Philosophy Updates

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The Uses and Misuses of Spinoza

The Uses and Misuses of Spinoza

The beguiling Dutch philosopher’s life and work is prone to misunderstandings and misreadings. A recent biography goes so far as to recruit him into the culture war.

www.thenation.com

The beguiling Dutch philosopher’s life and work is prone to misunderstandings and misreadings. A recent biography goes so far as to recruit him into the culture war...

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What does music have to do with imagination?

What does music have to do with imagination? — The Junkyard

A post by Giulia Lorenzi What does music have to do with imagination? At a first glance, it may appear that music does not have much to do with imagination and imagining. After all, when we are presented with a musical piece, we encounter a complex perceptual entity constructed and structured in a

junkyardofthemind.com

In this short piece, I want to explore places in which imagination may play a role in enjoying, perceiving, and producing music. Far from aiming to be an exhaustive treatment of where and how imagination could be at play in the musical realm, this piece aims to reflect on where philosophical studies of imagination may be enlightening for philosophical research on music.

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The dark side of the energy transition

The dark side of the energy transition: How efficiency leads us astray | Franco Ruzzenenti

In the quest for a sustainable energy transition, the debate is split between two main camps: technical innovation and behavioural change. What the both miss, argues Franco Ruzzenenti, is that increased efficiency can paradoxically lead to higher energy consumption. In this piece, Ruzzenenti...

iai.tv

In the quest for a sustainable energy transition, the debate is split between two main camps: technical innovation and behavioural change. What the both miss, argues Franco Ruzzenenti, is that increased efficiency can paradoxically lead to higher energy consumption. In this piece, Ruzzenenti puts forward a manifesto for the energy transition, arguing that efficiency is not the saviour we once thought.

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The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think

The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think | NOEMA

The rhetoric over “superhuman” AI implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.

www.noemamag.com

I had thought it was a fairly obvious — even trivial — observation that human intelligence cannot be reduced to these tasks, which can be executed by tools that even Bengio admits are as mindless, as insensible to the world of living and feeling, as your toaster. But he seemed to be insisting that human intelligence could be reduced to these operations — that we ourselves are no more than task optimization machines. I realized then, with shock, that our disagreement was not about the capabilities of machine learning models at all. It was about the capabilities of human beings, and what descriptions of those capabilities we can and should license.

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Stop Trying to Understand Kafka

Stop Trying to Understand Kafka

His parables aren’t supposed to make sense.

www.theatlantic.com

Franz Kafka wasn’t a rabbi, exactly, but he is the high priest of 20th-century literature, and he also wrote in parables. In a brief one called “On Parables,” he asks, in effect, what they’re good for. Why do sages feel obliged to illustrate their principles with tales, requiring their listeners to, as he puts it, “go over” to another world? Kafka answers: The sages don’t mean that we should go to “some actual place,” but rather to “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least.” In short, even the sage can’t articulate the meaning of his own parables, and so they’re useless to us. “All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible.”

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PAPER: Studying and improving reasoning in humans and machines

Studying and improving reasoning in humans and machines - Communications Psychology

Some large language models show reasoning errors akin to humans in cognitive bias tasks. However, humans and models respond differently to prompting strategies, highlighting differences in cognitive processing.

www.nature.com

ABSTRACT: In the present study, we investigate and compare reasoning in large language models (LLMs) and humans, using a selection of cognitive psychology tools traditionally dedicated to the study of (bounded) rationality. We presented to human participants and an array of pretrained LLMs new variants of classical cognitive experiments, and cross-compared their performances. Our results showed that most of the included models presented reasoning errors akin to those frequently ascribed to error-prone, heuristic-based human reasoning. Notwithstanding this superficial similarity, an in-depth comparison between humans and LLMs indicated important differences with human-like reasoning, with models’ limitations disappearing almost entirely in more recent LLMs’ releases. Moreover, we show that while it is possible to devise strategies to induce better performance, humans and machines are not equally responsive to the same prompting schemes. We conclude by discussing the epistemological implications and challenges of comparing human and machine behavior for both artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology.

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Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival

Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival

The Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism is having a moment. Through wisdom, temperance, courage and justice you can create a virtuous, well-lived life. But have modern day stoics got it right?

www.wbur.org

INTRO: The Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism is having a moment. Through wisdom, temperance, courage and justice you can create a virtuous, well-lived life. But have modern-day stoics got it right? Today, On Point: Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival.

GUESTS:

Margaret Graver, professor in classics at Dartmouth College.

Nancy Sherman, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University.
Also Featured

Ryan Holiday, author, businessman and podcaster.

Ryan Mulkowsky, former pastor, current hospice chaplain and bereavement coordinator, mental health therapist.

John Knighton, co-founder of the Redwood Stoa.

