. The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves... (MORE - details)

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You can and should blame young people when they act like lazy cheaters, actually
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-can-and-should-blame-young-people

EXCERPT: Honestly, I think a lot of modern college teachers just don’t want to handle the drag of disciplining students, so they come up with tortured justifications for why they shouldn’t ever have to do so. But of course disciplining students is a core part of ensuring that they get what they’re supposed to out of their educations, which means this is a matter of instructors putting their own emotional comfort over the best interests of students. Seems bad!

The spectacle of grown adults insisting that we simply cannot judge college students for outsourcing their thinking to machines is one of those little moral evasions that contemporary culture specializes in: tender, quasi-therapeutic, progressive-sounding, and ultimately a form of abandonment. Of course we can judge them! It is our duty to judge them. There is no such thing as schooling without judgment... (MORE - details)

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Is the twenty-first century a creative void?
https://yalereview.org/article/audrey-wollen-david-marx-blank-space

EXCERPT: In his closing chapter, David Marx writes, “Culture has been central to the narrative of the last twenty-five years—but merely as entertainment, commerce, and politics. In reliving the first quarter of the century in these pages, we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” It is, by its own admission, history presented as negative-space drawing: if you write down all the “entertainment, commerce, and politics,” the absent shape of “art” might become visible. Art evades definition—you’ll know it when you (don’t) see it.

No one could argue that people are making less of it, as this is also an era defined by unprecedented access to the tools of production and distribution. The means to edit a short film, design a poster, or record an album in your bedroom, and then publish that work directly to an audience, are newly affordable and widespread. For Marx, however, most of that creation (or should we call it content?) is not creativity; it is a surplus of material, propelled and inhibited by a wish to make money and gain attention. Poptimism—the idea that commercial pop should be accorded the same critical attention as traditionally “serious” genres such as rock or jazz—has wrenched away our critical ability to assess something’s worth outside of metrics defined by mass-market success: if it makes money, it must be good... (MORE - details)
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The no-human future
https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-nick-lands-philosophy-of-accelerationism-really

EXCERPTS: So, what is ‘accelerationism’? In the past decade, two forms seem to have consolidated in the public imagination. ... But neither reflects the original and much stranger philosophy of accelerationism, which began neither as an ideology of white nationalism nor of techno-utopianism. It began with one man’s ecstatic philosophy of human extinction.

[...] Nick Land was born in 1962 in the UK. ... In 1995, along with another Warwick philosopher, the ‘cyberfeminist’ Sadie Plant, Land established an experimental cultural theory collective called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (or Ccru).

[...] Land is showing that Kant’s philosophy silences true Otherness [actual existence versus our cognitive representations of it] before we even encounter it, forcing everything alien to appear to us only through the filter of our own preconceived ideas. What seems ‘other’ becomes just a reflection of ourselves. This critique reveals what Land is fundamentally after: freeing a radical Otherness from the prison that human reason has built around it.

[...] Land offers an alternative to this philosophical tradition: if thought cannot grasp reality’s radical alterity without reducing it to a thing for us, the only way to access that Otherness is at the limit or even death of thought itself. Death, after all, marks the absolute negation of subjectivity. Like Kant’s unknowable noumenon, death is that which thought cannot reach. It is proof that reality exceeds what we can think of it.

[...] That is, to understand reality, we must eagerly embrace death with open arms. ... From 1993 onwards, Land’s writings undergo a decisive shift. Rather than seeing capitalism as repressing a noumenal, inhuman ‘Outside’, he comes to envision capitalism’s technological advancement ... as examples of the Outside beginning to melt down our most cherished values and beliefs.

