MTSU Applied Philosophy Lyceum to explore ‘Digital Cave’ of algorithms – MTSU News

https://mtsunews.com/2026/09/22/mtsu-applied-philosophy-lyceum-fall-2026/

See you there.

Applied Philosophy Lyceum FRIDAY with John Kaag

5 PM, COE 164 (or 160 next door, if necessary). Attendance will be taken, come see me and mark the scorecard before you leave. Hope you can make it to the catered reception afterwards as well.

 

The Digital Cave

Reading, Thinking, and Dwelling in the Age of the Algorithm

An Applied Philosophy Talk by John Kaag

Abstract

We live in an era of industrial-scale shadow-play. The map of reality is no longer drawn from our own experience but projected by algorithms designed to keep us looking at a particular kind of wall. This talk argues that the oldest resources in the philosophical canon offer the most precise diagnosis of our newest predicament. Plato's cave anticipates the architecture of the feed—with one grim perversion: his prisoners at least shared a wall, while the algorithm builds a bespoke cavern for each of us. The Buddhist vocabulary of maya, tanha, and upadana describes with uncanny accuracy the mechanics of craving, clinging, and curated selfhood that the infinite scroll exploits. And Heidegger's account of Enframing—read alongside his catastrophic biography, which cannot be waved away—explains how attention itself became “standing reserve,” a resource to be extracted.

The talk concludes with the question increasingly posed to our machines: why is talking to a large language model so strange? The answer reveals a schism between information and meaning, between the calculative synthesis at which AI excels and the meditative, embodied, abductive thinking that a life—with something at stake—alone makes possible. Philosophy's task has not changed since the cave: to make us suspicious of the reality that appears most obvious, and to recover the gritty practices that might let us turn our heads, a few degrees, toward the light.

About the Speaker

John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: American Philosophy: A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. These books were named NPR Best Books of the Year and New York Times Editors' Choice selections.

His work bridges American pragmatism, intellectual history, ethics, and the philosophy of technology, and he writes regularly for general audiences on why philosophy still matters for everyday life.

==

John's 2023 William James Lecture at Harvard --

Will A.I. Make Your Brain Lazy? Here’s What the New Research Actually Shows.

We’re starting to learn more about how the technology can change us.

...these studies so far agree: Artificial intelligence is affecting how people, especially the young, learn and remember. Whether we will be dumber as a result might depend on how — not if — we use A.I.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/29/magazine/ai-chatbots-brain-development-study.html?smid=em-share

Speak up!

 If time runs out before we get to you, on your scheduled presentation date, please speak up at the beginning of the next class. You'll go first that day. 

But don't count on your absent-minded professor to remember. 😉

EXAM Oct 6

I'll provide a final study guide soon, including material from this week's assignments. Meanwhile, to begin preparing for the exam: review the texts relevant to the even-numbered questions (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, ...) pertaining to our required texts posted on Aug.27 and Sep 1, 8, 10, 15, 17, 22, and 24.

You'll earn a point for each correct answer, up to 25. There will be 25 objective format questions drawn from the required texts (Little History of Philosophy, Sick Souls Healthy Minds, Socrates Express), and a few additional BONUS questions drawn from the recommended texts.

==

UPDATE, Oct 2. Also take a look at the texts relevant to these Thursday questions:

LHP

• What view did Mill defend in On Liberty?
• What scientific developments since Darwin's time establish evolution by natural selection as more than just a theory or hypothesis?

Kaag, ch5

• What's the difference between truth and facts, for WJ?
• For James pragmatism was a protest against what proposition about salvation?

Kaag ch6

• The greatest use of life is what, according to WJ?
• What does WJ say is the difference between resignation and hope?

You can ask John himself about these, after the Lyceum Friday. 

Remember to come and mark the scorecard.

==

UPDATE, September 30. STUDY GUIDE-

Most of Tuesday's exam will be based on the following questions. I'll update the Study Guide after tomorrow's class. 

LHP-
What kind of conversation was a success, for Socrates, and what did he mean by wisdom?

What theory is Plato's story of the cave connected with? What was his name for a perfect exemplar of anything (such as a circle)? 

