Rene

"Reading good books is like having conversations with the finest minds of the past."
- René Descartes (born #onthisday) https://t.co/OHVvJLXM2g
(https://twitter.com/EthicsInBricks/status/1377168792858546178?s=02)

Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter

...Creating a smarter A.I. requires more than the ability to write good code; it would require a major breakthrough in A.I. research, and that’s not something an average computer programmer is guaranteed to achieve, no matter how much time you give them...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-computers-wont-make-themselves-smarter?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Final report blogposts

When you know your final report blogpost topic please indicate it here. I'll ask everyone to give us a brief sneak-preview during our last class meetings, in roughly the same order as midterm presentations. The final draft is due by May 4, but post earlier if you'd like to solicit constructive feedback from the class in time to make final revisions.

You can continue to research and develop your midterm report topic, if you wish, or select another topic entirely. If the latter, try to relate it to something in Why Grow Up or Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. 

If you wish, I'll assign your topic or offer suggestions. I've posted a suggestion in the sidebar. 

I'm not especially concerned with total wordcount, but I would like your final report to exploit the blogpost format by including more than words: embedded links and videos, relevant visual content, etc. Let me know if you need any instruction on any of that. It's really not difficult, as evidenced by the fact that I can do it. 😉

Caruso, Dennett, Shermer on free will

Video: Free Will Debate: Daniel Dennett vs. Gregg Caruso | My two hour conversation with @danieldennett and @michaelshermer | https://t.co/SumqBiVWDU
(https://twitter.com/GreggDCaruso/status/1376881017424863235?s=02)

Questions April 1

 FL 31-32

• Why do so many Americans believe Jesus is coming back before 2050? Do they all really believe it, or do many say it in order to conform to what they perceive as popular opinion? Do they think about it? 274
• What do you think of "blame-the-victims" storytelling? 277
• Why do so many Americans believe in "The Devil"? (And again, do they really believe it, etc.? -see the first question above) 281
• Why have Americans, compared to Europeans in particular, "rushed headlong back toward magic and miracles"? 288
• Why do so relatively few people in the U.K. and other European countries say they believe what Americans say they do? 287-88
• Do you buy the marketplace explanation of American religiosity? 290

WGU -122

• Is Hannah Arendt's emphasis on natality as important as mortality, in defining the human condition? Would it still be, if we ever achieved natural immortality? 80-81
• Is the US still a proud nation of immigrants, or more like those European nations "struggling with what they regard as the problem of immigration? 81
• Are there ways other than travel to "experience the world as babies do" etc.? 83
• Did your upbringing make it easier or harder for you to trust? 86
• "Once you start asking why, there's no natural place to stop." 88 So why do so many people stop, or else never start?
• How long would we have to live, to see this as Leibniz's "best possible world" 89
• Was Hume right about reason being slave to the passions? 93
• Was Thrasymachus right about justice? 94
• Do you agree with the cliche about socialism? 100
• Is Hume's strategy for dispelling melancholy good? 104
• Has the gap between ought and is narrowed in the world, historically?107
• Was Nietzsche right about stoicism? 113
• Is it childish to expect the world to make sense? 114
• How can philosophy help us grow up? 119
• Do we have a right to happiness? 122

Growing up

  LISTEN (recorded Oct.'20)

Today (again) in CoPhi we close Warburton's Little History with Rawls's Veil, Searle's Chinese Room, Turing's Test (and Depp's Transcendence), and Singer's Effective Altruism, before opening Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. And we conclude most of our scheduled midterm reports.

She says you're fooling yourself if you think youth is the happiest time of life. Ask Grandfather Philosophy. Enlightened maturity is best, though her hero Kant was more about deserving than actually achieving happiness. We should go for both. You should not have to "renounce your hopes and dreams" to get what you want and need. That's Stones (not Stone) philosophy.

In "What is Enlightenment?" (1784) Kant answered his own question promptly and succinctly, for once. "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!"

In a distracted age like ours, and a country like ours (like Brian's) where we're so lockstep-sure that we're all individuals, it takes a resolute and committed will to think for yourself. Even those who think they're thinking may just be re-arranging their prejudices, William James probably wasn't the first to say. Most people would die sooner than think, Bertrand Russell repeated. Real originality is hard. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, Honest Abe.

But I can vouch for the accuracy of this statement from Susan Neiman: "All the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement... Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule." Surprising statement from a Kantian, though even he was probably not much moved by the Categorical Imperative. Point is, there's a big gap between the way things are (according to experience) and the way reason tells us they should be. "Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two, without giving up on either one."