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Reverse Turing Test Experiment with AIs

A group of advanced AIs try to figure out who among them is the human. Experiment I made in Unity.

VIDEO LINK: Reverse Turing Test Experiment with AIs

 

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Do scientists make good presidents? How five national leaders perform

Do scientists make good presidents? How five national leaders performed

Following Mexico’s election result, Nature reviews the legacy of well-known politicians with backgrounds in science and engineering.

www.nature.com

INTRO: This week, Mexico elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo — a politician with a background in physics and environmental engineering. Despite her scientific pedigree, not all researchers are confident that she will have their interests at heart, given that her mentor and predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, cut science budgets and had a sometimes antagonistic relationship with the Mexican science community.

Speculation now abounds about whether Sheinbaum Pardo will prioritize evidence-based decision-making.

To get a view of what might come, Nature talked to historians and policy experts about how five other scientists-turned-world-leaders fared in office, and whether their backgrounds in science were a benefit — or a detriment.

Some say science expertise is a double-edged sword. Researchers “know very well how to gather information from various actors in society”, says Sayaka Oki, a historian of science at the University of Tokyo. But at the same time, if they rely too much on their own intellect instead of listening to constituents, they can get “trapped in their own self-righteousness”, she adds... (MORE - missing details)
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Freeman Dyson’s disturbing scientific theology

Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing Scientific Theology — John Horgan (The Science Writer)

Hoboken, June 9, 2024. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have given new life to the old idea that one day intelligent machines will surpass their human creators . Physicist Freeman Dyson was an early explorer of this sci-fi scenario. Dyson, who died in 2020 at the age of 96, pos

johnhorgan.org

EXCERPT: Freeman Dyson is the most brilliant practitioner of scientific theology. In his 1988 essay collection Infinite in All Directions, Dyson ponders why life is so hard. The answer, he suggests, might be related to “the principle of maximum diversity.” This principle, he explains,

operates at both the physical and the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which made life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.​

When I first read this passage, I circled it and drew exclamation marks beside it. Dyson is rejecting the notion that physics can find a “final theory” that solves the riddle of the universe and brings physics to an end. Dyson is also hinting at a solution to the deepest of all theological puzzles, the problem of evil: Why would a loving, all-powerful God create such a painful, unjust world?

Dyson’s answer is that God makes life hard to ensure that it will be “as interesting as possible.” The implication is that existence is--and must be--an eternal struggle... (MORE - details)
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[Magical Realist]

Always when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut.

We basically live our lives around the attempt to minimize the number of events that can catch us off guard. Cushy warm houses with weather proof roofing. Luxurious cars transporting us smoothly with minimum thought and effort to well lighted stores where we can buy everything we need. An internet that imparts endless images and information and social validation at our fingertips. Yearly trips to the doctor to screen for any ailments that might be lurking about in us. I don't think we need earthquakes and covid pandemics and wars and ice ages to keep life interesting. Interesting is whatever you have time to reflect on and take solace in and pleasurably engage with. And we have a society nowadays that maximizes the chances for that sort of pressure-free and playful me time.
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Why do we have consciousness? Researchers are deeply divided

Why do we have consciousness? Researchers are deeply divided

But perhaps everyone is somewhat right? A Norwegian professor is attempting to reconcile the seemingly conflicting theories.

www.sciencenorway.no

EXCERPTS: How on earth can these subjective experiences arise in a lump of biological material? What mechanisms are behind this? And what is the minimum requirement for these mechanisms to start working?

Does consciousness only exist in immensely complicated systems, like the brains of humans and primates? Or can there be small sparks of consciousness even in insects? Or trees? Or computers?

“Philosophers have been grappling with these questions for millennia,” says Johan Storm, a professor of neurophysiology at the University of Oslo. But in recent decades, something has changed: Brain researchers have become much more actively engaged. Storm is one of them...

[...] In contrast to earlier times, there is now no shortage of theories about how the brain can give rise to consciousness. The problem is that we do not know which one is correct. Each theory is supported by scientific studies...

[...] “We propose a completely different approach to this controversy. If you look closely, these theories are much more compatible than they appear at first glance,” says Storm.

[...] Storm believes that much of the conflict revolves around the researchers partly talking past each other and attributing different meanings to words and concepts. They are trying to explain different forms of consciousness and focus on mechanisms at quite different levels, such as the cellular level and the system level.

“People see things differently because they’re trying to explain different aspects of consciousness,” says Storm, illustrating the point with a famous Indian parable.