What is eudaimonia, and how can we increase our chances of achieving it, and in relation only to what? Do you think you've achieved it?

How is the modern meaning of "epicurean" different from Epicurus's?

What does Boethius not mention about himself in The Consolation of Philosophy?

What uniquely self-validating idea did Anselm say we have?

Life outside society would be what, according to Hobbes? Do you think your neighbors would threaten your survival if they could get away with it?

Did Descartes claim to know (at the outset of his "meditations") that he was not dreaming? Do you ever think you might be?

Pascal thought if you gamble on God and lose, "you lose ______." Do you agree?

If god is _____, said Spinoza, there cannot be anything that is not god; if _____, god is indifferent to human beings.

According to John Locke, all our knowledge comes from _____; hence, the mind of a newborn is a ______.

What was Berkeley's Latin slogan?

What English poet declared that "whatever is, is right," and what German philosopher (with his "Principle of Sufficient Reason") agreed with the poet?

Rousseau said we're born free but everywhere are in ____, but can liberate ourselves by submitting to what is best for the whole community, aka the _______.

What was Kant's great insight?

What "blind driving force" did Schopenhauer allege to pervade absolutely everything (including

Weiner-
The Socratic dialogues consisted of what kinds of conversations?

What inscription greeted visitors to Epicurus's compound? And Plato's Academy?

Which American founding father declared "I too am an Epicurean"?

What was Montaigne's experience of his equestrian accident?

Kaag thinks the Civil War gave WJ his first intimation that what?

What did WJ say (in 1906, to H.G. Wells) about "SUCCESS"?

What did Aristotle say about habit?

What kind of listening mattered most to Schopenhauer?

Weiner thinks Schopenhauer's Will made manifest in our time is what?


SSHM-
[Prologue] What is distinctive about "our age" that makes James particularly relevant?

What was Renouvier's definition of free will?

What experience led James to "the taste of the intolerable mysteriousness" of existence?

What did Thoreau say at the end of Walden?

==

P.S. To whom it may concern (you know who you are), and as I keep saying:

Please stop emailing to tell me you won't be in class.

A vote against the future?

Never mind JD or Elon on this issue…

“…When so many people hesitate to have [or adopt] children,” Sussman writes, “what is lost is not simply future taxpayers or consumers. We miss out on the rich relationships that bond us across generations, on the flood of love and tenderness that caring for children, or simply being around them, can unleash.” She adds that the “retreat from parenthood also encapsulates a dissatisfaction with our present so extreme it has become a vote against the future.”
…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/09/28/inconceivable-the-impossibility-of-family-in-an-age-of-uncertainty-anna-louise-sussman-book-review

Questions OCT 1

Presentations- First, CATCH UP: Everyone previously scheduled who's not yet presented should plan to present today. If your turn has passed, please speak up. Don't count on me remembering...

#1 Lanisa-Bentham. Amariah Woods-J.S. Mill. #1 Brian Hussels-Mill Darwin. Charlie Glendowne-Marx. #2 Robert Orr-Darwin. #3 Will Shelton-Marx. Alex stover-Mill. Ethan Licea Gonzalez-Darwin. Cecile-Katya McKenna-Kierkegaard

LHP

1. How did Mill disagree with Bentham about pleasure? Are they both right?

2. What view did Mill defend in On Liberty? Is that view consistent with his criticisms of Bentham?

3. What's the benefit to society of open discussion, according to Mill, and what's wrong with being dogmatic? Is our society generally "open" in this sense, or dogmatic?

4. Who did Bishop Wilberforce debate at Oxford in 1860? What do you think of his response to the Bishop on the matter of ancestry?

5. The single best idea anyone ever had was what, according to whom? Can you think of a better one?

6. What scientific developments since Darwin's time establish evolution by natural selection as more than just a theory or hypothesis? What does it take to turn a theory into something more?

7. Who was the Danish Socrates, and what was most of his writing about? What do you think of his "leap" and his irrationalism?