If travel is essential for growing up, the pandemic's really set us back. Former Harvard President and Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers's disdain for language-learning would too. As we've noted in discussing Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks, and as Wittgenstein's "language games" imply, learning a language is inseparable from thinking new thoughts and expanding your mental world.

Is 18 to 28 the best time of life? Neiman thinks it's the hardest, made harder by the conceit that you should be loving it then and missing it the rest of your life. Better to look forward with the poet to a long and gratifying maturation. "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made."

Today in Fantasyland we notice the precedent in POTUS 40 for 45's dangerous conflation of myth and reality, and wonder if there's any way to control the spread of "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" on the Internet." Only one surefire way, apparently: log off.

And what do we think of the 80% of Americans who "say they never doubt the existence of God"? I think they need to think about it.

Originally published 10.27.20

Turing & Ai

Alan Turing, the father of computer science wondered if machines could think or talk like humans. Below I've posted a short video explaining his developments with artificial intelligence. 

John Searle had a similar question regarding ai, and wanted to know if computers could truly think and understand the way humans do. His hypothetical experiment the "Chinese room" went on to question the differences in how machines and humans think and operate. 

The philosophy surrounding ai is interesting because it leads us to question what consciousness really is in essence. Does something have to have a soul or the ability to think to be considered alive? 

--Questions--

-- Do you agree with John Searle that machines don't truly have the ability to think, but simply simulate the understanding of things?

-- Do you think artificial intelligence will one day become more intelligent than humans? Do you think this would be dangerous or beneficial? Explain why or why not. 

--  What is your first idea when you think of ai? How has media sensationalized our idea of artificial         intelligence?

-- How would you describe consciousness? Is it         merely the ability to think? Or is it something more            spiritual?

PowerPoint link: https://1drv.ms/p/s!AvARK9_LdpdnhSthcz2pbVouEK-y?e=59IQJW

Sources: 

-- Alan Turing. 26 Mar. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan Turing. 

-- Turing, A. M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, vol. 59, no. 236, 1950, pp. 433–460.     JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2251299. Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

-- Philosophy of AI, www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~eroberts/cs91/projects/ethics-of-ai/sec4.html. 

-- Dowe, & David.. "The Turing Test (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". N.p. n.d. Web. 29 March     2021. < https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/ >