[...] Storm and his colleagues are now trying to convince the world that the situation might be similar in consciousness research. They have created a large review article showing how the theories might be intertwined... (MORE - details)
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How a widely used ranking system ended up with three fake journals in its top 10 philosophy list

How a widely used ranking system ended up with three fake journals in its top 10 philosophy list

Tomasz Żuradzki Recently our philosophy faculty at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, like many institutions around the world, introduced a ranking of journals based on Elsevier’s Scopus database t…

retractionwatch.com

EXCERPT: When we informally alerted some colleagues involved in introducing these rankings at our institution, we met with indifference. The presence of these fake journals on the relevant lists is apparently perceived to have negligible consequences. However, the lists as used in the employee evaluation process – for example, to nominate researchers for yearly awards – have firm percentile cutoffs. And the fact that three fake journals are among the leaders in the Scopus rankings has the practical consequence that three honest journals which should have received the top score from the perspective of our local evaluation have been pushed to the lower tier. (MORE - details)

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The big idea: is it OK to do wrong for the greater good?

The big idea: is it OK to do wrong for the greater good?

Jailed tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried believed altruism justified his actions. Was he right?

www.theguardian.com

EXCERPTS: Earlier this year, the cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on seven counts of wire fraud. It’s safe to say that his life has not gone according to plan. But was the plan itself immoral?

By his own account, Bankman-Fried aimed to accumulate wealth for philanthropic causes: “earning to give”, in the idiom of the effective altruist movement, of which he was a supporter...

[...] Philosophical ideas don’t often go mainstream. Effective altruism is one of them; another is “the trolley problem” – a source of countless social media memes and a prominent plot device in The Good Place. What gets lost in the memes is why the trolley problem matters. The point is not to generate ever more baffling cases of moral uncertainty, but precisely to investigate Bankman-Fried’s quandary... (MORE - details)

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How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture

How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture

Turn on, Tune in, Write Code

www.thenewatlantis.com

EXCERPTS: Margaret Mead believed that what was needed was a deliberate process of cultural evolution — in which mind-altering substances might play a role. Over the subsequent decades, Mead and her third husband, Gregory Bateson, would strive for just this transformation, focusing their attention on a newly synthesized hallucinogenic substance of astonishing potency: LSD.

[...] Whereas today’s popularizers tend to promote psychedelics as means of individual self-discovery and self-improvement, [...] they hoped psychedelics could be part of “a new set of tools for reprogramming minds and societies stuck in self-destructive feedback loops.”

[...] The recent re-emergence of psychedelic science is mostly lacking in the collective dimension that was so central to Mead, Bateson, and their generation. Hallucinogens are now just another addition to our endless array of personal lifestyle options... (MORE - details)

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In praise of the paranormal curiosity of Charles Fort, the Patron Saint of Cranks

In Praise of the Paranormal Curiosity of Charles Fort, Patron Saint of Cranks

A strange precipitate fell July 12, 1873 across the streets and brick alleyways of Kansas City, over her stockyards and rail depots. Scientific American would report that there rained a “shower of …

lithub.com

EXCERPT: Paranormal thinking can be defined as a discipline, a method, and a perspective, but also—and this isn’t emphasized enough—as a literary style. Charles Fort may have posited himself as a modern day Diogenes, but before anything he was a writer, and a writer who conceived of an entirely novel genre at that. All the hallmarks of the paranormal mode are evident in Fort, manifesting like ectoplasm before the participants in a séance. The desire to see connections between disparate events, the baroque establishment of often contradictory explanations, the democratic distrust of authority. As much as an epistemological perspective, the paranormal is a prose style, a way of thinking about and explaining that which is inexplicable... (MORE - details)

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Tomorrow People: chasing telepathy

For over a century, telepathy has been just around the corner | Aeon Essays

For the entire 20th century, it had felt like telepathy was just around the corner. Why is that especially true now?

aeon.co

EXCERPT: Telepathy might initially seem a much softer, psychological proposition, tainted with a sense of the supernatural. Yet both Campbell and Clarke were lifelong advocates of the view that telepathy was highly probable, the scientific proof of its existence likely just around the corner. The promise of telepathy – soon to be achieved, not far off, only a few test subjects away – feels very familiar when reading Musk’s boosterish announcements on Neuralink’s latest breakthroughs. The promise that telepathy is just about to be realised is not confined to entrepreneurs and science-fiction writers alone. For more than a century, there have consistently been figures in the scientific establishment who have entertained similar hopes that telepathy would soon reach the threshold of proof, promising everything from opening a new evolutionary phase of human development to a new psychic front in the global arms race... (MORE - details)

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Do plants have minds?

Can we see past our soul-blindness to recognise plant minds? | Aeon Essays

In the 1840s, the iconoclastic scientist Gustav Fechner made an inspired case for taking seriously the interior lives of plants

aeon.co

In the 1840s, the iconoclastic scientist Gustav Fechner made an inspired case for taking seriously the interior lives of plants...
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Introducing new or different standards for "intelligence" that accept something so radically minimal would be scientists engaging in arguments or philosophical activity. The "justification" isn't going to be found ready-made or perceptually blatant under a rock, but hashed out via human reason and competition.
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This flower could be defined as intelligent, scientists say

This Flower Could Be Defined as Intelligent, Scientists Say

Even without a central nervous system, some life on planet Earth can behave in arguably intelligent ways.

www.sciencealert.com

Assigning terms like 'intelligence' to plant life is highly controversial, but after decades of scientific dismissal and disdain, this field of research is finally beginning to bloom...
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What is intelligent life?

