Tag: philosophy

On Achieving Tennisosity

Posted on by Scott Samuelson

by Scott Samuelson

Though I’m at best a mediocre tennis player, I’ve achieved something in the sport that the pros achieve only at their finest, which I’ve taken to calling “tennisosity,” a hybrid of “tennis” and “virtuosity.” I coined the term several years ago, in the sweaty aftermath of a match in which my opponent and I had entered into its state. Among my friends and family, the ugly term tennisosity has stuck—I suspect because it describes something vitally yet elusively important, something with an ethical and an aesthetic dimension that can apply to any meaningful human activity.

This is NOT a picture of my backhand.

Tennisosity (in the realm of tennis) is when you and your opponent are so well-matched that the competition not only raises both of your play to a higher level but perfectly realizes the game of tennis. The way I put it to my exhausted opponent was, “We just played the 2008 Wimbledon Final”—the battle between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, sometimes called the greatest match ever, where Nadal won his first Wimbledon against the defending champ (Federer had won the previous five straight, including the last two against Nadal). Even though neither my opponent nor I could return the serve of your average high school varsity tennis player, our rallies were just as dramatic as Federer’s and Nadal’s, each of us got to just as many shots that the other didn’t think could be gotten to, our aces were just as glorious, and our double faults were just as tragic—at least within the context of our game.

I admit that my backhand isn’t at the level of Roger Federer’s! I’m giggling at even drawing the comparison. By the normal metrics and standards of excellence in tennis, everything about my game is junk. Also, there was no public recognition riding on my match—not even the chintzy trophy of a local tournament, much less the engraved silver of the most storied competition in tennis. In fact, nobody was watching.

And yet, had others been watching us, I believe that their aesthetic experience of our tennis match would have been similar in kind to the great Wimbledon Final—obviously not concerning our individual skillsets but concerning what the interactive combination of our skillsets involved. My opponent and I had to dig deep again and again. The same kind of grit and imagination Federer and Nadal had to draw on, we had to draw on. The glory of tennis was on display for all to see—even though nobody happened to be there to see it. If I remember right, one of us cried. Read more »

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

What Natural Intelligence Looks Like

Posted on by Scott Samuelson

by Scott Samuelson

Jusepe de Ribera. Touch. c. 1615, oil on canvas. Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. Check out the enlarged image here.

When we conjure up what thinking looks like, what tends to leap to mind is an a-ha lightbulb or a brow-furrowed chin scratch—or the sculpture The Thinker. While there’s something deservedly iconic about how Rodin depicts a powerful body redirecting its energies inward, I think that the most insightful depictions of thinking in the history of art are found in the work of Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), a.k.a. José de Ribera or Lo Spagnoletto (The Little Spaniard). In a time when we’re alternatively fascinated and horrified by what artificial intelligence can do, even to the point of wondering whether AIs can think or be treated like people, it’s worth asking some great Baroque paintings to remind us of what natural intelligence is.

Early in his artistic career, Ribera went to Rome and painted a series on the senses. Only four of the original five paintings survive (we suffer Hearing loss). Touch, the most interesting of the remaining paintings, depicting a blind man feeling the face of a sculpture, launches a crucial theme throughout Ribera’s work.

Let’s try to imagine Ribera in the process of making this painting. He looks at live models, probably at an actual blind man. He studies prints, sketches, fusses with his paints, maybe takes a walk. He sleeps on it. He chats with a friend and lights on an approach: a blind man exploring a sculpture by feeling it. He hurries back to his studio and begins to paint. He notices more about his subject, makes a mistake, fixes it. He holds up a jar of paint—no, that one would be better. Somewhere in this process, I imagine, it dawns on him that he’s doing the same thing as the blind man. (Maybe this is why he decides to put the painting on the table—though the painting is also a powerful visual reminder for us that there are always limits to our engagement with the world.)

Regardless of what actually went through Ribera’s head, the point I’m trying to make has been illustrated—both figuratively and literally—by a contemporary artist. In the 1990s Claude Heath was sick of the ideas of beauty that governed his artistic work. So, he lit on the idea of drawing a plaster cast of his brother’s head—blindfolded. Using small pieces of Blu-tack for orientation, one stuck into the top of the cast, one into his piece of paper, he felt the head’s contours with his left hand and drew corresponding lines with his right. “I tried not to draw what I know, but what I feel . . . I created a triangle, if you like, between me, the object, and the drawing . . . It was a bit of a transcription.” He didn’t look at what he was doing until he was finished. By liberating himself from ideas of beauty, he made beautiful drawings. Read more »

Friday, October 18, 2024

Becoming What We Are: Authenticity as a Practice

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

Become what you are, having learned what that is. —Pindar

[To protect their privacy, I have changed identifying details of those mentioned here.]