Section 7, Haley Flanagan

Gnosticism

"Gnosticism grew up within Judaism, the mystery religion Orphism, and Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, and it had a particularly rich career in Christianity. Gnostics in any of these groups tended to see themselves as the elite of that group. In fact, they were often the community leaders. But like many mystics before and after them, they believed that not everyone could handle the secret truth of the world: in this case, that the creator God was not good. With Gnosticism, the whole question of doubt gets spun on its head. The Gnostic idea was that human beings have within them the spark of something absolutely transcendent, something completely alien to this world. This spark, our consciousness, is a spark off the fire of an unimaginable God. Our humanity is the same stuff as this entirely distant, otherworldly God. This God did not make the world. Instead, the world was made by a creator God, a much less extraordinary figure. In many interpretations, the creator God was downright evil. Human beings have been worshiping this creator God by mistake, explained the Gnostics, but they should not do so. Gnostics called this creator God “Saklas,” the Blind One; or “Samael,” God of the Blind; or “the Demiurge,” the Lesser Power. As Gnostics saw it, human beings are of more value than the creator God since we contain a spark of what is true, good, and transcendent. Whereas religions generally looked at the cosmos and reported that such a wonderful world must have been made by an amazing intelligence, the Greek and Roman philosophers had wondered if there could be a God since the world was such a cruel series of ruptures and distress. The Gnostics took this idea in another direction: they saw the world as a limiting, nasty, frustrating cage and assumed a cruel God had made it. They cursed this God and felt superior to him. His limitations or villainy explained evil in the world, and his lack of the transcendent spark made a new kind of sense of our alienation from the world. Humanity has humanness—meaning, compassion, and love—and the universe does not, but just outside the universe, somehow, lives the true God and this true God has humanness, too. In fact, that is where we got ours. Gnostics were believers. They belong to the history of doubt because over the centuries, within the history of Judaism and Christianity, Gnostics doubted all of the personal characteristics of that God. Doubting God’s benevolence is as fundamental a matter as doubting God as thinking, creating, all-powerful, or eternal. For the Gnostics, all the crowing about the magnificent order of the cosmos was suddenly cast as wrongheaded: order and natural law were not to be celebrated, they were to be derided. Why marvel at the economy or grace of a law that effectively keeps you trapped on the surface of the planet, destined to die and rot in the ground or go up in smoke? Why marvel that God made beaches, wheat, and honeycombs if, on the important questions, any fairly decent human being would have done a better job; would, for instance, neither invent torture nor allow it to be invented? That would go for any kind of torture, and meanwhile, look how many kinds there are. They were very clear on the point that human beings owe no allegiance to the creator God. Our sense of ethics, pity, and care makes us far superior to the universe in which we are trapped. It is a celebration of the human. Our only mission is to come to know who we are, to realize that we belong elsewhere, and to try to find our way back to our home outside this world. We find our way back by cultivating our alienation here below. People were to wean themselves from life—not to reconcile themselves to it, but rather actively to seek alienation from it. Most religions suggest that there is something to be learned from the observation that, for the great material universe, all our striving, our vanity, our longing, is meaningless. The Gnostic paradigm says No, there is no lesson there for us. Whatever we have inside us, whatever is most like us and least like the rest of the known universe, that is the actual reality, and all we have of truth. Gnosticism was in the mainstream of early Christianity: about 140 CE, one of the most prominent and influential early Gnostic teachers, Valentinus, seems to have been under consideration for election as the Bishop of Rome. By the end of his life some twenty years later, he had been forced from the public eye and branded a heretic. There was growing hostility to Gnosticism’s secret knowledge and its continuous creation of new scripture. By 180 CE, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, was attacking Gnosticism as heresy. By the end of the fourth century Gnosticism was eradicated, its remaining teachers were murdered or driven into exile, and its sacred books were destroyed. Until recent finds, all we knew of it was the polemical denunciations and fragments preserved in the Christian documents on heresies. But thrilling new finds have given us the other side of the story. The newest finds include the Nag Hammadi collection, discovered in 1945 by an Arab peasant digging in his field. In the large earthenware jar he uncovered were a library of texts that Gnostic monks had buried sometime around the year 390 to save them from the hands of the orthodox Church. Elaine Pagels, one of Gnosticism’s most eminent scholars, has written that “to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God: this is the secret of gnosis.… Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.”24 There is something very individualist in a doctrine that allows each person to access truth. It was an odd choice, dogma over mysticism, because the mystic vision is less susceptible to doubt. It makes few universal claims about details—meaning there is little to be contradicted; it encourages self-altering practices that try to bring the adherent to God through experience, not reason; and last, it never claims that philosophy or texts are proof of anything, so that whole approach to questioning religion is invalidated. So the mystic position would have been easy to defend but, as I noted, it afforded each believer a lot of interpretive power. Gnosticism recreated the problem of doubt by imagining a way to find the world woefully beneath humane standards, reject the Creator God in those terms, and yet preserve belief in God. It cursed the Judeo-Christian God for death and disease, heartache and loss, drought, fire, flood, and famine, all that has gone wrong with history all these many years. Furthermore, it left room for men and women to do their own thinking, to work out their own relationship to their inner self and the strangely hostile world in which it finds itself. Along with Epicureanism and Stoicism, Manichaeism and the larger world of Gnosticism were the major competitors of mainstream Christianity. Then there were the heresies. These took over huge swaths of Christendom, sometimes for many centuries, because the people who followed them believed that the orthodox Church was wrong and that following it would lead to damnation..."

Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson by Jennifer Hecht: https://a.co/6UOsJYp

Gnostic Christianity By Kendra Givens

Gnostic Christianity 

    In the first century AD, there was no overarching, orthodox Church to look to for guidance and unity. Instead, Christianity was a diverse mixture of groups; all with their own interpretations, but with one common goal: extricate itself from the centuries-old Judaism. Therefore, as unconventional Gnosticism might seem today, it did not arise in a vacuum. At its beginning, it was simply one more offshoot with its own explanation and their explanation was that the Old Testament had been interpreted incorrectly. 

The core difference between Gnosticism and Christianity is that Gnostics turn the Old Testament upside down by saying the world was not actually created by God, but by a demon. With all the suffering and pain, it seemed paradoxical that an all-knowing, all-loving God could have created such an atrocity. Gnostic’s beliefs are best summed up by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”. 