Why ‘intelligence’ exists only in the eye of the beholder | Aeon Essays

Our human minds hold us back from truly understanding the many brilliant ways that other creatures solve their problems

aeon.co

EXCERPT: In some contexts, the brain itself has been suggested as a poor candidate for the locus of intelligence. Supporters of swarm or collective intelligence tell us that the problem of problem-solving can be shared among a host of similar entities, as in a shoal of fish or a surge of grasshoppers. Ants build boats, bridges and metropolises with populations in the millions, and yet their individual cerebral horsepower doesn’t amount to much. The boundaries of an interacting group – the nest, the shoal, the rational mind, the nation-state – all can be argued as the scale at which true intelligence arises.

Paradoxically, we value intelligence as a marker of individual success, yet it exists both as a collective of our own neurons, and an aggregate of collective behaviour. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, we keep using this word, but perhaps it does not mean what we think it means... (MORE - missing details)
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Being able to avoid doctors and prescription meds only works for me because of proper diet, exercise, effective self-treatment, and "seemingly" lacking those inherited risk-factors (for now). But I've done that my whole adult life. Contrary to the waiting till one's "70s" below to drop out of the health system. Which is when the regular check-ups surely are needed for people with unhealthy lifestyles. (Maybe many Ashkenazi Jews can live into their 90s and 100s despite eating junk food and going without exercise, but they're genetically privileged in that particular area. William Shatner, for instance, seems fully determined to not die until reaching the range of Carl Reiner, Kirk Douglas, etc. At age 95, Stan Lee fell a few years short of that upper-elite level. )
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I’m a rational anti-medicine Nut (philosophy of medicine)

I’m a Rational Anti-Medicine Nut — John Horgan (The Science Writer)

I recently ranted to my pal Theresa, a medical anthropologist, that a surgeon who carved a spot of melanoma out of my back urged me to get screened for skin cancer every three months. The hell with that , I told Theresa, from now on I’ll only see a doctor if there’s something wrong with me . Th

johnhorgan.org

EXCERPT: In Natural Causes, published in 2018, Ehrenreich announces that she’s done with preventive medicine, at least the part aimed at detecting diseases before they produce symptoms. “I will seek help for an urgent problem,” she writes, “but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me.”

Ehrenreich reached this decision in her 70s, which she says is “old enough to die,” a remark to which I return below. Actually, her critique of preventive medicine applies to people of all ages, with a crucial caveat: preemptive tests make more sense for those with a family history of a disease or otherwise at risk.

Below I summarize Ehrenreich’s key points:

PROFITS TRUMP HEALTH: Preventive medicine transforms healthy people, as Ehrenreich puts it, into “raw material for a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex.” The basic assumption underpinning all her analyses is that American health care prioritizes profits over health.

That harsh charge, to my mind, is corroborated by two statistics: 1, the U.S. spends far more on health care per capita than any other country. 2, the U.S. has a lower life expectancy than many nations spending far less per capita. See this recent analysis of the problem. We Americans pay more and get less. That’s the very definition of a bad deal.

ANNUAL CHECKUPS ARE “WORTHLESS”: Ehrenreich cites a 2015 N.Y. Times essay in which health-care expert Ezekiel Emanuel calls annual checkups “basically worthless.” A 2019 meta-analysis by Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit that evaluates medical procedures, corroborates Emanuel’s assertion. Cochrane concludes that “health checks are unlikely to be beneficial and may lead to unnecessary tests and treatments.” (MORE - details)

 

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Conscious subjects needn't be determinately countable: generalizing Dennett's Fame in the Brain

Conscious Subjects Needn't Be Determinately Countable: Generalizing Dennett's Fame in the Brain

schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com

EXCERPTS: It is, I suspect, an accident of vertebrate biology that conscious subjects typically come in neat, determinate bundles -- one per vertebrate body, with no overlap. Things might be very different with less neurophysiologically unified octopuses, garden snails, split-brain patients, craniopagus twins, hypothetical conscious computer systems, and maybe some people with "multiple personality" or dissociative identity.

