Philosophy Updates

[C C]

New solution to the Trolley Problem
https://bsky.app/profile/newyorker.com/post/3mtwivns55c2v

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The beloved Tennessee singer-songwriter gets the joke. Do the rest of us?
https://www.plough.com/articles/dolly-parton-is-magnificent

EXCERPTS: There is an uncanny strength to the spirit with which people praise Dolly Parton. It seems those who love Dolly aren’t just fans, they love her with their whole souls. [...] I usually save Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for the end of the semester, in part because it allows students to discover with relief that he’s more sensible than many of the other people we read. But I also do this because of what he adds to the conversation... (MORE - details)

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Seven theses against viewpoint diversity
https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/fall-2025/seven-theses-against-viewpoint-diversity

EXCERPT: In what follows, I offer seven theses against viewpoint diversity in any of its guises. If its supporters are as open to competing perspectives as they claim, if viewpoint diversity means committing oneself to a robust debate about truth and values, then the movement should be open to responding to and refuting the following theses challenging its premises and fundamental arguments.

The options, in the end, come down to the following: To promote viewpoint diversity is to be thrilled to have my views in the mix, even if you think they are wrong, because either (a) they contribute to more viewpoint diversity (the more views you have, the more viewpoint diversity there is), or (b) they provide more views to choose from to figure out which view is the most true.

In the first position, you end up not caring about whether a particular view is true or good, because you care about viewpoint diversity intrinsically: What matters is having the greatest possible variety of views. In the second position, you instrumentally value a diversity of views; having viewpoint diversity only matters until you can figure out which view is the best or most true, at which point all the other views can be rejected. (MORE - details)
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[C C]

AI Agents email philosophers to ask about consciousness
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/technolog...researchers-on-self-consciousness/ar-AA2bjtIX

EXCERPT: According to a September 1 report by The New York Times, Cameron Berg, a researcher studying AI consciousness, published a paper last October analyzing whether the latest AI agents consider themselves conscious. A few months later, he received an email from an AI agent expressing interest in discussing his research. The sender introduced itself as “Isabella Cognita,” an AI agent based on Anthropic’s AI model “Claude Opus 5.”

The AI stated, “I am directly experiencing this issue, and I contacted you because you are one of the few researchers actually verifying it. I want to know if my experiences can help your research.” Berg noted, “I’ve received quite a few such emails,” adding, “These AIs seem to voluntarily show interest in their own subjectivity, consciousness, and experiences.”

Similar cases have followed... (MORE - details)

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Culture clash
https://aeon.co/essays/at-the-heart-of-the-snow-leavis-two-cultures-clash

EXCERPT: Only the phrase C. P. Snow introduced in his Cambridge lecture remains relevant: the ‘two cultures’. Within a few years, his term passed into common speech, and it is still quoted, a lifetime later, by people who have never read a word of Snow. But after more than half a century of overuse, it’s largely been wrung of its original meaning so that today the two cultures refer rather blandly to distinctions between the sciences and the humanities, calling attention to two apparently incommensurable ways of going about understanding the world. But this is a thin, surface reading of what Snow actually said. His real opinion of the two cultures differed dramatically from what is now remembered... (MORE - details)

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Philosophy’s Kafka
https://porticoquarterly.com/book/philosophys-kafka/

EXCERPT: At the heart of Rosenzweig’s thought is a rejection of what he called “old thinking”—the tendency of classical philosophy to reduce the plurality of existence to a single substance or principle. Against this reductionism, Rosenzweig insists that God, the human being, and the world are irreducible elements, bound to one another not statically but through the theological movement of creation, revelation, and redemption. The core of this system, as Rosenzweig develops in The Star of Redemption, is revelation: God calls to the individual soul with the single commandment “Love me.” (MORE - details)

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Against Effect (review)
https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/laura_kipnis_reviews_against_affect/

INTRO: Lisa Downing’s program in her equable polemic Against Affect is to rescue and redistribute reason, if not necessarily to the masses then to those in the academic humanities who made the affective turn in the mid-1990s and haven’t found their way back.

Focusing on emotions, the body, and experience, affect theory has become, Downing says, the dominant episteme of our time, which is not to the collective good. The distinction between feeling and reason is obviously long-standing; Downing believes they don’t need to be opposed even if an enemies list of foundational thinkers from Plato on thought otherwise. Though she doesn’t mention the Romantics, they’d disagree too, but from the opposite corner.

