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4530.724142
In the world of literary non-fiction, John McPhee is a god. Through his New Yorker essays, and prize-winning books McPhee has mastered the art of narrative non-fiction. In fact, he pretty much invented the genre. …
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5662.724244
This paper explores the connection between the feelings that arise in grief and two kinds of “grief tech” that we use to regulate these feelings: music and AI-driven chatbots. “Grief tech” covers a broad range of practices, rituals, and artefacts that shape how we experience and express our grief. Music and AI might seem to have little in common with one another. However, I argue that both afford something not all forms of grief tech do – collaborative possibilities for world-making – and therefore can help the bereaved reconstruct “habits of intimacy” lost when a loved one dies. This (re)constructive impact is part of their world-making potency. And it is a crucial part of grief work. In this way, both music and AI potentially have a deep effect on our emotions, agency, and self-regulative capacities. This is why both are particularly powerful forms of grief tech.
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20145.724258
A normative power is supposed to be a power to directly change normative reality. We can, of course, indirectly change normative reality by affecting the antecedents of conditional norms: By unfairly insulting you, I get myself to have a duty to apologize, but that is simply due to a pre-existing duty to apologize for all unfair insults. …
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29278.724265
The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re living through, if not the last days of humanity, then surely the last days of liberal democracy on earth. All the more reason to ignore all of that, then, and blog instead about the notorious Busy Beaver function! …
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32044.724271
The idea that diverse groups of ordinary citizens will “outperform” expert panels has become something of a totemic conviction in democratic theory. The “diversity trumps ability” (DTA) theorem, first formulated by the economists Lu Hong and Scott E. Page (2004), asserts that under certain conditions, diverse assemblies will find better solutions to complex problems than homogeneous groups of the best experts. This result has been taken up with much enthusiasm by political theorists, some of whom have taken it to prove the epistemic supremacy of democratic decision-making over its competitors (Landemore 2013). In debates with defenders of expertocratic and epistocratic, let alone autocratic, modes of decision-making,
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51474.724277
The fields of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics have experienced rapid growth over the past decade, yet little research has focused on issues related to midlife or older age. In light of the profound demographic changes occurring in our society, this is an important research gap. The past century witnessed a near doubling of life expectancy, and it is projected that in <50 years, there will be close to 90 million Americans aged 65 years (Federal Interagency Forum on Aging-Related Statistics, 2010). We are on the brink of profound demographic changes both in the USA and the world at large (see: http://www.prb.org/Articles/2011/agingpopulationclocks.aspx).
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74453.724283
Assume naturalism and suppose that digital electronic systems can be significantly conscious. Suppose Alice is a deterministic significantly conscious digital electronic system. Imagine we duplicated Alice to make another such system, Bob, and fed them both the same inputs. …
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221094.724289
Confirmation bias has been widely studied for its role in failures of reasoning. Individuals exhibiting confirmation bias fail to engage with information that contradicts their current beliefs, and, as a result, can fail to abandon inaccurate beliefs. But although most investigations of confirmation bias focus on individual learning, human knowledge is typically developed within a social structure. We use network models to show that moderate confirmation bias often improves group learning. However, a downside is that a stronger form of confirmation bias can hurt the knowledge-producing capacity of the community.
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237124.724297
Being low status is unpleasant. Sometimes it’s only that, and barely so: when it comes to sports, my athletic abilities mark me as inferior, and won’t get me attention from professional recruiters, but I don’t care. …
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288162.724303
One of my recurring themes is that people underrate epistemic discipline: doing the most basic legwork of good thinking. Both critical thinking books and rationalist writings often focus on fallacies involving subtleties like the Monty Hall problem and Bayes’ Theorem. …
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415975.724309
If morality and self-interest don’t always coincide—if
sometimes doing what’s right isn’t also best for
you—morality can sometimes require you to do what will be worse
for you or to forgo an act that would benefit you. But some
philosophers think a reasonable morality can’t be too demanding
in this sense and have proposed moral views that are less so.
