Continuations

The last Philosophy Monday was nearly a month ago as I got distracted by the launch of my book in Germany and also current political events. The prior post was on values and today’s post picks up this topic by asking where values should come from. One historic answer has been “from God.” Obviously, unless you have direct conversations with God, this usually means that the values come from a religious tradition in the form of sacred texts and/or some group of religious authority figures (e.g. ...

It is crucially important to have something to fight for instead of just resisting. Having a long term goal is what keeps us motivated and resilient in light of near term setbacks. Sadly American politics is utterly bereft of a bold vision at the moment (the recent book Abundance falls comically short of its title). A great inspiration for a positive vision of the US today can be found in the original Star Trek from the late 1960s. We are still a long way from some of the extreme technologica...

At present it is once again wildly popular to speculate about the relationships between fundamental physics and concepts such as consciousness and free will. Despite the often high quality of the people participating in this I do consider this to be largely bunk. Or slightly less dramatically, I believe this path is unlikely to lead to deep insights. The deep flaw here is the application of theories that describe particles with little or no information content to complex systems which cannot ...

The other day I posted the following: Musk has been the greatest gift to Trump. First getting him elected, now helping create room for Trump loyalists, and drawing attention away from the truly awful ways the administration is undercutting the rule of law. Trump will discard Musk when he stops being useful. 50 percent chance that Musk will be in prison with his fortune seized. Might want to look into what Putin did with the oligarchs who didn't fall in line. Some people took offense at this t...

In the previous Philosophy Monday we took a first stab at supporting a view of humans and advanced artificial intelligences as making choices. Today we will start to dig into the "How" part of the fundamental question: "How should we choose our actions in light of our understanding of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeling)?" Our point of departure will be a closely related “how” question. How should we evaluate ...

Last week in Philosophy Mondays we completed the ingredients that go into the fundamental question that philosophy should help people answer: "How should we choose our actions in light of our understanding of reality and the potential impact of our actions on this reality (which happens to include how we and others are feeling)?" Today let's start to dig deeper into this question by looking at just the word "choose." As humans we are faced with choices small and large all day every day. Shoul...