Aristotle

What do we want for our lives? It’s a peculiarly human question; other animals don’t appear to be worrying about it. I’ve asked myself this question, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes more desperately, for as long as I can remember. I’m always moved when patients raise it in their therapy. A man who retired from a successful career said that when he looks into the future without the mantle of his professional title and status, he feels empty and lost, ashamed that at 70 he doesn’t know what he wants.

Sometimes we raise the question ourselves; sometimes the world raises it for us. Another patient, whose boyfriend just “dumped” her, is wrestling with her alcohol use. The men she wants in her life don’t want an alcoholic in theirs. She’s angry at the thought of sobering up for someone else, “Wouldn’t that be inauthentic?” At the same time, she (authentically) wants a partner in her life.

She knows what most of us know, that we want to be authentic. By “authenticity” I mean living in a way that is true to oneself and to one’s situation in the world. (For the bigger philosophic picture, see my previous column, Reclaiming Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal.) Authenticity resonates because it is that rare thing, an ideal that most of us embrace—despite our divergent religious, ethnic, social, and political values. After all, each of us faces (or not) the question of how to become our best selves.

Although we must ask and answer that question for ourselves, I will suggest a few core principles that can guide our way. I’ll start with Aristotle’s view, that the one thing we all want from life is to flourish, which means living in such a way as to be fulfilling our nature. This might sound about as helpful as telling someone who is struggling, “Just be true to yourself!” How do we even know what our true self is? If we’re a lonely alcoholic, is our true self more of the same, or is it sober and in a relationship?

We can find some guidance by unpacking two principles of flourishing that extend to living authentically. Read more »

Thursday, August 22, 2024

Path and Pathology: Some Philosophic Aspects of Psychotherapy

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

I came to psychotherapy from philosophy, first starting therapy in my forties while on sabbatical from St. John’s College. I was struck by its transformative power—so struck that I ultimately resigned my tenure and returned to graduate school to train as a therapist. But I’ve hardly left philosophy behind. Freud reminds me of Nietzsche. Socrates’ fingerprints are all over the motives and methods of psychoanalysis. Donald Winnicott and Erik Erikson bring to mind Hegel, and the list goes on.

Philosophy and psychotherapy (and the humanist tradition in general) see our lives as developmental journeys. In the spirit of Socrates, they view self-exploration and self-awareness as essential to self-actualization. This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to lose sight of. Which makes it remarkable that many academics don’t believe being a “philosopher” need include examining themselves. Yet, how could it not? After all, philosophy means the love of wisdom, and who would say of a true philosopher what Regan said of her father, King Lear, that “he hath ever but slenderly known himself.”

It’s equally remarkable that the Socratic spirit is often absent in therapists, in their own lives and in their work with clients. A variety of forces (not least insurance companies) lead many therapists and clients to focus on techniques and tools for reducing symptoms; this draws attention away from the person as a whole. There is nothing wrong with focusing on symptom-relief, as the advertised “evidence-based” “solution-focused” therapies like CBT do. After all, people vary in what they want and need from therapy, so we should welcome experimentation and a variety of approaches.

That said, if therapy is to encourage deeper self-exploration, it needs to go beyond symptoms to the whole person suffering them. Read more »

Monday, July 8, 2024

The Absent Self

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

Insist on your self; never imitate. —Emerson

How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself? —Dostoevsky

The key promise of the modern world was the freedom of the individual. It was the motivating cry of the great revolutions of the modern age, meaning two things, at least: first, the removal of the external barriers to freedom: no more oppression by kings and priests, and later, freedom from the democratic masses themselves: the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Second, freedom as the ability to be oneself, to express who one truly is; the ideal of authenticity. The free, unique individual, able at last to to express their unique self. But this ‘real’ self needs to be found in order to be freed, and this has proved to be more difficult than the removal of oppressive rulers.

Authenticity

The authentic self is hard to reach. Something keeps getting in the way. Perhaps the culprit is an inauthentic self, a mask or double woven by social convention, and adopted through self deception. So one becomes two, or perhaps three. The alienated self must discard the false in order to find the True Self. The great task for moderns is to be authentic and unique.