[...] What would it be like to be such an entity / pair of entities / diffuse-bordered-uncountable-groupish thing? Unsurprisingly, we might find such forms of consciousness difficult to imagine with our ordinary vertebrate concepts and philosophical tools derived from our particular psychology...(MORE - details)

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‘He had a sarcastic turn of phrase’: discovery of 1509 book sheds new light on ‘father of utilitarianism’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/a...k-sheds-new-light-on-father-of-utilitarianism

EXCERPT: Last month, UCL academics unveiled the most significant rediscovered books left to the university in Jeremy Bentham’s will, including the translation of Brandt’s Ship of Fools and a maths textbook explaining Euclid’s propositions. Their contents, together with the philosopher’s own notes, indicate how some of his radical theories were first sparked.

Bentham’s famous formulas for good governance now seem like a response to both the idiocy depicted in Ship of Fools and the mathematical clarity of Euclid. Dr Tim Causer, principal research fellow at UCL’s Bentham Project, believes the books show that the philosopher’s reputation as a “cold calculator” is undeserved... (MORE - details)
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On one hand, the so-called Science Wars can be construed as an historical item of the 1990s. But from another POV, the battleground has expanded, diversified, and continued in one form or another to this day. So even though an "old news topic", it's still something to check in on -- or rather, to maintain an awareness of.

The quote fragment below espouses a somewhat failed prediction. From the standpoint that the influence of humanities scholars -- in cultural engineering, politics, and the arguably compromised social sciences -- is as robust as ever. As well as their fruit (policies) being adopted by administrations of science/medical/educational institutions and some "justice enlightened sectors of industry" which ironically steer, police, and employ those very researchers themselves.

IOW, so much for the latter being the paladins who would provide liberation from the "traditional intellectual class". You have been assimilated.

John Brockman: The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s.

Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

[...] During the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as "the intellectuals," as though there were no others. ... How did the literary intellectuals get away with it?

[...] The recent publishing successes of serious science books have surprised only the old-style intellectuals. Their view is that these books are anomalies--that they are bought but not read. I disagree. The emergence of this third-culture activity is evidence that many people have a great intellectual hunger...

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Video link: How to spot a lying intellectual socialist

EXCERPTS: Like everyone else, intellectuals have a mixture of knowledge and notions. For some intellectuals in certain fields, that knowledge includes knowledge of the systematic procedures available to test notions and determine their validity as knowledge. Since ideas are their life's work, intellectuals might be expected to more thoroughly or more systematically subject notions to such tests.

[...But...] intellectuals also tend to excel in verbal skills that can be used to evade the testing of their favorite notions. Yes, verbal skills to evade the testing of their favorite notions.

[...] Everyone will understand that such a government policy has failed, but what will become of Professor Richard Wolff? Will he be charged for supporting a failed policy? Will he in any way lose his academic stature?

[...] Intellectuals in ... general usage are ultimately unaccountable to the external world. The prevalence and presumed desirability of this are confirmed by such things as academic tenure and expansive concepts of academic freedom and academic self-governance. In the media, expansive notions of freedom of speech and of the press play similar roles. In short, unaccountability to the external world is not simply a happenstance, but a principle.

John Stuart Mill argued that intellectuals should be free even from social standards, while setting social standards for others.

Not only have intellectuals been insulated from material consequences, they have often enjoyed immunity from even a loss of reputation after having been demonstrated wrong...

 

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What the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy fossil reveals about nudity and shame

What the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy fossil reveals about nudity and shame

The way Lucy has been depicted in newspapers, textbooks and museums shows how today’s cultural norms influence perceptions of the past.

theconversation.com

EXCERPT: According to the coevolutionary tale of humans and their lice, our immediate ancestors lost most of their body fur 3 to 4 million years ago and did not don clothing until 83,000 to 170,000 years ago. That means that for over 2.5 million years, early humans and their ancestors were simply naked. As a philosopher, I’m interested in how modern culture influences representations of the past. And the way Lucy has been depicted in newspapers, textbooks and museums may reveal more about us than it says about her... (MORE - details)
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The many answers to the quantum measurement problem

The many-answers to the quantum measurement problem | Mario Barbatti

The measurement problem in quantum mechanics has challenged physicists and philosophers for almost a century. The measurement problem refers to the probablictic collapse of the deterministic wave function. It has been a focal point of debate in the philosophy of physics, engaging minds from...

iai.tv

INTRO: The measurement problem in quantum mechanics has challenged physicists and philosophers for almost a century. The measurement problem refers to the probablistic collapse of the deterministic wave function. It has been a focal point of debate in the philosophy of physics, engaging minds from Richard Feynman to Sir Roger Penrose. We now have a plethora of interpretations. Join Mario Barbatti as he argues that, while the quantum measurement problem is not completely solved, the proposed solutions are beginning to bear fruit. (MORE - details)
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Decades ago, Isaac Asimov proposed something similar to the below, during an interview, which startled the person conducting the conversation.

While Marxist dogma did interfere with innovation in the past ("The tragic story of Soviet genetics shows the folly of political meddling in science"), the original old school was at least devoted to its brand of materialism and most proper science practice.