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466511.724314
from our empathy for the dead. Much needs to be done to give a satisfying defense of this proposal — beginning with a defense of the suggestion that empathy can extend, beyond the living, to those who experience nothing. But the very suggestion that empathy plays even some role in grief may itself come as a surprise. In fact, the suggestion goes against the grain of much recent theorizing in philosophical discussions of grief. One of the major divides in this literature is between “agent-centered” views of grief, which claim that the loss to be grieved is a loss from the perspective of the bereaved person’s life, and “object-centered” views, which claim that the loss to be grieved is an objective loss of life, not, primarily, a loss to the griever. Empathy disappears from view in this setting because it straddles the divide between self (the grieving agent) and other (the objective loss); in empathizing, it is said that one feels for another.
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466537.72432
Despite persistent misunderstandings to the contrary, standpoint theorists are not committed to an automatic privilege thesis (Wylie 2003, 27). According to an automatic privilege thesis, those who occupy marginalized social positions automatically know more, or know better, by virtue of their social location. The issues with this thesis are obvious: it is implausible; it offers no explanation of the connection between marginalized social location and epistemic advantage; and it cannot explain how it is that some marginalized individuals seem to (genuinely) buy into oppressive ideologies.
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528812.724325
Postgraduate research training in the United Kingdom often narrowly focuses on domain-specific methods, neglecting wider philosophical topics such as epistemology and scientific method. Consequently, we designed a workshop on (inductive, deductive, and abductive) inference for postgraduate researchers. We ran the workshop three times with (N = 29) attendees from across four universities, testing the potential benefits of the workshop in a mixed-method, repeated measures design. Our core aims were to investigate what attendees learned from the workshop, and whether they felt it had impacted on their research practices six months later. Overall, learning inferential logic benefitted postgraduate researchers in various ways and to varying degrees. Six months on, roughly half of attendees reported being more critical of key aspects of research such as inferences and study design. Additionally, some attendees reported more subtle effects, such as prompting new lines of thought and inquiry. Given that self-criticism and scepticism are fundamental intellectual virtues, these results evidence the importance of embedding epistemological training into doctoral programmes across the UK.
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586487.724333
An aesthetic sense—a taste for the creation and/or appreciation of that which strikes one as, e.g., attractive or awesome—is often assumed to be a distinctively H. sapiens phenomenon. However, recent paleoanthropological research is revealing its archaeologically visible, deeper roots. The sensorimotor/perceptual and cognitive capacities underpinning aesthetic activities are a major focus of evolutionary aesthetics. Here we take a diachronic, evolutionary perspective and assess ongoing scepticism regarding whether, and to what extent, aesthetic capacity extends to our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it serves as a defence of the attribution of Neanderthal aesthetic capacity by marshalling archaeological data best explained by positing a Neanderthal aesthetic sense. Second, it offers an opportunity to make progress on understanding some epistemically relevant features of the wider debate in evolutionary aesthetics.
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625505.724339
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is said to pose many risks, be they catastrophic, existential and otherwise. This paper discusses whether the notion of risk can apply to AGI, both descriptively and in the current regulatory framework. The paper argues that current definitions of risk are ill-suited to capture supposed AGI existential risks, and that the risk-based framework of the EU AI Act is inadequate to deal with truly general, agential systems.