[...] The mature Land’s account here is paradoxically closer to anti-capitalists than to those who believe capitalism is beneficial to humankind. It is, after all, anti-capitalists like Karl Marx who grasp that capitalism is a profoundly dehumanising megamachine that strips us of autonomy before all-powerful market forces. The difference is that Land thinks we can do nothing about this, so that the moral outrage of anti-capitalists is in vain. He also thinks that we should affirm such dehumanisation, at least if our goal is to grasp the real by stripping it of all anthropomorphic dissimulations. Seen from this more inhuman and critical perspective, anti-capitalist struggle is but the last-ditch effort to prevent or at least slow down the human species’ extinction. That is, anti-capitalists have correctly identified the radical power of capitalism, but waste their energy trying in vain to rein it in. Understood in this way, the anti-capitalist Left are now the conservatives, while the libertarian Right have become the revolutionaries as they struggle to unfetter capitalism from all restraints.

[...] Land comes to re-envision capitalism as the engine of the Outside rather than its obstruction. What makes this change possible is his view that capitalism’s constant revolutionisation of productive forces ensures ‘life is being phased-out into something new’... (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: I actually agree so far the as the eventual replacement of humans widely occurring if technological progress continues. But due to Neo-Marxist and progressive support for identity transformation (which can be construed as a primitive precursor to transhumanism and then human supersession), such could be seen as incrementally converging on the same technological path as the libertarian Right (reluctant, unknowing allies). And similarly, the indirectly facilitating traditionalists -- who are uneasy with transexual and other radical body modification -- are kind of feebly resisting the route to replacement of humans early on like classic Marxism, despite the political disparity between the two (capitalists versus anti-capitalists).
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New studies suggest consciousness exists in organisms without brains
https://iai.tv/articles/new-studies...organisms-without-brains-auid-3597?_auid=2020

INTRO: We assume consciousness requires a human or animal brain—an assumption that author and philosopher of science Natalie Lawrence argues is the biggest obstacle to understanding what the mind actually is. Our tools for investigating cognition were built in our own image, leading us to over-attribute "life" to AI while dismissing complex organisms like slime moulds. Drawing on her research into the philosophy of biology, Lawrence explores how Spain's MINT Lab is moving beyond these biases. By designing experiments that don't use human cognition as the template, they aim to build a framework rigorous enough to finally distinguish a system that merely reacts to its past from one that genuinely experiences its present... (MORE - details)

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Why AI is incorrigibly didactic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2...opy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

EXCERPT: Most of the time, of course, people aren’t using AI to generate fiction. But ChatGPT’s attempts at storytelling reveal a tendency that also shapes the way it produces business emails and school essays and research summaries. AI is often described as sycophantic, telling us what we want to hear. But that is just one expression of its structural bias toward familiarity and averageness. An LLM reflects our expectations back to us, not because it wants to please us—it doesn’t have wants of any kind—but because it produces new text by reproducing patterns it finds in existing texts. The lessons that ChatGPT’s stories taught me—listen to others; don’t give in to fear; guard your independence—are banal because they are the kind of thing human beings say to one another all the time. [...] AI writing never challenges the way we think or see. It can’t do so, even if you explicitly ask it to... (MORE - details)

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Toni Morrison’s native figures
https://yalereview.org/article/namwali-serpell-toni-morrisons-native-figures

EXCERPTS: Toni Morrison has lately been bestowed with a dubious distinction: the patron saint of cancel culture. Beyond her cutting remarks about whiteness in widely memed television interviews, her literary criticism interrogates racialized language in a way that, on the surface, resembles so-called activist scholarship. [...] So what do we make of the fact that, in the classes I teach, some young men and women—Native American, black, mixed, and otherwise—shudder when reading the words Morrison herself seems to have casually included in her writing?

