“… What are we, and what is the universe? what are we in the universe? These are questions that leave us speechless, and that we are accustomed to answering with a joke so as not to seem ridiculous. “We, I would venture to guess, are the books we have read, the paintings we have seen,… Continue reading

(from a conversation with Rick) ACT THREE Next Day. Same Time. Same Place. VLADIMIR sits on the ground, staring at nothing. ESTRAGON surveys the landscape expectantly, is about to speak, looks at VLADIMIR, loses heart, and then speaks anyway. ESTRAGON: A fine day! (No response from VLADIMIR.) Yes, a fine day! The sort of day… Continue reading

Daniel Dennett, I’ve Been Thinking (Norton, 2023). Daniel Dennett died last week, and I took the occasion to read his autobiography. I don’t know how interesting the book would be to anyone who didn’t know Dennett, or anyone who hasn’t read at least 3 or 4 of his books and been captivated by them. I… Continue reading

Caleb Scharf, The Ascent of Information (Riverhead Books, 2021) Scharf is a physicist who argues in this book that the main subject of our planet has been information. Life itself is a system of storing and reproducing information, intelligence is a way of collecting, storing and sharing information, and our current preoccupation with digital intelligence… Continue reading

I was in a conversation recently, and somebody tried to explain a small group’s weird behavior in a Nietzschean or Freudian fashion: “They couldn’t exert power over others, so they began punishing themselves” or some such claim. I instantly judged that that explanation couldn’t possibly be right, even though I didn’t have a better one,… Continue reading

Roman Yampolskiy, AI: Unexplainable, unpredictable, uncontrollable (CRC Press 2024) It’s coming, and probably sooner than you think. Open AI’s Leopold Aschenbrenner noted recently on X, “One year since GPT-4 release. Hope you all enjoyed some time to relax; it’ll have been the slowest 12 months of AI progress for quite some time to come.” You… Continue reading

Here is a sensible, informed, and wise essay by Ali Minai at 3QuarksDaily that offers a clear picture of the general way AI systems like Chat-GPT work, and some sober recommendations for minimizing the disruptions they are likely to cause. His general conclusion: The problem has to be addressed at least at three level: Regulation,… Continue reading

I recently had the chance to visit two centers of the arcane. The first was the Warburg Library, an academic library at the University of London. It attracts a notable but somewhat rare subspecies of academics: those interested in how ideas in religion, philosophy, magic, mysticism, and the arts evolved from ancient times into the… Continue reading

I feel that in my last two posts (on Tár and postmodernism) I managed to miss the big idea that was lurking in both of them. The idea is that the study of culture, and especially popular culture, is no substitute for understanding (what we might call) “the human condition” (if we didn’t know any… Continue reading

“Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the “grand narratives” of modernism, rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power.” [Wikipedia] Postmodernism = … a bunch of over-educated privileged urban types who like to make contradictory assertions… Continue reading

I just came across this excellent overview of the field of linguistics by Steven Pinker. Highly recommended. Continue reading

When I put together the “Two and a half minutes” piece for 3QD (below), I experimented with DALL-E to compose some art to accompany it. I ended up going with something less literal, but here’s what the AI did with the prompt “A painting of a muddy landscape with humans climbing out of brown pods”:… Continue reading

I have taught “Epistemology” for many years, but it has always been for me a difficult course to plan. I want to cover traditional philosophical questions about skepticism, justification, induction, and belief in the external world. But then I also want to cover topics arising from the social conditions of knowledge: how cultural ideologies and… Continue reading

At least on the surface, there seems to be something incongruous in regarding some artifact (like a watch) as clearly implying some kind of intelligent, crafty mind, but then regarding that intelligent, crafty mind as not implying any sort of further creator, but coming about through natural causes. A watchmaker is if anything more impressive… Continue reading

One of the cleanest and most compelling arguments against physicalism in the philosophy of mind is the “Knowledge Argument”. (Here is a quick summary. The response I am going to offer doesn’t show up there, though it fits in as a variant of the “No Learning” objection. It’s also the reply Daniel Dennett gives in… Continue reading

It might seem daunting to read philosophy. Giants of thinking with names like Hegel, Plato, Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard loom over us with imperious glares, asking if we are sure we are worthy. We might worry that we won’t understand anything they are telling us; even if we do think we understand, we still might… Continue reading

I have been teaching university philosophy classes for something like 78 years. (At some point, when you can’t summon the energy to figure out how old you are, and what year something happened, and then do a bit of subtraction, then the point you were going to make can be made just as well by… Continue reading

We know all too well how easy it is to write something to someone online that we would never say face to face, and conversely how much more effort it takes to write online with the general kindness we employ in our real life interactions. It is tempting to let fly with that zinger, press… Continue reading

So, I’m no fiction writer (at least, not on purpose). I give it a shot now and then, for fun. A while back I had a plan to write a series of stories featuring the “wonder cabinet” of Dr Tenebris, which would be a stockpile of amazing and magical artifacts of the past. I wrote… Continue reading

This past term I’ve been teaching a capstone class in which students are supposed to write a longer paper on some topic that means a lot to them. It’s meant to be a culminating event for their undergraduate work in philosophy. The class is always a fun exchange of ideas in which I can just… Continue reading