That this should seem natural to us may be because we have been shaped by the brave new world of bourgeois freedom that followed the Age of Revolutions. Mill, Constant, de Tocqueville, Emerson, all have it for their theme, which was also that of much romantic art of the period. Here is Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay Self Reliance:

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. [1]

Emerson continues in this vein at some length, in a high flown peroration. He refers repeatedly to the evil effects of the crowd, the multitude the mass of men (it’s always men) who threaten to suffocate the genius of the individual. This can seem like tedious over insistence. It still finds an audience, especially in the self-help and get-ahead-in-business circles that dream of the remarkable person who achieves success, by liberating their unique self with all its talents.  Read more »

Monday, May 27, 2024

The Large Language Turn: LLMs As A Philosophical Tool

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

The schematic architecture of OpenAI’s GPT models. Image credit: Marxav, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

There is a widespread feeling that the introduction of the transformer, the technology at the heart of Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s various GPT-instances, Meta’s LLaMA or Google’s Gemini, will have a revolutionary impact on our lives not seen since the introduction of the World Wide Web. Transformers may change the way we work (and the kind of work we do), create, and even interact with one another—with each of these coming with visions ranging from the utopian to the apocalyptic.

On the one hand, we might soon outsource large swaths of boring, routine tasks—summarizing large, dry technical documents, writing and checking code for routine tasks. On the other, we might find ourselves out of a job altogether, particularly if that job is mainly focused on text production. Image creation engines allow instantaneous production of increasingly high quality illustrations from a simple description, but plagiarize and threaten the livelihood of artists, designers, and illustrators. Routine interpersonal tasks, such as making appointments or booking travel, might be assigned to virtual assistants, while human interaction gets lost in a mire of unhelpful service chatbots, fake online accounts, and manufactured stories and images.

But besides their social impact, LLMs also represent a unique development that make them highly interesting from a philosophical point of view: for the first time, we have a technology capable of reproducing many feats usually linked to human mental capacities—text production at near-human level, the creation of images or pieces of music, even logical and mathematical reasoning to a certain extent. However, so far, LLMs have mainly served as objects of philosophical inquiry, most notable along the lines of ‘Are they sentient?’ (I don’t think so) and ‘Will they kill us all?’. Here, I want to explore whether, besides being the object of philosophical questions, they also might be able to supply—or suggest—some answers: whether philosophers could use LLMs to elucidate their own field of study.

LLMs are, to many of their uses, what a plane is to flying: the plane achieves the same end as the bird, but by different means. Hence, it provides a testbed for certain assumptions about flight, perhaps bearing them out or refuting them by example. Read more »

Monday, April 22, 2024

The Irises Are Blooming Early This Year

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

I live in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. I have been photographing the irises in the Eleventh Street flower beds since 2011. So far I have uploaded 558 of those photos to Flickr.

I took most of those photos in May or June. But there is one from April 30, 2021, and three from April 29, 2022. I took the following photograph on Monday, April 15, 2024 at 4:54 PM (digital cameras can record the date and time an image was taken). Why so early in April? Random variation in the weather I suppose.

Irises on the street in Hoboken.

That particular photo is an example of what I like to call the “urban pastoral,” I term I once heard applied to Hart Crane’s The Bridge.

Most of my iris photographs, however, do not include enough context to justify that label. They are just photographs of irises. I took this one on Friday, April 19, 2024 at 3:23 PM. Read more »

Monday, April 8, 2024

Third Places and American Libraries

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…  —President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953

Andrew Carnegie

The other day I stopped in at one of those coworking spaces to see if it would be worth joining in an effort to increase my productivity. Productivity, in my case, is a fancy word to describe getting my taxes done on time, answering a few emails, staying atop some small businesses, and doing a little writing. I’m not exactly a threat to mainland China.

Unfortunately the place I visited had all the charm of a gulag in far east Russia, with poor lighting, and about four pale characters staring at their computer screens as if they could see the eternal void in the universe and had a longing to visit. No thanks.

It did get me thinking about “third places,” and libraries in particular. I believe the term, third place, was coined by the writer Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place. First places are our homes, second places are where we work, and third places are where we go to get relief from the first and second places. They include churches, libraries, pubs, cafes, parks, gyms, and clubs.