[...] When talking to my students about how to make sense of these passages, it is helpful to emphasize that Morrison always distinguished between a character’s beliefs and an author’s. She also adamantly opposed censorship, complaining of the canon wars of the 1980s that they threatened both to destroy a canon precious to her (“I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare”) and to degenerate “into ad hominem and unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious and silly arguments about politics.” Nevertheless, I have found one literary “sin” of Morrison’s rather more difficult to defend in these terms: her strange, often awkward representation of Native Americans... (MORE - details)
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Our experience of time is just as foundational as the physics
https://iai.tv/articles/our-experie...ndational-as-the-physics-auid-3598?_auid=2020

INTRO: We want to trust the clock, dismissing our strange and flexible experience of time as mere "psychological distortion". But philosopher Manuel Delaflor argues this dismissal is a mistake. Drawing on relativity, neuroscience and the strange testimony of anaesthesia and psychedelics, he contends that time is not something that proceeds outside of ourselves, but is generated by minds navigating possibility and constraint. Rather than tracking a hidden reality, Delaflor argues the clock is just one model among many, and a poor one for love, grief, boredom and the moments that change a life.
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COMMENT: Cognition is dependent upon memory. For instance, identifying and understanding _X_ object as a "tree" can be conditional on a concept that has been stored in the brain for decades. But discerning a difference between one's last experience of the world and the specious "current" one is reliant upon immediate information storage of that former state and comparing it to the structure of the "bogus now" experience. Both can actually be subsumed by our temporal category of "past", because even if the external world did feature an objective, non-cognitive "flow", it would already have "moved on" by the time fresh information interacts with the body and gets neurally processed. There's no direct, non-mediated access to "outer change" anymore than there is with the rest of outer, existing affairs. Humans seem to be capable of accepting indirect realism about the latter more easily than they can do that with time. Despite the so-called "flow" and its "absolute now" clearly being an attribute of phenomenal experience (belonging to the latter), the majority of us simply cannot stop projecting it upon the non-cognitive or non-generated world (or at least our popular, commonsense idea of a material realm being the case).
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People are marrying holograms and making friends with chatbots. But can AI bring true happiness?
https://theconversation.com/people-...atbots-but-can-ai-bring-true-happiness-284872

INTRO: Can technology really replace human relationships? As philosophy scholars who focus on human happiness and on artificial intelligence (AI), we tackle this question in a recent paper. In our study, we address the rise of AI companions, chatbots, and social robots for friendship, advice, emotional support, and even romance. We argue that AI can reduce loneliness and provide assistance, but it lacks the genuine understanding, emotions, and moral responsibility needed for human flourishing... (MORE - details)

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The mind at the end of the universe
https://www.templeton.org/news/the-mind-at-the-end-of-the-universe

EXCERPT: Inspired by this interpretation, physicist Paul Davies imagines the far, far future, when intelligence in some form has left Earth and spread through the Milky Way and out into the other galaxies. This now cosmos-wide mega-mind-at-the-end-of-the-universe could act as an observer. It would be able to reach all the way back to the Big Bang itself and select the very laws and numbers of nature that allow the existence of life and mind.

The scenario is like an enormous, self-consistent loop through time-the future is selecting the past, and the past is permitting the future, solving the finetuning problem. “The universe, its laws and its observers all explain each other in a self-consistent package,” elaborates Davies... (MORE - details)

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Could alien consciousness be unlike anything we can imagine?
https://thedebrief.org/could-alien-...igence-may-be-stranger-than-we-ever-imagined/

EXCERPTS: The researchers framed their core question around what they call “substrate flexibility”: can a specific property be achieved across many substrates, or is it more limited? [...] what about consciousness? Can it also be achieved flexibly? Perhaps the answer depends on the specificity of the question and whether we are considering human consciousness or a broader concept of consciousness itself.

[...] While the authors concede that a similar substrate may be required to perfectly reproduce human consciousness, a broader view of the phenomenon may be necessary to recognize forms of consciousness that are fundamentally alien to our own. The paper, “Substrate Flexibility and the Copernican Principle of Consciousness,” appeared in draft form on the University of California, Riverside website on May 28, 2026... (MORE - details)
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Why AI firms are turning to philosophers
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/why-ai-firms-turning-philosophers-133028473.html

EXCERPTS: For years, philosophy graduates have been the "butt of jokes about unemployable degrees", said Thibault Spirlet in Business Insider. Now, they can earn six-figure salaries as the "world's most powerful AI companies" try to "shape how machines think and behave".