Although it might seem unusual and eccentric, it was very helpful in solving a problem that orthodox Christians have always struggled with-how a loving God can exist with so much needless suffering. It also helped Gnsoticis make sense of passages where the creator seemed completely and downright evil such as Genesis 6:5-22: “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become,...7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created...for I regret that I have made them.” There are also passages such as John 5:19 which only make sense under a gnostic interpretation: “We know that we are God’s children and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one.”

In Gnosticism, the creation myth is also completely flipped upside down. Gnostics believe the demon created Adam and Eve and imprisoned divine sparks from Heaven inside them. However, he couldn’t bear the thought that they were more perfect them him so he trapped them in the Garden of Eden. He issued the Ten Commandments and then proceeded to break every single one. The true God, seeing all the suffering, disguised himself as a snake to try and give Adam and Eve truth and knowledge.  In Christianity, this is where the original sin occurred and the reason there is so much evil in the world. Gnostics, however, believe it is in fact the original innocence and that needless suffering is the creator’s fault, not humanity’s.

Jesus plays the same role of savior in both Christianity and Gnosticism. However, in Christianity, he is sent to save humanity from itself. In the latter, he is sent to save humanity from the demon creator which again plays into the original sin vs original innocence theme. Gnostics placed considerable emphasis on Jesus’s words. Most of their scripture is simply him speaking. However, where Christians believe that his words were the ends themselves, Gnostics believe they were the means to an end and that his purpose was to help them remember their divine nature and to seek knowledge (basically to become Christ themselves). As Phillip puts it in the gnostic scripture: Gospel of Phillip, “[Many people] go down into the water [of baptism] and come up without having received anything.”[9]. 

Questions

• What do you think about gnostic beliefs? 

• Do they make more sense than Christian ones?

• If not, how would you explain evil without using the “part of God’s plan excuse”?

• How do you make sense of a loving God wiping out his creation with a flood, killing firstborns, making parents sacrifice their children to prove their faith?

• Does this make you think deeper about the way you interpret the bible? 

• Do you believe humanity is inherently evil or innocent? 

https://iep.utm.edu/gnostic/

gnosticismexplained.org/god-the-father-in-gnosticism/

Before and after the deluge

My dawn post this morning-

An eventful weekend: got my second COVID shot yesterday morning, spent the afternoon with wife and Younger Daughter and Brother-in-law celebrating his birthday and his recovery from COVID and heart surgery; and on Friday, before Saturday's day-long deluge and resultant flooding (pics), had a charmed near-perfect early Spring day featuring (1) helpful physical therapy (decompression and laser) for my increasingly-debilitating ambulatory impairment, (2) a delightful bikeride in Warner Parks, and (3) a practically unimpaired and painless hike, first such in months, through the Burch Reserve... (continues)

Hannah Arendt on Jean-Paul Sartre

She was not a fan. (Not crazy about Rousseau either...)

"I just finished reading Sartre's Les Mots—and was so disgusted that I was almost tempted to review this piece of highly complicated lying."

Hannah Arendt on Jean-Paul Sartre: https://t.co/xQLgLHPnlI
(https://twitter.com/Samantharhill/status/1375784742130434052?s=02)

Deleuze and Guattari?

Gonna tell my kids this was Deleuze and Guattari. https://t.co/CKaSboZqeu
(https://twitter.com/vernon_w_cisney/status/1375655886178418691?s=02)

Podcasts

 In Our Time (BBC)

Utilitarianism. A moral theory that emphasises ends over means, Utilitarianism holds that a good act is one that increases pleasure in the world and decreases pain. The tradition flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and has antecedents in ancient philosophy. According to Bentham, happiness is the means for assessing the utility of an act, declaring "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Mill and others went on to refine and challenge Bentham's views and to defend them from critics such as Thomas Carlyle, who termed Utilitarianism a "doctrine worthy only of swine."

Artificial Intelligence
In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss artificial intelligence. Can we create a machine that creates? Some argue so. And is consciousness, as we are, with headaches and tiffs and moods and small pleasures and sore feet - often all at the same time - capable of taking place in a machine? Artificial intelligence machines have been growing much more intelligent since Alan Turing’s pioneering days at Bletchley in World War Two. Its claims are now very grand indeed. It is 31 years since Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke gave us HAL - the archetypal thinking computer of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But are we any nearer to achieving the thinking, feeling computer? Or is it just a dream - and should it remain as one?With Igor Aleksander, Professor, Imperial College London and inventor of Magnus - a neural computer which he says is an artificially conscious machine; John Searle, Professor of Philosophy, University of California and one of only two people in the world to invent an argument, the Chinese Room Argument, which destroys the plausibility of the idea of conscious machines.