My second place is a beautiful ranch in Colorado, so I have little to complain about, but when it comes to the close work of being on a computer, I really value third places. Scholars have described Oldenburg’s third place as having eight features including neutrality, leveling qualities, accommodation, a low profile, and a sense of home. In short, it’s a place that is welcoming, not fancy, free of social hierarchies, free of dues, and imparts no obligation to be there. That perfectly describes American libraries, one of our greatest institutions. Read more »

Monday, March 18, 2024

The Vegetarian Fallacy

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

Atelier ecosystemes des communs, Alima El Bajnouni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Vegetarian Fallacy was so dubbed by philosophy grad students in a well-oiled pub debate back in the 1980s. There is a fundamental conflict—so the argument went—between vegetarians and ecologists. The first principle of ecology—everything is connected to everything else (Barry Commoner’s first law)—is incompatible with the hands-off, “live and let live” ideal implicit in ethical vegetarianism. The ecologists took the match by arguing that, pragmatically, animals either have a symbiotic role in human life or else they compete with us for habitat, and those competitions go badly for the animals. In the long run, a moral stricture against eating animals will not benefit animals.

Now, pub debates are notoriously broad, and this one obviously was. A swirl of issues made appearances, tangential ones like pragmatism versus ethics, and central ones like holism versus atomism. In the end—philosophers being relatively convivial drinkers—all came to agree that pragmatism and ethics must be symbiotic as well, and that the practice of vegetarianism (beyond its ethical stance) could be more holistically approached and defended. Details, though, are fuzzy.

A fancy capitalized title like “Vegetarian Fallacy” may seem a bit grandiose, given the humble origins I just recounted. What justifies a grand title is when the bad thinking in a losing argument is also at work far beyond that one dispute. And that is my main thesis. So, although I will elaborate the two sides, it will be only a little bit. I am more interested in the mischief the Vegetarian Fallacy is perpetrating not in the academy but in wider political and cultural realms. Read more »

Monday, November 6, 2023

Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, was originally published in 1995 but more recently updated in a 25th anniversary edition in 2020. Well, he added a new introduction, but no study or concept in the book was updated despite huge changes in our lives since then and tons of new studies with updated technology. It’s kind of refreshing to read a book about the problem with kids today without a single mention of phones, but it feels a little sloppy. Goleman is a science journalist without a clinical practice in psychotherapy as far as I can tell. While his book is about how to be smart according to the front cover, it’s also being used in psychotherapy. It’s a fast, engaging read, but I have some concerns about the content and application.

The book outlines the need for emotional intelligence (EI) to be overtly taught to children, explains the psychoneurology of EI, argues for the primacy of emotional intelligence for success, adds in the need for emotional supports, and ends with a call for parents to be better educated as well. The principle underlying Goleman’s text is that there are four specific domains, adapted from Salovey & Mayer, that emerge from the activity of our brain circuits that have more of an impact on our general well being than does our intelligence: self-awareness, self-management (formerly motivation and self-regulation), empathy, and skilled relationships. Goleman explains that people will be better off emotionally, relationally, and vocationally if they develop their emotional intelligence to identify and understand their feelings as they happen, manage them effectively, understand other people’s feelings, and relate to others more positively. With a calm mind, people can make better decisions, which positively affects all other aspects of their life. Goldman has used these domains to help to develop educational programs to teach children Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in the schools through the CASEL organization. I feel like it goes without saying  that being able to manage our emotional experiences helps in other aspects in our lives, so I’m all in at this point. Read more »

Monday, September 25, 2023

Grand Observations: Darwin and Fitzroy

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Captain Robert Fitzroy

One of the artifacts of modern American culture is the digital clutter that crowds our minds and crowds our days. I’m old enough to have grown up in the era before even answering machines and the glorification of fast information. It’s an era that’s hard to remember because like most Americans, I’ve gotten lost in the sea of immediate “content” and the vast body of information at our fingertips and on our phones. While it’s a delicious feeling to be able to access almost every bit of knowledge acquired by humankind over the last few thousand years, I suspect the resulting mental clutter has in many ways made us just plain dumber. Our little brains can absorb and process a lot of information but digesting the massive amount of data available nowadays has some of our minds resembling the storage units of hoarders: an unholy mess of useless facts and impressions guarded in a dark space with a lost key.