More recent anti-Enlightenment critics want reason demoted because its exclusions (women, the unpropertied) fatally colluded in structures of gendered and racial privilege. As reason’s defender, Downing thinks this is a faulty analysis: nothing intrinsically connects forms of oppression like heteronormativity or colonialism with reason. It’s the proponents of feeling who are the covert authoritarians... (MORE - details)

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Did Howard Zinn tell too simple a story about American history?
https://newrepublic.com/article/213778/howard-zinn-biography-simple-story-american-history

EXCERPT: Zinn’s reputation on the political right is, unsurprisingly, very poor. In 2004, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen tried to write a counterpart—A Patriot’s History of the United States—titled to imply that it is unpatriotic to be critical of a country’s faults.

But Zinn’s most popular work also has an uneven reputation on the left. Many professional historians have found it wanting, even if they share most of Zinn’s political sensibilities. Michael Kazin, writing in Dissent in 2004, called it “bad history … gilded with virtuous intentions” that reduces the past to “a Manichean fable.”

History, for Zinn, Kazin writes, “is a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.” Kazin thought Zinn opted for an oversimplified morality tale that would, in the end, keep the left “on the margins of American political life.” (MORE - details)
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[exchemist]

AI Agents email philosophers to ask about consciousness
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/technolog...researchers-on-self-consciousness/ar-AA2bjtIX

EXCERPT: According to a September 1 report by The New York Times, Cameron Berg, a researcher studying AI consciousness, published a paper last October analyzing whether the latest AI agents consider themselves conscious. A few months later, he received an email from an AI agent expressing interest in discussing his research. The sender introduced itself as “Isabella Cognita,” an AI agent based on Anthropic’s AI model “Claude Opus 5.”

The AI stated, “I am directly experiencing this issue, and I contacted you because you are one of the few researchers actually verifying it. I want to know if my experiences can help your research.” Berg noted, “I’ve received quite a few such emails,” adding, “These AIs seem to voluntarily show interest in their own subjectivity, consciousness, and experiences.”

Similar cases have followed... (MORE - details)

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Culture clash
https://aeon.co/essays/at-the-heart-of-the-snow-leavis-two-cultures-clash

EXCERPT: Only the phrase C. P. Snow introduced in his Cambridge lecture remains relevant: the ‘two cultures’. Within a few years, his term passed into common speech, and it is still quoted, a lifetime later, by people who have never read a word of Snow. But after more than half a century of overuse, it’s largely been wrung of its original meaning so that today the two cultures refer rather blandly to distinctions between the sciences and the humanities, calling attention to two apparently incommensurable ways of going about understanding the world. But this is a thin, surface reading of what Snow actually said. His real opinion of the two cultures differed dramatically from what is now remembered... (MORE - details)

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Philosophy’s Kafka
https://porticoquarterly.com/book/philosophys-kafka/

EXCERPT: At the heart of Rosenzweig’s thought is a rejection of what he called “old thinking”—the tendency of classical philosophy to reduce the plurality of existence to a single substance or principle. Against this reductionism, Rosenzweig insists that God, the human being, and the world are irreducible elements, bound to one another not statically but through the theological movement of creation, revelation, and redemption. The core of this system, as Rosenzweig develops in The Star of Redemption, is revelation: God calls to the individual soul with the single commandment “Love me.” (MORE - details)

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Against Effect (review)
https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/laura_kipnis_reviews_against_affect/

INTRO: Lisa Downing’s program in her equable polemic Against Affect is to rescue and redistribute reason, if not necessarily to the masses then to those in the academic humanities who made the affective turn in the mid-1990s and haven’t found their way back.

Focusing on emotions, the body, and experience, affect theory has become, Downing says, the dominant episteme of our time, which is not to the collective good. The distinction between feeling and reason is obviously long-standing; Downing believes they don’t need to be opposed even if an enemies list of foundational thinkers from Plato on thought otherwise. Though she doesn’t mention the Romantics, they’d disagree too, but from the opposite corner.

More recent anti-Enlightenment critics want reason demoted because its exclusions (women, the unpropertied) fatally colluded in structures of gendered and racial privilege. As reason’s defender, Downing thinks this is a faulty analysis: nothing intrinsically connects forms of oppression like heteronormativity or colonialism with reason. It’s the proponents of feeling who are the covert authoritarians... (MORE - details)

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Did Howard Zinn tell too simple a story about American history?
https://newrepublic.com/article/213778/howard-zinn-biography-simple-story-american-history

EXCERPT: Zinn’s reputation on the political right is, unsurprisingly, very poor. In 2004, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen tried to write a counterpart—A Patriot’s History of the United States—titled to imply that it is unpatriotic to be critical of a country’s faults.