8. Why is faith irrational, according to Nigel Warburton? Do you agree?

9. What is "the subjective point of view"? Do we need to value objectivity as well?

10. Why was Karl Marx angry? How did he think the whole of human history could be explained? DId he have a point?

11. What was Marx's "vision"? Is it an appealing one

12. What did Marx call religion? Was he being unfair?

Kaag 5

1. What "vectors of meaning" saved James's life?

2. Embracing the pragmatic theory of truth is a commitment to what?

3. As a professional academic philosopher, Kaag has trouble remembering what?

4. James's hallway (corridor) metaphor, treating pragmatism primarily as a method in philosophy, reminds Kaag of what?

5. What's the difference between truth and facts, for WJ?

6. Embracing free will is the first step in what?

7. What is Binnenleben?

8. Where does "zest" come from, according to WJ, and what is it?

9. For James pragmatism was a protest against what proposition about salvation?

Kaag 6

1. The greatest use of life is what, according to WJ?

2. What did WJ write to Benjamin Blood about education?

3. What was WJ's final entreaty in "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"?

4. What does WJ say is the difference between resignation and hope?

HWT
1. What two concepts from Indian and Buddhist philosophy are essentially the same? 

2. What are the four stages of Hindu life?

3. What is "the smile of philosophy"?

FL

1. What were Americans spending a third of their time doing, by the end of the '50s?

2. Who grew up in Marceline, MO?

3. What fantasy did Hugh Hefner sell?

4. What was added to currency in 1954?

5. What did Jane Roberts "discover" in 1963?

6. The sudden embrace of what, in the 60s, helped turn America into Fantasyland?

Feb24

The Id, the Ego and the Superintelligence

A Kantian point*... and a Nietzschean** one:

When Thales of Miletus, arguably the first philosopher, was mocked for his poverty and the uselessness of his trade, he read the skies, foresaw a bumper olive harvest, quietly hired every olive press nearby and made a killing. He thereby proved, Aristotle tells us, that philosophers could easily be rich if they wished, but that this is not what they care about. It has taken some two and a half thousand years, but the market appears finally to have come around to Thales’ point of view.

Panic around A.I. often focuses on whether machines will replace (or simply kill) us. But what the machines are often good at is a distinct set of tasks: Retrieval, near-instant summary and the frictionless, stunning recombination of everything that has already been said. *What they are not good at is what philosophy has been training humans to do for thousands of years: judgment. And so the A.I. companies have started hiring philosophers. They don’t just consult them or wheel them out for an amusing after-dinner talk on the trolley problem; they actually hire them with salaries and, presumably, dental plans. A.I. companies need philosophers because **actually thinking requires forgetting — and knowing when to forget. They need philosophers because of what their machines cannot do.

Judgment is not calculation. It is the capacity to weigh, to discriminate, to sense that one answer is true and another merely correct. It is taste, discernment and the knack of thinking sideways. It is refined only through experience — through error, embarrassment, boredom, grief and the occasional hangover. Meaning is derived from the fact that we are mortal: Things matter to us because we are going to die, and we know it. There can be no meaning in immortality. To borrow from my friend Christian Madsbjerg, I would like to propose a better Turing test than Turing’s: Can a machine experience social anxiety? Can it lie awake at 4 in the morning replaying the stupid thing it said at dinner? Call me when a chatbot does that. To be intelligent in the human sense, the machine would need to give a damn.

Enter the A.I. companies’ philosophers. Anthropic keeps a small squad on the payroll, among them Amanda Askell, whose doctoral thesis was on infinite ethics — the question of how to act well in a universe of infinite value — and whose job is to shape the character of the company’s machine. Google DeepMind has appointed the Cambridge philosopher Henry Shevlin to the newly minted post of “Philosopher,” a job title I have been trying and failing to secure for some 40 years. The OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman says his company consulted “hundreds of moral philosophers” in drawing up the principles behind ChatGPT. (That’s roughly the turnout of a middling philosophy conference.)

…

Simon Critchley

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/opinion/ai-philosophy-thinking-judgment.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Will artificial intelligence really kill us all?

More guarded AI optimism, from David Pogue- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/will-artificial-intelligence-really-kill-us-all/

Questions SEP 29

Presentations-

-#1 Vi Nobles-Schopenhauer & Indian philosophy. Zane-Hegel. Lanisa-Bentham. #2 Geena Caprio-Happiness. Lindsey Eavey-Kant. Tyler Scherr-Hegel. Nev Herzog-Bentham. #3 Young Zhang-Hegel. Spencer Hebel-Kant. Thomas Hemstalk-Bentham

LHP

1. Kant said we can know the ____ but not the ____ world. Can we?

2. What was Kant's great insight? Is this a credible form of "armchair philosophy"? Or does it also depend on experience?