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649394.724347
On the occasion of the 7th International Conference on Economic Philosophy that we organized last month in Reims, we had two book sessions on recently published books dealing with the main topic of the conference, “market(s) and democracy.” One of the sessions was about Petr Špecián’s (Charles University) Behavioral Political Economy and Democratic Theory (Routledge, 2022) and the other discussed Lisa Herzog’s (University of Groningen) Citizen Knowledge. …
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655817.724353
Episodic memory gives us the ability to mentally travel back in time to revisit and relive past experiences. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the function of episodic memory. According to the orthodox view, episodic memory should be considered a part of a constructive system that simulates the future for sophisticated foresight and flexible planning. In this paper, I offer a novel alternative view. I argue that episodic memory provides invaluable information about the past behavior of others, allowing us to identify reliable and trustworthy partners while avoiding dealing with cheaters. Theoretical models demonstrate that cooperation in groups can be maintained if potential partners use information about an individual’s past behavior to guide their behavior toward that individual. In these reputation-based models of human cooperation, individuals with a history of cheating are ostracized, whereas those with a history of cooperative behavior flourish. Against this theoretical background, it is possible to see a function of episodic memory in facilitating information exchange about others, helping group members make effective partner choices, and avoiding the risk of interacting with cheaters. If correct, episodic memory may have played a significant role in the evolution of human cooperation.
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679994.724359
Vices are often attributed to corporations. We hear that casinos are ‘greedy,’ mining companies are ‘ruthless,’ or tobacco companies are ‘dishonest.’ This chapter addresses two questions. First, are such corporate vices reducible to the vices of individual role-bearers? Second, which traits of corporations are properly labelled ‘vices’? The chapter argues that corporate vice is sometimes irreducible to the vices of role-bearers: corporations can be vicious ‘over and above’ the traits of role-bearers. It further argues that different corporations should be held to different standards: what it means for a casino to be ‘vicious’ is different from what it means for a mining company to be ‘vicious,’ for example.
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759812.724365
Kuhn’s analysis of the structure and function of the scientific community has been recently re-interpreted as a seminal contribution to the so-called social epistemology of science. Kuhn’s social epistemology should be considered as part of a normative-descriptive philosophical framework in which epistemological, historical, sociological, and psychological elements are interconnected. In this chapter, I will compare Kuhn’s seminal insights with two contemporary approaches to the social epistemology of science, namely: the development of idealised formal models of the scientific community and the use of qualitative studies for philosophical purposes. On the one hand, these contemporary approaches to social epistemology may be regarded as developing some of Kuhn’s views in new and exciting ways. On the other hand, however, it is still not entirely clear which kind of general philosophical ‘image of science’ they are contributing to. This chapter, therefore, aims at illuminating how analysing some of the contemporary debates in social epistemology through the lenses of Kuhn’s philosophy may recast under a new light the issue of the value of the study of the social dimension of scientific research for general philosophy of science.
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816947.724372
This paper analyses the phenomenology and epistemology of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard. The computational architecture underpinning these chatbots are large language models (LLMs), which are generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on a massive dataset of text extracted from the Web. We conceptualise these LLMs as multifunctional computational cognitive artifacts, used for various cognitive tasks such as translating, summarizing, answering questions, information-seeking, and much more. Phenomenologically, LLMs can be experienced as a “quasi-other”; when that happens, users anthropomorphise them. For most users, current LLMs are black boxes, i.e., for the most part, they lack data transparency and algorithmic transparency. They can, however, be phenomenologically and informationally transparent, in which case there is an interactional flow. Anthropomorphising and interactional flow can, in some users, create an attitude of (unwarranted) trust towards the output LLMs generate. We conclude this paper by drawing on the epistemology of trust and testimony to examine the epistemic implications of these dimensions. Whilst LLMs generally generate accurate responses, we observe two epistemic pitfalls. Ideally, users should be able to match the level of trust that they place in LLMs to the degree that LLMs are trustworthy. However, both their data and algorithmic opacity and their phenomenological and informational transparency can make it difficult for users to calibrate their trust correctly. The effects of these limitations are twofold: users may adopt unwarranted attitudes of trust towards the outputs of LLMs (which is particularly problematic when LLMs hallucinate), and the trustworthiness of LLMs may be undermined.