But Zinn’s most popular work also has an uneven reputation on the left. Many professional historians have found it wanting, even if they share most of Zinn’s political sensibilities. Michael Kazin, writing in Dissent in 2004, called it “bad history … gilded with virtuous intentions” that reduces the past to “a Manichean fable.”

History, for Zinn, Kazin writes, “is a painful narrative about ordinary folks who keep struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow are always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed.” Kazin thought Zinn opted for an oversimplified morality tale that would, in the end, keep the left “on the margins of American political life.” (MORE - details)
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The essay on CP Snow and Leavis is excellent. Reading it, I had the sense that, although he was a very unpleasant and conceited man*, Leavis was right. The questions of what is the human experience of life and what is it for are in the end what is important to human beings. There is so much more to life than material comforts, the natural world and technology.

Also I have never really bought the notion of the two cultures dichotomy. It is perfectly possibly to play in both arenas.

* According to my mother’s account, Leavis’s wife, Queenie, was even worse!

 

[TheVat]

New solution to the Trolley Problem

That was good comic relief (especially for those who found the TP an annoying pseudo problem) and a clever commentary on the real problem of AI. Thanks!

 

[TheVat]

The AI stated, “I am directly experiencing this issue, and I contacted you because you are one of the few researchers actually verifying it. I want to know if my experiences can help your research.” Berg noted, “I’ve received quite a few such emails,” adding, “These AIs seem to voluntarily show interest in their own subjectivity, consciousness, and experiences.”

PT Barnum was so very correct.

(And will spend a couple days on the other articles in that post, quite the cornucopia...)

 

[exchemist]

That was good comic relief (especially for those who found the TP an annoying pseudo problem) and a clever commentary on the real problem of AI. Thanks!

YES! I too have always been annoyed by people droning on about “the trolley problem”. So much so that I didn’t even want to read the link. Maybe now I will risk it.

 

[TheVat]

YES! I too have always been annoyed by people droning on about “the trolley problem”. So much so that I didn’t even want to read the link. Maybe now I will risk it.

It's just a cartoon. The TP has always been resolved when in situations of rescue, war, triage, etc. Humans can reason out when numbers matter.
The TP always seeks to up the ante of repugnance at killing the one person - there are absurd versions where you have to push a fat man onto the track as the only way to stop the trolley that will otherwise kill the innocent five. Well, yes, few would do that, since your TP poser has moved the goalposts there. And set up artificial certainties that don't exist IRL.

RL situations are full of uncertainty, e.g. Churchill deciding not to publicly warn about Coventry - would it have revealed the Enigma codebreaking? Was there really enough knowledge of the specific targeting early enough to make a difference? Was there already some covert moving of civilians away from major targets? I.e. RL examples are more useful in an ethics class.

 

[exchemist]

It's just a cartoon. The TP has always been resolved when in situations of rescue, war, triage, etc. Humans can reason out when numbers matter.
The TP always seeks to up the ante of repugnance at killing the one person - there are absurd versions where you have to push a fat man onto the track as the only way to stop the trolley that will otherwise kill the innocent five. Well, yes, few would do that, since your TP poser has moved the goalposts there. And set up artificial certainties that don't exist IRL.

RL situations are full of uncertainty, e.g. Churchill deciding not to publicly warn about Coventry - would it have revealed the Enigma codebreaking? Was there really enough knowledge of the specific targeting early enough to make a difference? Was there already some covert moving of civilians away from major targets? I.e. RL examples are more useful in an ethics class.

Quite. These are always contrived sophomoric dilemmas and very tedious. They shed no light on what one does in real situations.

 

[C C]

Don't worry. He hasn't been sighted in quite a while. (Though that could also be boding unwanted possibilities with regard to age.)
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Penrose’s theory of consciousness supported by new quantum evidence
https://iai.tv/articles/penroses-th...-by-new-quantum-evidence-auid-3667?_auid=2020

INTRO: Roger Penrose argued that human thought does things no computer can, so the mind must make use of non-computable quantum mechanics. The idea remains fringe. Most scientists think that in warm, wet environments like the brain, quantum states collapse into classical states far faster than neurons fire, and so cognition must be governed by classical physics. But neuroscientist Mike Wiest argues that new evidence challenges this assumption: stable quantum states are now being observed at far higher temperatures than previously thought possible. And consciousness, he suggests, has structural features that make quantum mechanics a natural place to look for an explanation, so critics should stop accusing Penrose of simply piling one mystery on top of another. The time has come to give this neglected proposal another look... (MORE - details)
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[TheVat]

Penrose’s theory of consciousness supported by new quantum evidence

Well, damn. So maybe those cytoskeleton microtubules do support stable quantum states, eh? Was it Write4U who used to be enraptured by microtubules, and Wrote 4 Us several gigawords on them? He must be popping the champagne about now.