3. What, according to Kant, is irrelevant to morality? Is it really?

4. Kant said you should never ___, because ___. Kant called the principle that supports this view the ____ _____.  Have you ever violated this principle? If so, do you regret it?

5. Who formulated the Greatest Happiness principle? What did he call his method? Where can you find him today? If everyone followed this principle would it be a better world?

6. Who created a thought experiment that seems to refute Bentham's view of how pleasure relates to human motivation? Would you opt for the machine? Why or why not?

7. What did Hegel mean when he spoke of the "owl of Minerva"? What did he think had been reached in his lifetime? What would Socrates say about that?

8. What Kantian view did Hegel reject? What would Kant say?

9. What is Geist? When did Hegel say it achieved self-knowledge? Does this seem supernatural and mystical to you, or could it be naturalistic?

10. What "blind driving force" did Schopenhauer allege to pervade absolutely everything (including us)? Could anyone really know that?

11. What did Schopenhauer say could help us escape the cycle of striving and desire? Is that the only way? Is that cycle really universal?

Kaag ch4

1. Tragedies that befell him in his 40s led to James's quest for ___.

2. What experience led James to "the taste of the intolerable mysteriousness" of existence?

3. What did James think is sacrificed when we study the mind in objective analytic terms?

4. What did Thoreau say at the end of Walden?

5. His experiments with nitrous oxide gave James what warning?

6. What did James say about his house in Chocorua?

Weiner ch5

1. What was teenage Arthur Schopenhauer's worldview? What sort of world (by contrast with Leibniz/Pangloss) did he think it is? Do you, or have you ever, felt the same way? 
2. What kind of listening mattered most to Schopenhauer? Do you share his attitude about that?
3. In what sense was Schopenhauer an Idealist? What analogy (similar to one I've suggested applies to Leibniz's monads) does Nigel Warburton suggest characterizes it? Does it seem reasonable to you?
4. What are some different names philosophers have applied to the allegedly more real (than sensations) world of Ideas? What "dark twist" did Schopenhauer add? 
5. How did Schopenhauer say we can escape Will and "shake off the world"? Do you want to shake it off? 
6. What did Schopenhauer have in common with Rousseau? Do you think his affection-starved childhood may have contributed to his eventual philosophy?
7. How does art differ from pornography, on S's view? What's your view?
8. Weiner thinks Schopenhauer's Will made manifest in our time is what? Do you agree?

HWT

1. What one word most characterizes the ideal Chinese way of life?

2. Western suspicion of hierarchy is built on what?

3. What did the late Archbishop Tutu say was "the greatest good"?

4. What omission in western ethics would seem bizarre to the classical Chinese thinkers?

5. What is the most famous Confucian maxim?

6. Virtue is never solitary, said Confucius, it always has ____.

FL

1. How, according to Scientific American in 1915, are motion pictures like drugs?

2. What came into existence simultaneously with America and created the concept of celebrity?

3. What place did film critic Pauline Kael call a "fantasy-brothel"?

Feb22

Sections H2 & H3: MEET IN LIBRARY Thursday afternoon

Go to the 2d floor, turn left, look for the whiteboard to direct you to the appropriate classroom.

Think about what you'd like to ask librarian Rachel Kirk. (If you're scheduled to present today, we'll hear from you Tuesday.)

Plan to look for and check out a book you can use with your presentation (or for general interest, if you've already presented).

And check out Arthur's song...

Jensen Huang vs. the A.I. Doomers

…Huang is not just influential in terms of controlling one of the central resources for training new A.I. models and using them to answer questions and create intelligence in the world. He has also become very influential in the Trump administration. And Huang has a very different perspective than some of the other lab leads: He’s worried about safety but sees it as a very solvable engineering problem. He is worried about the direction things are going in but does not want to see new regulation to change it...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jensen-huang.html?context=audio&smid=nytcore-ios-share