If you consider who our “wise men” and “wise women” are these days, they sure seem dumber than men and women of past centuries. I guess some of them are incredibly clever when it comes to computers, material science, genetic engineering, and the like. But when it comes to big-picture thinking, even the most glorified billionaires just seem foolish. And our batch of politicians even more so.

It’s hard to know the shape and content of the human mind in our millions of years of development but the story goes that we’ve advanced in consciousness almost every century, with major advances in periods such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That may be true for certain individuals but as a whole, it seems we drove right on past the bus stop of higher consciousness with our digital orgy and embryonic embrace of artificial intelligence. Are we losing the wonderful feeling, agency, and utility of uncluttered minds? Read more »

Monday, September 4, 2023

The Aesthetics of Dispassionate Observers

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

Aesthetic properties in art works are peculiar. They appear to be based on objective features of an object. Yet, we typically use the way a work of art makes us feel to identify the aesthetic properties that characterize it. However, dispassionate observer cases show that even when the feelings are absent, the aesthetic properties can still be recognized as such. Feelings seem both necessary yet unnecessary for appreciation of the work.

How do we square this circle?

When we ascribe to works of art properties such as beautiful, melancholy, mesmerizing, charming, ugly, awe-inspiring, magnificent, drab, or dynamic we are typically reporting how the work affects us, and we often use what we loosely call “feelings” to help in the ascription. A painting is charming if the viewer feels charmed. The architecture of a building is awe-inspiring if an admirer has the feeling of being awed. To say that a musical passage is beautiful but it leaves me uninspired and bored is peculiar and would require some special explanation for what is meant by “beautiful” in this case. We typically use the degree and kind of pleasure we feel about an object to be one measure of its beauty. The feelings involved in our response to artworks or other aesthetic objects need not be full blown emotions. As many commentators have pointed out, a sad song does not necessarily make one feel sad if you have nothing to be sad about. In fact, we often find sad songs exhilarating. Yet sad songs make us feel an analog to sadness which helps us attribute the property “sad” to the song.

In other words, there is something that it is like to feel charmed, awed, in the presence of beauty, or “sad-adjacent” that typically accompanies the identification of that property in an object. And the feeling state helps us identify the property. We know a film is amusing because it makes us feel amused, joyful because it sparks feelings of joy, etc.

But this raises a puzzle about dispassionate observers. Read more »

Monday, July 17, 2023

How Quantum Models Work

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

A notable theorist visits a notable laboratory (Stephen Hawking at CERN, 2013)

The science lab and the theory suite

If you spend any time doing science, you might notice that some things change when you close the door to the lab and walk into the theory suite.

In the laboratory, surprising things happen, no doubt about it. Depending on the type of lab you’re working in, you might see liquid nitrogen boiling out from a container, solutions changing color only near their surfaces, or microorganisms unexpectedly mutating. But once roughly the same thing happens a few times in a row, the conventional scientific attitude is to suppose that you can make sense of these observations. Sure, you can still expect a few outliers that don’t follow the usual trends, but there’s nothing in the laboratory that forces one to take any strong metaphysical positions. The surprises, instead, are of the sort that might lead someone to ask, Can I see that again? What conditions would allow this surprise to reoccur?

Of course, the ideas discussed back in the theory suite are, in some indirect way, just codified responses to old observational surprises. But scientists—at least, young scientists—rarely think in such pragmatic terms. Most young scientists are cradle realists, and start out with the impression that there is quite a cozy relationship between the entities they invoke in the theory suite and the observations they make back in the lab. This can be quite confusing, since connecting theory to observation is rarely so straightforward as simply calculating from first principles.

The types of experiments I’ve had been able to observe most closely involve electron microscopes. For many cases where electron microscopes are involved, workers will use quantum models to describe the observations. I’ve written about quantum models a few times before, but I haven’t discussed much about how quantum physics models differ from their classical physics counterparts. Last summer, I worked out a simple, concrete example in detail, and this column will discuss the upshot of that, leaving out the details. If you’ve ever wondered, how exactly do quantum models work?—or even if you haven’t wondered, but are wondering now that I mention it—well, read on. Read more »

Monday, May 29, 2023

Responsibility Gaps: A Red Herring?

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon

What should we do in cases where increasingly sophisticated and potentially autonomous AI-systems perform ‘actions’ that, under normal circumstances, would warrant the ascription of moral responsibility? That is, who (or what) is responsible when, for example, a self-driving car harms a pedestrian? An intuitive answer might be: Well, it is of course the company who created the car who should be held responsible! They built the car, trained the AI-system, and deployed it.