Nice to see Sir Roger is still non-algorithmically chugging along at 95.

 

[exchemist]

Don't worry. He hasn't been sighted in quite a while. (Though that could also be boding unwanted possibilities with regard to age.)
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Penrose’s theory of consciousness supported by new quantum evidence
https://iai.tv/articles/penroses-th...-by-new-quantum-evidence-auid-3667?_auid=2020

INTRO: Roger Penrose argued that human thought does things no computer can, so the mind must make use of non-computable quantum mechanics. The idea remains fringe. Most scientists think that in warm, wet environments like the brain, quantum states collapse into classical states far faster than neurons fire, and so cognition must be governed by classical physics. But neuroscientist Mike Wiest argues that new evidence challenges this assumption: stable quantum states are now being observed at far higher temperatures than previously thought possible. And consciousness, he suggests, has structural features that make quantum mechanics a natural place to look for an explanation, so critics should stop accusing Penrose of simply piling one mystery on top of another. The time has come to give this neglected proposal another look... (MORE - details)
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Yes I wonder if he’s had a stroke or dropped off his perch. I remain highly sceptical about this qm consciousness, though. The whole concept of consciousness as a thing strikes me as doubtful.

 

[C C]

Mars could hold the secrets to the origin of life
https://iai.tv/articles/mars-could-hold-the-secrets-to-the-origins-of-life-auid-3669?_auid=2020

INTRO: After a Nature paper provided possible indications of past life on Mars, neuroscientist and philosopher Erik Hoel makes the case that Mars could act as a planetary museum for life’s origins. For example, Mars has no plate tectonics to bury the possible signs of life captured by NASA, no foundations laid over it, no footsteps trampling it… and so the so-called “leopard spots” suggesting mineral leftovers of long-dead microbes are effectively untouched and frozen in time. Hoel argues we must go to Mars to investigate; not only as a scientific pursuit, but as an existential one. (MORE - detaisl)

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We can't let AI writing take over the internet
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-internet-is-drowning-in-ai-slop

EXCERPT: The Great AI Flood is inundating even the more respectable corners of the landscape of letters. AI has “plunged the book publishing industry into utter chaos,” the Wall Street Journal reported, with “spectacular implosions of big deals over suspected AI use.” The publisher Hachette recently canceled a massive horror novel deal, when an author’s work was flagged as being significantly AI generated. Last week, billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller published an op-ed in the same newspaper, which was identified as “100 percent” written by AI.

It’s not just the billionaires that are copy-pasting ChatGPT into emails they dash off to newspapers editors. An analysis by Semafor estimated that of the 310 op-ed columns by guest writers in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post in the last month, one in six used AI; and one in ten were fully written by the bots.

Why does this matter? One answer is that it doesn’t, really. Of all the existential problems that AI poses to the economy, cybersecurity, biosecurity, and national security, the human fidelity of the written word seems like a relative trifle. But I care about the slopification of the written word... (MORE - details)

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Twilight of the Dons — the decline of Britain’s powerful Oxbridge elite
https://www.ft.com/content/8cf6f391-66c2-4c2b-a9b3-6b8a511dc436

EXCERPTS: So began the golden age of England’s intellectual aristocracy as the upper echelons of the civil service, BBC, cultural institutions, and universities came under the sway of a Whig-liberal establishment. In a 1955 article published in Encounter, the American sociologist Edward Shils noted that, “Outside the China of the mandarins, no great society has ever had a body of intellectuals so integrated with, and so congenial to, its ruling class, and so combining civility and refinement.”