In contrast, the intellectual movements descended from Marxism (from Gramsci onward), have progressively become more and more anti-Western. To the point now during the current decolonization era, where the "alternative sciences" of traditional local cultures are now the prized usurpers. So it's not Karl's classic and narrower ideological fixation with social oppression that is a potential impending threat, but rather the widely accepted and influential contemporary offshoots of it, that border on the deranged.
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The world is richer than ever, but it's not due to communism or capitalism, it's science

The World Is Richer Than Ever, But It's Not Due To Communism Or Capitalism, It's Science

There are lots of stories about the poor in America, and have been for decades. Smart demographers know that, like racism, if everyone is talking about The Poor, it's almost eliminated.One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television...

www.science20.com

EXCERPTS: One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television program "60 Minutes" had a segment on poverty in America. It was designed to tug at the heartstrings of those with more money. The USSR ran it for their citizens but it actually backfired. Being in 'poverty' in America meant having a television and more living space than anyone not an elite in the Soviet Union had.

Today, America and all western nations are so wealthy compared to the past that for the first time in the history of the world, poor people can afford to be fat. [...] Capitalists note that free markets and globalization led to a quality of life improvement of 300 percent for the poorest during the time Karl Marx was saying that capitalism needed violent overthrow, and hasn't slowed down....

[...] They're both right. They both also miss the plot. In both cases, the common denominator is science, not which economic model leads to less corruption and grift... (MORE - details)
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An anatomy of algorithm aversion (paper)

An Anatomy of Algorithm Aversion

People are said to show "algorithm aversion" when (1) they prefer human forecasters or decision-makers to algorithms even though (2) algorithms genera

papers.ssrn.com

ABSTRACT: People are said to show "algorithm aversion" when (1) they prefer human forecasters or decision-makers to algorithms even though (2) algorithms generally outperform people (in forecasting accuracy and/or optimal decision-making in furtherance of a specified goal). Algorithm aversion also has "softer" forms, as when people prefer human forecasters or decision-makers to algorithms in the abstract, without having clear evidence about comparative performance. Algorithm aversion is a product of diverse mechanisms, including (1) a desire for agency; (2) a negative moral or emotional reaction to judgment by algorithms; (3) a belief that certain human experts have unique knowledge, unlikely to be held or used by algorithms; (4) ignorance about why algorithms perform well; and (5) asymmetrical forgiveness, or a larger negative reaction to algorithmic error than to human error. An understanding of the various mechanisms provides some clues about how to overcome algorithm aversion, and also of its boundary conditions.

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What If motherhood Isn’t transformative at all?

What If Motherhood Isn’t Transformative at All?

We’re often told that becoming a parent will alter one’s identity. For me, the change never came.

www.thecut.com

EXCERPT: To have a child, it is often said, is to transform one’s identity. What this might have meant in the past is more or less obvious: With few exceptions, for the better part of history, to have a child meant it was time for a woman to say her final farewells to whatever public existence she managed to forge up to that point. But now there is another, more mysterious change that becoming a mother is understood to imply, more basic than the historical conditions of oppression. This change is supposed to reconfigure the deepest core of one’s being. When the contemporary analytic philosopher L. A. Paul wanted to introduce the idea of a fundamentally transformative experience, one of her central examples was having a child. For women, especially, becoming a parent is frequently described as a total revolution of the self... (MORE - details)

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Why does moral progress feel preachy and annoying?

Why does moral progress feel preachy and annoying? | Aeon Essays

You might feel you can trust your gut to tell right from wrong, but the friction of social change shows that you can’t

aeon.co

EXCERPT: What is happening here? Why, rather than taking the moral concerns behind social reforms seriously, do we so often respond with this kind of petulant, knee-jerk defensiveness? It’s not that we don’t care about right and wrong. But cases like these can feel like a far cry from the sort of moral issues that we’re inclined to take seriously – you know, like murder and human rights. In fact, there seems to be an unspoken expectation that when we’re confronted with genuine, important arguments for moral change, they’ll be easy to recognise. Probably they’ll be accompanied by a flash of righteous anger, or a pang of compassion. And of course we will rise to the occasion.

Annoyance and irritation, though, are often taken as a sign that the concerns aren’t that big of a deal, that the arguments are mere quibbles that can be safely dismissed. Call this the eyeroll heuristic: if it’s preachy and annoying, it’s OK to ignore it. As philosophers who work on moral cognition, we think that the eyeroll heuristic is a serious obstacle to moral progress... (MORE - details)

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What was the “Paradigm Shift”?

What Was the “Paradigm Shift”?

