Tim Sommers is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at The College of William & Mary. He teaches and writes on ethical, legal, and political philosophy. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and an M.A. from Brown. Tim has won storytelling slams in London and elsewhere and was once a bodyguard for The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (for one night). He can be reached at [email protected].
by Tim Sommers I try to keep callbacks to a minimum in my columns here, but this one seems worth it. Be warned, though. It’s well into the weeds we go. Last month, right here, I posted this piece. “Are Counterfeit People the Most Dangerous Artifacts in Human History?” It was a counter to Daniel…
by Tim Sommers Widely-respected philosopher, Tufts professor, one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” of the New Atheists’ movement, and an “External Professor” for the prestigious Santa Fe Institute, Daniel Dennett recently took to the very public soap box of The Atlantic to issue a dire warning. “Today, for the first time in history, thanks to…
by Tim Sommers I’m not really interested in magic. But I am interested in crime. So, recently while reading a discussion of close-in magic by neuroscientists I perked up when they got to the question of how criminals, and others of questionable character (like magicians), steal wristwatches right off their victims’ wrist without being detected.…
by Tim Sommers One thing that Elon Musk and Bill Gates have in common, besides being two of the five richest people in the world, is that they both believe that there is a very serious risk that an AI more intelligent than them – and, so, more intelligent than you and I, obviously –…
by Tim Sommers “Cleave,” “buckle,” and “dust” are contranyms. They are their own opposites. To dust means to remove, or sprinkle, with dust. To buckle means to collapse or secure. To cleave means both to divide and to stick to tenaciously. In that spirit, an astro-turf Federalist Society group, opposing affirmative action and pro-active diversity…
by Tim Sommers “Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.” — Zhuangzi (translation by Burton Watson) “We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.”…
by Tim Sommers What’s the greatest prediction of all time? By “greatest,” I mean something like how big a deal the thing predicted is multiplied by how accurate the prediction was. I would love to hear other proposals in the comments, but mine is Andy Warhol’s prediction that, “In the future, everyone will be famous…
by Tim Sommers Despite what you might have heard, it almost certainly wasn’t Yogi Berra or Samuel Goldwyn who said it. It may be an old Danish Proverb. But it is probably a remark made by someone in the Danish Parliament between 1937-1938, recorded without attribution in the voluminous autobiography of one Karl Kristian Steincke.…
by Tim Sommers My wife Stacey is irritated with the way Netflix’s machine learning algorithm makes recommendations. “I hate it,” she says. “Everything it recommends, I want to watch.” On the other hand, I am quite happy with Spotify’s AI. Not only does it do pretty well at introducing me to bands I like, but…
by Tim Sommers “Mankind was first taught to stammer the proposition of equality” – “Everyone is equal to everyone else” – “In a religious context, and only later was it made into morality,” Nietzsche wrote. Elsewhere, he called “human equality,” or “moral equality,” a specifically “Christian concept, no less crazy [than the soul],” moral equality…
by Tim Sommers When people say they want equal opportunity, what do they really want? If what they want is whatever it is that the opportunity is an opportunity for, are they really interested in the opportunity at all? Or are they motivated by what de Tocqueville called “the charm of anticipated success”? Well, there…
by Tim Sommers When I ask students what they were most interested in, or at least what they remember most, from their “Introduction to Ethics” or “Intro to Philosophy” class, it’s remarkable how many offer the same answer. It seems they all remember Robert Nozick’s “Experience Machine.” Here it is. The Experience Machine Suppose you…
by Tim Sommers Moral Grandstanding is using moral talk as way of drawing attention to oneself, seeking status, and/or trying to impress others with our moral qualities. Moral grandstanding is supposed, by some, to be a pervasive and dangerous phenomenon. According to psychologist Joshua Grubbs, for example, moral grandstanding exacerbated the COVID-19 crisis and is…
by Tim Sommers Computers are not alive. Hopefully, we can agree on that. It’s a place to start. But if anyone succeeds at creating a program that exhibits true artificial general intelligence, wouldn’t such a program, despite not being alive in the biological sense, deserve some kind of moral consideration? Or, at least, if we…
by Tim Sommers “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” I can’t find the origin of this unfortunate slogan, but it’s been around – and oft repeated – at least since the 1970s. “To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.” That’s Wayne Lapierre, CEO…
by Tim Sommers In “Shower of Gold” by Donald Barthelme, Peterson, a sculptor who welds radiators together, applies to be on a TV show called Who Am I? – strictly for the money. In the ensuing interview, he asks the interviewer, Miss Arbor, what the show is about. “‘Let me answer your question with another…
by Tim Sommers The New York Times’ columnist who thought that a good way to capture the interconnectedness of the modern world was to say that “The World is Flat” – an idea, arguably, better captured by saying that the world is round (which it is) – recently joined the chorus of pundits saying, yeah,…
by Tim Sommers The “Crito” by Plato opens with Socrates in prison (circa 399 B.C.E.) awaiting execution, having been unjustly convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and teaching false gods. When his friend Crito assures him that he can get him out, no problem, that “some people only need to be given a little…
by Tim Sommers How do we know that the external world exists in anything like the form we think it has? Assuming that we think, therefore we are, and that it’s hard to doubt the existence of our own immediate sensations and sense perceptions, can we prove that our senses give us reasonably reliable access…
by Tim Sommers When I was 15 years old I volunteered at a paleontological dig in Barnhart, Missouri. A car dealership expanding its parking lot had discovered a treasure trove of mastodon bones in the empty lot right next door. Mastodons are woolly mammoths’ smaller, less glamorous, cousins. Furry elephants, basically. They roamed the Americas…