However, this answer is a bit hasty. The worry here is that the autonomous nature of certain AI-systems means that it would be unfair, unjust, or inappropriate to hold the company or any individual engineers or software developers responsible. To go back to the example of the self-driving car; it may be the case that due to the car’s ability to act outside of the control of the original developers, their responsibility would be ‘cancelled’, and it would be inappropriate to hold them responsible.

Moreover, it may be the case that the machine in question is not sufficiently autonomous or agential for it to be responsible itself. This is certainly true of all currently existing AI-systems and may be true far into the future. Thus, we have the emergence of a ‘responsibility gap’: Neither the machine nor the humans who developed it are responsible for some outcome.

In this article I want to offer some brief reflections on the ‘problem’ of responsibility gaps. Read more »

Monday, April 3, 2023

Open Letter Season: Large Language Models and the Perils of AI

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon and Ann-Katrien Oimann

DALL·E 2 generated image

Getting a handle on the impacts of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 is difficult.  These LLMs have raised a variety of ethical and regulatory concerns: problems of bias in the data set, privacy concerns for the data that is trawled in order to create and train the model in the first place, the resources used to train the models, etc. These are well-worn issues, and have been discussed at great length, both by critics of these models and by those who have been developing them.

What makes the task of figuring out the impacts of these systems even more difficult is the hype that surrounds them. It is often difficult to sort fact from fiction, and if we don’t have a good idea of what these systems can and can’t do, then it becomes almost impossible to figure out how to use them responsibly. Importantly, in order to craft proper legislation at both national and international levels we need to be clear about the future harm these systems might cause and ground these harms in the actual potential that these systems have.

In the last few days this discourse has taken an interesting turn. The Future of Life Institute (FLI) published an open letter (which has been signed by thousands of people, including eminent AI researchers) calling for a 6-month moratorium on “Giant AI Experiments”. Specifically, the letter calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4”. Quite the suggestion, given the rapid progress of these systems.

A few days after the FLI letter, another Open Letter was published, this time by researchers in Belgium (Nathalie A. Smuha, Mieke De Ketelaere, Mark Coeckelbergh, Pierre Dewitte and Yves Poullet). In the Belgian letter, the authors call for greater attention to the risk of emotional manipulation that chatbots, such as GPT-4, present (here they reference the tragic chatbot-incited suicide of a Belgian man). In the letter the authors outline some specific harms these systems bring about, advocate for more educational initiatives (including awareness campaigns to better inform people of the risks), a broader public debate, and urgent stronger legislative actions. Read more »

Monday, March 20, 2023

Does Identity Matter?

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

When we speak about identity, we usually have in mind the various social categories we occupy—gender categories, nationality, or racial categories being the most prominent. But none of these general characteristics really define us as individuals. Each of us falls into various categories but so does everyone else. To say I’m a straight white male puts me in a bucket with millions of others. To add my nationality and profession only narrows it down a bit.

While all these factors contribute to one’s identity, they don’t reach what makes each of us a distinct individual. Why should that matter? It matters in part because we want to be treated as an individual not a type, but also because having an understanding of one’s distinctive identity might help us decide what kind of life to live. It might help us guide our self-formation by reinforcing decisions tailored to one’s very specific needs, values, and aspirations.

So what does constitute our distinctiveness as persons? We might try to answer this by thinking about cases in which one’s identity is missing—what is commonly called an identity crisis. In an identity crisis we question our purpose in life, what our role or place in society is, what values we ought to be committed to, or the meaning and significance of our activities. But having purpose, meaning, and a commitment to certain values doesn’t quite individuate us either. We share values, commitments, and meanings with many others. These all seem necessary to us as individuals but aren’t sufficient to explain what makes us the distinctive selves we are.

When confronted with such puzzles we might hope that philosophy could straighten us out. However, the results of philosophical inquiry into questions of personal identity are mixed, although I think in the end helpful. Read more »

Monday, November 28, 2022

A Science Thanksgiving

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The pistol shrimp (Image credit: Wired)

It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in the U.S., and there’s an informal tradition on Thanksgiving to give thanks for all kinds of things in our lives. Certainly there’s plenty to be thankful for this year, especially for those of us whose lives and livelihoods haven’t been personally devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. But I thought I would do something different this year. Instead of being thankful for life’s usual blessings, how about being thankful for some specific facts of nature and the universe that are responsible for our very existence and make it wondrous? Being employed and healthy and surrounded by family and friends is excellent, but none of that would be possible without the amazing unity and diversity of life and the universe. So without further ado and in no particular order, I present an entirely personal selection of ten favorites for which I am eternally thankful.