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term, he wasn’t referring simply to “out of the box” thinking.

newrepublic.com

EXCERPT: The language of paradigms and paradigm shifts is ubiquitous except among the people most familiar with its source: historians and philosophers of science. Once upon a time—let’s say the late 1960s—a reference to “paradigm shifts” primarily signaled knowledge of Thomas Kuhn’s historicist approach to the philosophy of science. Kuhn’s 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, transformed our understanding of scientific change and has become a foundational text for historians, philosophers, and social studies of science.

It is nonetheless unusual these days for anyone who studies science professionally to invoke the term “paradigm shift.” The concept has become completely unmoored from the term. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in other words, is one of those books that everybody knows but doesn’t read, or reads once and shelves.

On rereading my copy, neglected since a first-year graduate seminar in the history of science over 25 years ago, I was struck by Kuhn’s insistence on the power of historical research to puncture idealized claims of scientific progress. Paradigms and normal science? Sure. But the truly radical idea here is that outsiders—in this case, historians—can offer better insight into the inner workings of a profession than the practitioners themselves... (MORE - details)
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[parmalee]

The world is richer than ever, but it's not due to communism or capitalism, it's science

The World Is Richer Than Ever, But It's Not Due To Communism Or Capitalism, It's Science

There are lots of stories about the poor in America, and have been for decades. Smart demographers know that, like racism, if everyone is talking about The Poor, it's almost eliminated.One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television...

www.science20.com

EXCERPTS: One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television program "60 Minutes" had a segment on poverty in America. It was designed to tug at the heartstrings of those with more money. The USSR ran it for their citizens but it actually backfired. Being in 'poverty' in America meant having a television and more living space than anyone not an elite in the Soviet Union had.

Today, America and all western nations are so wealthy compared to the past that for the first time in the history of the world, poor people can afford to be fat. [...] Capitalists note that free markets and globalization led to a quality of life improvement of 300 percent for the poorest during the time Karl Marx was saying that capitalism needed violent overthrow, and hasn't slowed down....

[...] They're both right. They both also miss the plot. In both cases, the common denominator is science, not which economic model leads to less corruption and grift... (MORE - details)
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Still... something something perpetual motion machines blah blah blah (Greta Thunberg).

Humans, by and large, are undoubtedly "richer", but someone pays. Someone always pays.

Over the past hundred-plus years, humans have simply shifted the overwhelming burden to non-human lifeforms. The Holocene Extinction. It will likely come back and bit em on the ass--well it is presently--but, as per usual, the effects will not be felt by the richest.

 

[C C]

40 years after his death Michel Foucault’s philosophy still speaks to a world saturated with social media

40 years after his death Michel Foucault’s philosophy still speaks to a world saturated with social media

Knowledge, for Foucault, is not just what we know. It is who we are. It defines our options, not just intellectually, but in all respects.

theconversation.com

INTRO: Forty years after his death in Paris on June 25, 1984, many of Michel Foucault’s once radical ideas now seem self-evident. Even critics like Noam Chomsky, who derided Foucault’s moral theories as “incoherent”, find themselves in a world wallpapered with Foucauldian terms like “discourse”, “power-knowledge”, “biopower”, and “governmentality”.

Today, who could thrive without knowing how to “control the narrative”, call out a “social construct” or navigate “power dynamics”?

After contributing so much to this way of seeing the world, however, a lot of Foucault’s effort in his later years went to the idea of the self.

The decades since he died have witnessed the rise of a gladiatorial institution – social media – in which the desires and vulnerabilities of the self are played out. So we should ask: are we putting our “selves” at peril online? Can a genuinely Foucauldian perspective contribute to a better understanding of our situation? (MORE - details)
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[Write4U]

What does music have to do with imagination? — The Junkyard

A post by Giulia Lorenzi What does music have to do with imagination? At a first glance, it may appear that music does not have much to do with imagination and imagining. After all, when we are presented with a musical piece, we encounter a complex perceptual entity constructed and structured in a

junkyardofthemind.com

In this short piece, I want to explore places in which imagination may play a role in enjoying, perceiving, and producing music. Far from aiming to be an exhaustive treatment of where and how imagination could be at play in the musical realm, this piece aims to reflect on where philosophical studies of imagination may be enlightening for philosophical research on music.

If I may introduce a little duet by 2 imaginative masters of a modern classic musical love poem that builds into an emotional climax that just leaves me breathless every time I hear it.

 

[exchemist]

What does music have to do with imagination?

What does music have to do with imagination? — The Junkyard

A post by Giulia Lorenzi What does music have to do with imagination? At a first glance, it may appear that music does not have much to do with imagination and imagining. After all, when we are presented with a musical piece, we encounter a complex perceptual entity constructed and structured in a

junkyardofthemind.com

In this short piece, I want to explore places in which imagination may play a role in enjoying, perceiving, and producing music. Far from aiming to be an exhaustive treatment of where and how imagination could be at play in the musical realm, this piece aims to reflect on where philosophical studies of imagination may be enlightening for philosophical research on music.