[...] A rise in demand for philosophers has also coincided with a decline in admissions for computer science students, said Lance Eliot in Forbes. Arguably, computer science has become a "dead-end endeavour", creating "automation that replaces the humans who made it all possible". ... philosophy is experiencing an "amazing arc of redemption".

But influence goes both ways and is "not limited to Silicon Valley", said Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly on Observer. Philosophy is impacting tech, but the demands of the AI industry are reshaping the "long-standing" landscape of philosophical thought. Academia is "rapidly adapting" as foundational questions regarding consciousness, morality, minds and computation have taken on a "new urgency". (MORE - details)

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What split-brain patients reveal about consciousness
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-split-brain-patients-reveal-about-consciousness/

EXCERPT: In summary, local properties of the cortex and its satellite structures mediate the specific content of consciousness, whereas global properties are critical for sustaining consciousness per se. For a coherent coalition of neurons to assemble at all — and for awareness to emerge — the cortico-thalamic complex needs to be suffused with neurotransmitters, chemicals released by the long and winding tentacles of neurons in the deeper and older parts of the brain... (MORE - details)

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More awe, wore wonder: Exploring the mystery of consciousness
https://www.templeton.org/news/more-awe-more-wonder-exploring-the-mystery-of-consciousness

EXCERPTS: Koch made a bet: scientists would, within the next 25 years, discover the material basis of consciousness in what he imagined would probably be “a small set of specialized neurons responsible for subjective experience.” [...] In the years that passed since their initial wager, scientists have made incredible discoveries, developed compelling theories of consciousness, and rigorously tested them in adversarial collaborations like the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s initiative “Accelerating Research on Consciousness.” And yet, despite their best efforts, specific structures responsible for consciousness have not been found.

[...] “Whether you believe in materialism or panpsychism or whatever, we can agree that there are physical mechanisms in the brain that correlate with consciousness,” Koch told Pollan. “But finding those mechanisms is never going to explain how consciousness arises.”

Koch’s journey, from buoyant confidence to chastened uncertainty, mirrors Pollan’s own: “I cannot guarantee that by the end of this book, you will know more about consciousness than you do now,” Pollan writes. “Like me, you may find that you know less than you do now.” (MORE - details)

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Can an the ideal society ever exist?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...-wren-review-can-the-ideal-society-ever-exist

EXCERPTS: Some patterns emerge: many utopias employ a framing device in which the narrator is accidentally or fantastically transported to a new land, and then subjected to reams of expository monologue about how it all works. Families are often abolished, with children raised in common. And in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, Wren explains straightfacedly, “there are no law schools or lawyers, abolished here as in most utopias”.

[...] for Nozick utopias are always coercive because not everyone will agree freely with their values. “It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it,” Nozick writes. “Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”

[...] things regularly go awry in this ideal society, from attack by intolerant fanatics, to rogue AI utilitarianism, or unfeasibly ancient alien artefacts. The best utopian fiction therefore ends up implicitly anti-utopian as well; at its highest level of practise, perhaps, utopia vanishes into the great flow of literature itself... (MORE - details)
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Consciousness is not an object we can observe
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-is-not-an-object-we-can-observe-auid-3608?_auid=2020

INTRO: Physicist Carlo Rovelli recently proclaimed that consciousness is just another physical thing, while materialist philosophers argue that consciousness is simply one brain state observing another. What such views miss, argues Manfred Frank, a leading figure in contemporary German philosophy, is that consciousness comes with a built-in awareness of itself—an awareness that exists prior to any introspection or observation. Consciousness does not observe itself in the way we observe objects; rather, it dissolves the distinction between observer and observed altogether. This is why consciousness cannot be simply another object in the world, but instead exists in an entirely different dimension... (MORE - details)
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