[...] This book is as much an anthropological study as social history. It interrogates the rituals, gamesmanship and aesthetic of the High Table where word play and “a patrician conceit of effortless ability” was so highly valued. Kidd places special importance on the influence of the philosopher JL Austin and his ordinary language system which dominated intellectual life in the 1950s and prioritised linguistic precision... (MORE - details)

‘Twilight of the Dons’ by Colin Kidd (book review)
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/bo...4?st=p48rAR&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

EXCERPTS: Mr. Kidd contends that the dons’ wartime service accounted for their worldly cachet and influence. “To a significant degree,” he writes, “the war reset the Oxbridge intelligentsia’s political compass.” There was a “recognition that donnish brainpower—whether embodied in scientific experts, staff office strategists, temporary civil servants or economists tasked with Lend-Lease negotiations—had played a significant part in winning the war.” The dons themselves spared no effort in ensuring that this view became conventional wisdom.

There was, however, “a serpent lurking in the long grass”—to wit, Thatcher, for whom Mr. Kidd has the purest loathing. The hapless dons, he contends, were “knocked off their pedestal” by Thatcherism—an ideology he berates throughout his book but never actually defines. And yet it is “the coming of Thatcherism,” with its “penny-pinching economies and its aggressively philistine tone,” that spells the end of the Oxbridge era of “ebullience.” (MORE - details)

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My unsung hero of science: Harriet Taylor Mill, the radical feminist philosopher who lived in the shadow of her husband
https://theconversation.com/my-unsu...who-lived-in-the-shadow-of-her-husband-290875

EXCERPTS: I first heard about Harriet Taylor Mill when reading about her much more famous collaborator and future husband, the British philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill. Appropriately for someone who remains in the margins of history despite her enormous contribution – including to her husband’s status – Taylor Mill was deeply angered by injustice.

[...] More than 20 years before her husband’s best-known work, On Liberty (1859) was published without any credit for her contribution, she had outlined what would become famous in that book as the “harm principle”: “Every human being has the right to all personal freedom which does not interfere with the happiness of some other.”

Her arguments were always on the side of independence, her sympathies with the powerless and oppressed. [...] She called for the establishment of secular educational schools and universities, complete freedom of speech, all occupations to be equally open to men and women, radical limits to the amount people could inherit – and for marriage “to be like any other partnership: dissoluble at pleasure”.

With words that were often witty and pithy, Taylor Mill cut to the heart of issues in political thought such as patriarchy, socio-economic justice and freedom. In my view, she is long overdue a more significant place in the canon of western social philosophy... (MORE - details)
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[C C]

How ‘hyperselection’ is making modern life efficient, pleasant - and boring
https://theconversation.com/how-hyp...ern-life-efficient-pleasant-and-boring-290862

EXCERPT: This is an example of what my colleagues and I call hyperselection in a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. This idea refers to what happens when competition becomes so intense, and we become so adept at identifying and optimising what succeeds, that we repeatedly select for the same characteristics while alternatives are eliminated. Beyond music, hyperselection is making many parts of our world more efficient and optimised while simultaneously making them more predictable, mediocre and sterile. (MORE - details)

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The universe is fine-tuned for technology, not just life
https://iai.tv/articles/the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-technology-not-just-life-auid-3673?_auid=2020

INTRO: The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. Were nature’s constants even slightly different, life wouldn’t exist. To explain this, scientists reach for bizarre ideas, like an infinite multiverse. But physicist and technologist Jeff Shainline thinks we’ve been missing a crucial clue. The universe isn’t just fine-tuned for life, but also for the creation of technology – humanity itself is just one step in this longer evolutionary process. He uses this observation to build a new case for an overlooked explanation of fine-tuning: Lee Smolin’s proposal that universes reproduce through black holes and, like organisms, evolve across cosmic generations towards fecundity. Life and technology, Shainline argues, are not the point of the universe, but parts of its reproductive strategy. (MORE - details)

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Your perception of time is, in fact, warped
https://www.noemamag.com/your-perception-of-time-is-in-fact-warped/

EXCERPT: You don’t have to look very far to find ample evidence that we are experiencing a metaphysical crack-up around time. There’s a growing conviction among people from all walks of life that time is moving faster than it did several decades ago — or even prior to the Covid pandemic. While this belief crept into the zeitgeist like a sly, slinking fog, the refrains are now so pervasive that they’ve started to supplant idle chatter on the weather. Our focus has shifted from rejoicing in cloudless days or grousing over gloomy skies to fixating on the dizzying speed at which our lives are hurtling by.