I thought the music one adresses an interesting subject, though I didn't feel the writer conveyed very clearly what she thinks an appreciative listener "imagines".

I would agree that to get at the nature of the appeal of music one should focus on "pure music" rather than, say, a song with lyrics that tell the listener what to think while listening. For me, the extraordinary quality of music is how abstract music can have an arresting effect. There is a discussion of this in this video (10 mins), using the introduction to Händel's "Zadok the Priest":

From the 2:27 mark the speaker starts to provide an insight into what makes this piece clever, arresting and beautiful. A lot is to do with first understanding the musical conventions of the period and second, the avoidance of the obvious conventions, and instead surprising the listener with unexpected harmonic effects.

There is no attempt in this piece to tell any kind of human story. What there is instead is a conjuring up of an atmosphere of anticipation, which of course is triumphantly resolved with the entry of the (6 part) choir, plus trumpets, on a huge D major chord.

I am not convinced the listener to this piece needs to "imagine" anything. But what is definitely needed, it seems to me, is a feel for the tradition of Western musical harmony and a recognition of its use in unexpected and creative ways to create tension and expectation in the listener's mind. Quite how music is able to do this remains something of a mystery.

 

[parmalee]

40 years after his death Michel Foucault’s philosophy still speaks to a world saturated with social media

40 years after his death Michel Foucault’s philosophy still speaks to a world saturated with social media

Knowledge, for Foucault, is not just what we know. It is who we are. It defines our options, not just intellectually, but in all respects.

theconversation.com

INTRO: Forty years after his death in Paris on June 25, 1984, many of Michel Foucault’s once radical ideas now seem self-evident. Even critics like Noam Chomsky, who derided Foucault’s moral theories as “incoherent”, find themselves in a world wallpapered with Foucauldian terms like “discourse”, “power-knowledge”, “biopower”, and “governmentality”.

Today, who could thrive without knowing how to “control the narrative”, call out a “social construct” or navigate “power dynamics”?

After contributing so much to this way of seeing the world, however, a lot of Foucault’s effort in his later years went to the idea of the self.

The decades since he died have witnessed the rise of a gladiatorial institution – social media – in which the desires and vulnerabilities of the self are played out. So we should ask: are we putting our “selves” at peril online? Can a genuinely Foucauldian perspective contribute to a better understanding of our situation? (MORE - details)
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Within the above, there's a link to a John Searle lecture in which he addresses a conversation with Foucault again:

Searle notes that, unlike his books, Foucault's lectures are quite clear and straightforward. He asks Foucault why he writes so "badly" and Foucault responds that he must, in order tp satisfy the French/Parisian reading audience. In short, he (Foucault) must throw in approximately 10 percent obscurantist crap. (I'm paraphrasing, obviously.)

No pushback from Searle on this. Really?!!! OK, so Searle thinks that Foucault deliberately writes crap, so that he can sell books?!!! He never considered the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Foucault was fucking with him? I dunno, my impression of Foucault has always been that he had a lot of integrity and that he was pretty damn uncompromising. IOW he wouldn't deliberately write crap in order to sell books.

Moreover, with a lot of these supposed "obscure" types, one finds that their lectures (listened to or transcribed) come across quite differently from their books. That's cuz you can skim and skip ahead in books if you don't feel like going down that rabbit hole--no one reads A Thousand Plateaus from start to finish--it's hard to do that with a lecture.

Searle and others seldom consider that, just perhaps, they might be failing to account for neurodivergence and that's one man's garbage... whatever.

I'm not gonna quote the Douglas Hofstadter passage yet again, partly because I forgot the exact wording (it's in Goedel Escher Bach, if that helps). The gist: Douglas' uncle, Albert, was a Heidegger scholar, and Douglas confesses to never having understood a word of Heidegger. But as his uncle was a pretty smart guy, he always figured that he probably just didn't "get" it.

The notion that Keith Rowe never tuned his guitar is obvious nonsense: he played jazz before he got into AMM, Scratch Orchestra and the like. And even in the midst of AMM, he probably tuned his guitar whenever he was sitting about his living room and playing along to some AC/DC tunes or whatever. But people generally don't dismiss Rowe because of his... non-tuning. If they don't care for it, they just say it's not their bag.

But Anglo philosophers have always--always, this goes back into previous centuries, long before the "obscure" French of the previous century--dismissed Continentals, practically accused them of peddling snake oil. Given that these folks (the Continentals) are almost universally anti-capitalist, and that one generally doesn't go into philosophy for the money anyway, isn't it more likely that they're (Anglos) just not "getting" it?


Edit: In support of my "just fucking with him" thesis, I'll note that humor has always been an important part of the French philosophical tradition, and very much not a part of most English and American traditions. That humor doesn't always translate is in no way a controversial assertion.