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831758.724377
What should morally conscientious agents do if they must choose among options that are somewhat right and somewhat wrong? Should you select an option that is right to the highest degree, or would it perhaps be more rational to choose randomly among all somewhat right options? And how should lawmakers and courts address behavior that is neither entirely right nor entirely wrong? In this first book-length discussion of the “gray area” in ethics, Martin Peterson challenges the assumption that rightness and wrongness are binary properties. He argues that some acts are neither entirely right nor entirely wrong, but rather a bit of both. Including discussions of white lies and the permissibility of abortion, Peterson’s book presents a gradualist theory of right and wrong designed to answer pressing practical questions about the gray area in ethics.
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932802.724386
This paper attempts to revive the epistemological discussion of scientific articles. What are their epistemic aims, and how are they achieved? We argue that scientific experimental articles are best understood as a particular kind of narrative: i.e., modernist narratives (think: Woolf, Joyce), at least in the sense that they employ many of the same techniques, including colligation and the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives. We suggest that this way of writing is necessary given the nature of modern science, but it also has specific epistemic benefits: it provides readers with an effective way to grasp the content of scientific articles which increases their understanding. On the other hand, modernist writing is vulnerable to certain kinds of epistemic abuses, which can be found instantiated in modern scientific writing as well.
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936654.724392
I show really be done with Integrated Information Theory (IIT), in Aaronson’s simplified formulation, but I noticed a rather interesting difficult. In my previous post on the subject, I noticed that a double grid system where there are two grids stacked on top of one another, with the bottom grid consisting of inputs and the upper grid of outputs, and each upper value being the logical OR of the (up to) five neighboring input values will be conscious according to IIT if all the values are zero and the grid is large enough. …
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990503.724398
Scientists have the epistemic responsibility of producing knowledge. They also have the social responsibility of aligning their research with the needs and values of various societal stakeholders. Individual scientists may be left with no guidance on how to prioritise and carry these different responsibilities. As I will argue, however, the responsibilities of science can be harmonised at the collective level. Drawing from debates in moral philosophy, I will propose a theory of the collective responsibilities of science that accounts for the internal diversity of research groups and for their different responsibilities.
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1095316.724404
Australia II became the first foreign yacht to win the America’s Cup in 1983. The boat had a revolutionary wing keel and a better underwater hull form. In official documents, Ben Lexcen is credited with the design. He is also listed as the sole inventor of the wing keel in a patent application submitted on February 5, 1982.
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1134231.72441
I hope this is my last post for a while on Integrated Information Theory (IIT), in Aaronson’s simplified formulation. One of the fun and well-known facts is that if you have an impractically large square two-dimensional grid of interconnected logic gates (presumably with some constant time-delay in each gate between inputs and outputs to prevent race conditions) in a fixed point (i.e., nothing is changing), the result can still have a degree of integrated information proportional to the square root of the number of gates. …
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1152492.724416
As I’m writing the final words of my manuscript and – hopefully – would-be book tentatively titled “Social Choice and Public Reason,” I’ve been rereading some classics of social choice theory to find some material relevant for the general introduction. …
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1205517.724422
It’s a cliché about philosophers that they ponder the meaning of life. But, by and large, they don’t. Philosophers rarely consider the question and when they do, they often dismiss it as nonsense. Among those who take life’s meaning seriously, many do so only to proclaim that it has none: life is meaningless or absurd.
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1205970.724427
Recent research indicates gender differences in the impact of stress on decision behavior, but little is known about the brain mechanisms involved in these gender-specific stress effects. The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine whether induced stress resulted in gender-specific patterns of brain activation during a decision task involving monetary reward. Specifically, we manipulated physiological stress levels using a cold pressor task, prior to a risky decision making task. Healthy men (n ¼ 24, 12 stressed) and women (n ¼ 23, 11 stressed) completed the decision task after either cold pressor stress or a control task during the period of cortisol response to the cold pressor. Gender differences in behavior were present in stressed participants but not controls, such that stress led to greater reward collection and faster decision speed in males but less reward collection and slower decision speed in females. A gender-by-stress interaction was observed for the dorsal striatum and anterior insula. With cold stress, activation in these regions was increased in males but decreased in females. The findings of this study indicate that the impact of stress on reward-related decision processing differs depending on gender.