The Social Contract
In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Social Contract and ask a foundational question of political philosophy – by what authority does a government govern? “Man was born free and he is everywhere in chains”. So begins Jean Jacques Rousseau’s great work on the Social Contract. Rousseau was trying to understand why a man would give up his natural freedoms and bind himself to the rule of a prince or a government. But the idea of the social contract - that political authority is held through a contract with those to be ruled - began before Rousseau with the work of John Locke, Hugo Grotius and even Plato. We explore how an idea that burgeoned among the 17th century upheavals of the English civil war and then withered in the face of modern capitalist society still influences our attitude to government today. With Melissa Lane, Senior University Lecturer in History at Cambridge University; Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Karen O’Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick.

Rousseau on Education
In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) on the education of children, as set out in his novel or treatise Emile, published in 1762. He held that children are born with natural goodness, which he sought to protect as they developed, allowing each to form their own conclusions from experience, avoiding the domineering influence of others. In particular, he was keen to stop infants forming the view that human relations were based on domination and subordination. Rousseau viewed Emile as his most imporant work, and it became very influential. It was also banned and burned, and Rousseau was attacked for not following these principles with his own children, who he abandoned, and for proposing a subordinate role for women in this scheme.

Philosopher Angie Hobbs on the Veil of Ignorance
A History of Ideas
Angie Hobbs with Leif Wenar and David Runciman debate and explore one of the most searching ideas of twentieth century legal thought: John Rawls' assertion of the value of a veil of ignorance.

John Rawls was a prolific American philosopher and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice defines the principles of Justice as those that "everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position". He proposed that in order to build a truly 'just' system of law, the law-makers should be kept unaware of their eventual position within that system - they should determine what is best for society from a position outside of society. This famous thought experiment is known as the 'veil of ignorance'.

Rawls served as a soldier in the Second World War and was promoted to Sergeant. After he refused to discipline a fellow soldier, who he thought had done nothing wrong, he was demoted back to Private.

==
Related discussions: 

• Peter Singer on why "it's our duty to give"... "the lives you can save, and why living ethically is so incredibly difficult"... video (bbc)
• Age of Enlightenment (multiple programs)
• Introduction to Philosophy syllabus in podcast episodes (Anjum)

Hume in Jeopardy

The first contestant said "What is the trolley problem and I started laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. #Jeopardy https://t.co/HgYbTLesCH
(https://twitter.com/drnelk/status/1375257682672750605?s=02)

Questions March 30

Rawls, Turing & Searle, Singer-LH 38-40, FL 29-30, Why Grow Up (WGU) -p.35

• Does Rawls's "Veil of Ignorance" thought experiment help to clarify your ideas about justice and fairness? 230
• Can you suggest an example of an inequity in our society that helps the "worst off"? 231
• Does John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment persuade you that computers can't really think like humans? 234 Does the Turing Test show that they can?
• Do you agree that computers can be programmed with syntax but not semantics? 236
• Do you think it will ever be possible to transfer minds into computers? Would you want your mind "uploaded"? What could go wrong? 237

 

• Should we all "give up one or two luxuries" to help less fortunate people?240
• Is "species-ism" still too widely accepted? Is it species-ist to eat meat?242-3
• Do you agree that Peter Singer represents the best tradition in philosophy? 244-5 Is he a modern Socrates? 

FL 

• Is it dangerous when a President confuses legend and myth, and movies, with reality? 254-5
• Is there any way to control the spread of "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" on the Internet" 260