I am thankful for the value of the resonance level energy of the excited state of carbon-12: carbon-12 which is the basis of all organic life on earth is formed in stars through the reaction of beryllium-8 with helium-4. The difference in energies between the starting materials (beryllium + helium) and carbon is only about 4%. If this difference had been even slightly higher, the unstable beryllium-8 would have disappeared long before it had transmuted into carbon-12, making life impossible. Read more »

Life Is hard. Can Philosophy Help?

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

Does philosophy have anything to tell us about problems we face in everyday life? Many ancient philosophers thought so. To them, philosophy was not merely an academic discipline but a way of life that provided distinctive reasons and motivations for living well. Some contemporary philosophers have been inspired by these ancient sources giving new life to this question about philosophy’s practical import.

The problem with the contemporary discussion about philosophy as a way of life is that answers to questions about how to live are too often drawn directly from these ancient sources. Aristotle, the Stoics, or Epicurus are treated as sages bestowing wisdom on us blinkered moderns. While there is no doubt great wisdom in this ancient literature, one might question the relevance of their commentary. We live in vastly different circumstances confronting problems of which they never dreamed. Furthermore, there has been a flood of philosophical water flowing under the bridge during the past 2000 years. Is that just so much effluent to be drawn off while we contemplate the Stoic logos or Plato’s forms?

This literature needs input from contemporary philosophers who can apply their considerable analytic skills to problems in living as they emerge in modern society without being freighted with ancient ideologies. Hence the import of Kieran Setiya’s new book, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. It is a paradigm of what is needed in current discussions about philosophy as way of life. Read more »

Monday, November 21, 2022

Privacy as a Common Good in the Age of Big Data

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Josie Roux and Fabio Tollon

Do we need to rethink the role (or conception) of privacy in a highly digitised world? The widespread collection of online user data has generated substantial interest in the various ways in which our right to privacy has been violated. Additionally, worries about our privacy being undermined are also linked to the coercive or manipulative power that digital technologies have over our lives. The concern, then, is that the widespread gathering and use of massive amounts of private information by Big Data barons might undermine individual autonomy. Moreover, if we consider that citizen autonomy is a crucial element of democracy, it becomes clear that the problem of privacy invasions of widespread data collection goes beyond its effect on individual users.

Here we would like to suggest that this situation demands that we reassess the way that we value privacy in liberal democracies.  Traditionally, privacy has been valued as an individual good; it is valued instrumentally for the individual goods it protects such as intimacy, creativity, self-expression, and personhood. In general, privacy is viewed as a right afforded to individuals that protects them from incursions from society. However, if we value privacy for its essential role in the protection of democracy, then it becomes clear that privacy is not only important for individuals but for society as a whole, and is not just an individual good but a common good. Read more »

Monday, October 3, 2022

Skepticism as A Way of Life

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

Today “skepticism” has two related meanings. In ordinary language it is a behavioral disposition to withhold assent to a claim until sufficient evidence is available to judge the claim true or false. This skeptical disposition is central to scientific inquiry, although financial incentives and the attractions of prestige render it inconsistently realized. In a world increasingly afflicted with misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies we could use more skepticism of this sort.

In philosophy, “skepticism” refers to the theoretical position that no claim satisfies the requirements for genuine knowledge. It is a move in the long-standing debate about the nature of knowledge and justification. However, this modern, theoretical use of the term harkens back to an ancient philosophical tradition that viewed skepticism, not solely as a theoretical position, but as a way of life. As the debate about philosophy as a way of life has emerged in the past several decades, this ancient view of skepticism has received some discussion. It’s worth considering what it can contribute to that debate.

Is skepticism a coherent way of life?

Most of the discussion makes use of the argument provided by Sextus Empiricus, who lived in the second or third century CE somewhere in the Mediterranean region and whose works have survived largely intact. The basic argument is this:

A good life should be as free from psychological disturbance as possible. Thus, a good life is a life of tranquility. Philosophical argument is the means through which we can achieve tranquility.

If you have attended seminars in philosophy, you might question this claim but bear with me. Read more »