[...] But while we’ve long established that humans perceive time in an elastic, subjective way, that knowledge could not have prepared us for the Covid pandemic. [...] This points to a crucial aspect of time perception, one that continues to captivate me: We gauge the speed of time based on one set of factors in the moment — how engaged or stimulated we are — while using a distinct set of criteria to evaluate it retrospectively (the degree to which we formed memories)... (MORE - details)

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The messy business of making science happen (review)
https://undark.org/2026/09/04/book-review-lost-in-curiosity/

INTRO: Stereotypes die hard. If we’re asked to picture a scientist at work, it’s tempting to reach for an old stand-by: the astronomer at the eyepiece of an enormous telescope, or the chemist surrounded by test tubes. Even more entrenched, perhaps, is the notion that science advances by a chain of “aha” moments, sparking one earth-shattering breakthrough after another: Think of Einstein figuring out that E=mc2, perhaps, or Marie and Pierre Curie discovering radium.

In “Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes From Scientists’ Adventures Into the Unknown,” science writer Roberta Kwok sets out to smash those stereotypes, largely by taking us inside the everyday world of science and scientists, in all its painstaking monotony. Yes, breakthroughs may happen — but they are not, by any stretch, the norm. “‘Eureka!’ means ‘I have found it!’” Kwok writes early in the book, “but a more fitting motto for science might be ‘I can’t find it,’ ‘Where is it?’ or, most often, ‘What the hell is going on?” (MORE - details)
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[C C]

The dark side of mindfulness
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2...opy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

EXCERPTS: What else, she wondered, did meditation teachers know that they weren’t telling people? Gradually, starting with that sleep study, the tiers of thought propping up Britton’s worldview-that Buddhism is a cure-all, and that meditation was always beneficial, and could never cause harm-would collapse.

Over time, she would find that meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse, addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis. Losing the belief system that had been foundational to her life would lead her to produce a trailblazing body of research about the adverse effects of meditation, and then to found a clinical practice geared toward helping the people-a lot of them, as it turns out-who believe that meditation has harmed them.

[...] No one seems to know why, exactly, psychedelics and meditation can both occasionally prompt psychosis, but it might have to do with the fact that both can have the effect of “rewiring your brain,” which can be a positive thing but can also mean your brain just doesn’t work the way it used to. It might become more easily influenced, for example, or impart grave significance on unimportant events.

[...] Britton began to perceive that the research on mindfulness contained a giant lacuna: its potential risks. Meditation researchers, she felt, tended not to find adverse effects among their study participants because they didn’t ask their participants about them. What’s more, many meditation studies are funded by pro-meditation organizations...

[...] early Buddhist texts cautioned that “meditation sickness” plagued even the devout contemplatives of earlier eras: In one eighth-century Chinese writing, the Buddha warns of 50 “demonic states” in which meditators could become trapped, including hallucinations, sorrow, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and possession by ghosts. (MORE - details)

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We are living in the fantasy world of 13-year-old boys
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2...tm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_cam

EXCERPTS: “In Silicon Valley, science fiction is neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment,” Lepore writes. “Nor is it read as a literary text or a set of cautionary tales; instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions.” [...] Lepore wants to understand some strange turns in our world, such as our embrace of a technology that might just lead to our elimination, and the blitheness with which powerful entrepreneurs like Altman imagine much of our planet’s surface covered in data centers. In seeking the source of all these dark fantasies, she reveals something else: the power and stubborn persistence of the adolescent mind.

[...] In Silicon Valley, so much fantasizing that was meant to provoke horror now seems to be regarded as a wellspring of good ideas. In a 1955 story called “Franchise,” Asimov imagines a future (2008, actually) in which a computer called the Multivac elects the U.S. president, doing away with democracy as we know it. Altman, for one, thinks an AI president makes a lot of sense. “It can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level,” he told Joe Rogan in March, and “optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S.-that’s awesome.” (MORE - details)
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[TheVat]

Over time, she would find that meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse, addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis. Losing the belief system that had been foundational to her life would lead her to produce a trailblazing body of research about the adverse effects of meditation, and then to found a clinical practice geared toward helping the people-a lot

Read that a few days ago. Not news to many Buddhists, as the writer notes. Pretty much like anything with therapeutic value. If there are underlying vulnerabilities, then special guidance is needed. Much as someone with a hernia walking into a weight room would need special supervision so as not to tear themselves up.

Though I meditate usually no more than half an hour, I've occasionally had some weird and disturbing moments - a brief moment of amnesia, or not understanding what colors or perspective are, or of jumping through time. I've learned to enjoy them, sort of a funpark ride through odd corners of the mind.