WGU

• Do you think of growing up as "a matter of renouncing your hopes and dreams"? 1
• Do you like the "well-meaning Uncle's" advice? Or the Rolling Stones'? 4
• Is Kant right, in "What is Enlightenment?," about why people "choose immaturity"? 5
• If distractions, especially "since the invention of cyberspace," are "literally limitless," is Enlightenment in Kant's sense a realistic goal for most people? 9
• Do you agree that it takes courage to think for yourself? 11
• Is travel necessary for growing up? 13-16
• Is Larry Summers wrong about language-learning? 16
• Do you believe the best time of life is between the ages of 18 and 28? 20
• How innocent should childhood be? What do you think of the way French children were raised in the 17th century? 24
• Do you wish you'd had a Samoan childhood? Do you think tests in school prepare you for life? 27
• Is it bad to be "WEIRD" (In the sense of the acronym)? 32
• • Should philosophers pay more attention to child-rearing and parenting? 36
  • What do you think Cicero meant by saying that philosophy is learning to die?
  • Do you feel fully empowered to "choose your life's journey"? If not, what obstacles prevent that? 37
  • In what ways do you think your parents' occupations influence the number of choices you'll be able to make in your life?
  • If you've read 1984 and Brave New World, which do you find the more "seductive dystopia"? 39
  • Are we confused about toys and dreams? 40
  • Do others make the most important decisions for you? 41
  • Do you "make a regular appointment with your body"? 42
  • Do you trust anyone over 30? 45
  • Is it "reasonable to expect justice and joy"? 49
  • Are you "committed to Enlightenment"? 51
  • Do the passions for glory and luxury make us wicked and miserable? 53
  • What does it mean to say there are no atheists in foxholes? Is it true? 54
  • Was Rousseau right about inequality and private property? 55
  • Should philosophy be taught to children, so as to become thinking adults? 57
  • Should children "yield to the commands of other people"? 61
  • Should parents "let the child wail"?
  • Are Rousseau and Kant right about the true definition of freedom? 62
  • Is Rousseau right about desire? 65
  • Did Rousseau's abandonment of his children discredit his thoughts on child-rearing? 69 Or show him to be a hypocrite for saying no task in the world is more important than raising a child properly? 72
  
  

 

American moral philosopher and author, Susan Neiman, talks us about why we have been tricked to think we are happiest when we are young and why it is we need to grow up. Watch the full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeNQV... Institute of Art & Ideas

====

5 books on ethics for AI... What will become of us?

==

Arts & Letters Daily search results for “john rawls” (3)

2017-10-25 | John Rawls called it "the best of all games"; Mark Kingwell calls it "the most philosophical of games." What is it about baseball and philosophy? more »

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2018-09-04 | What's the meaning of freedom? Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick disagreed on much. But they all emphasized universal values over group identity more »

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2018-08-24 | The famously liberal philosopher John Rawls has been recast as a sharp critic of capitalism. If Rawls really was a socialist, why was he so reticent about it? more »

Arts & Letters Daily search results for “ alan turing” (2)

2012-12-22 | Alan Turing was a courageous, patriotic, but sad, unconventional man. He was also gay. Can homosexuality help explain his genius? more »

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2014-01-01 | Alan Turing predicted that computers would be able to think by 2000. No dice. Not even close. We still don't understand what thinking is more »

Arts & Letters Daily search results for “john searle” (2)

2015-04-18 | John Searle has a bone to pick with Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and Kant. He blames them for the basic mistake of modern epistemology more »

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2015-06-23 | Everything you know about perception is wrong – and it’s the fault of Western philosophers, starting with Descartes. Or so John Searle would have you think more »

“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” 

“I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future:

Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think."

LA Theater Worksw dramatization, "Breaking the Code" - recording
==
Jaron Lanier on the future of virtual reality etc. - and he says AI is not a thing... On Point  11.29.17... Dawn of the New Everything
==
“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.” 

“If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?” 

“The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.” 

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” 

“To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.” 

Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. -” 

“Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

1.  Peter Singer ‏@PeterSinger 6m6 minutes ago

   Out for #GivingTuesday, Animal Charity Evaluators has a new list of recommended organizations working for animals: animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/introduci…

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2.  Peter Singer ‏@PeterSinger 7h7 hours ago

   Its #GivingTuesday and here's my #Unselfie. You CAN make a differencethelifeyoucansave.org

	Peter Singer (@PeterSinger)
11/19/17, 11:06 AM "Philosophy Changing Lives" - an interview with me on Why? Radio: goo.gl/ztR4m9

Arts & Letters Daily search results for “peter singer” (3)

2011-01-01 | For Peter Singer, the defining idea of the coming decade will be the Internet, which will democratize education, economics, and the media more »

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2010-01-01 | Abhorring animal cruelty does not entail the idea that all animals, humans included, sit at the same moral level. Peter Singer has an argument to answer more »

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2015-07-07 | Where morality meets rationalism. Is Peter Singer’s “effective altruism” the apotheosis of ethics, or an unempathetic, politically naive, elitist doctrine? more »