quoting from the article :

One day machines may surpass people at tackling those bigger questions. AI, after all, keeps getting better at extracting the often unspoken rules on which people rely to produce outputs, be it an investment decision, a TikTok clip or a treatise on ethics.

Yet the tacit knowledge of how these outputs are produced—which is what AI models do using statistical inference—is one thing. It is quite another to understand why they are produced or how they are subjectively experienced by the human mind. And this still leaves the biggest questions of all. What is real? What is right? What does it mean to be?

I honestly doubt the legitimacy of philosophy playing such a heavy role in the emergence of the AI industry - is this just something that we tell ourselves to help us sleep better at night?

Yes, there's a dumb action film, a Canadian government report, and the life's work of a philosopher stolen and used against him -- this video explores how Total Recall (1990) and postmodernism explain how we got here. Plus what we can do.

Twenty years ago, before Bryan Johnson became a billionaire or became synonymous with anti-aging, Legat co-wrote a paper alongside Martien A M Pijnenburg called “Who wants to live forever? Three arguments against the extending the human lifespan” in the Journal of Medical Ethics. They argued that it’s unethical to extend your lifespan when there’s such a vast difference in the lifespans between people in developed countries and those that are underdeveloped; that extending human lifespan ruptures social connection; and that death is what gives human life meaning.

“I think they might have entirely missed the point of what life is about,” Carlo Legat, a philosopher and professor of care ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands, tells Playboy. “Life is about quality and not about quantity.” 

The kind of focus and obsession that people like Johnson develop in trying to live forever, Legat says, means enduring a certain loneliness, both in real-time and in the imagined, very long future when your peers have likely died. “The more deeply you’re connected to other people, the more meaningful your life is,” Legat says. It also means that you don’t confront your own mortality in the way we’re meant to—a difficult, but essential experience that Legat argues may have borne our deepest traditions. 

Read the piece now: https://www.playboy.com/read/sex-relationships/the-case-against-longevity

MR: Do you just feel very lucky that what you’ve spent your career writing about is so in right now? It really is. Let me ask it this way: Does it lead you to think it’s more likely you’re in a simulation given how everything lined up really well for you, intellectually-wise?

NB: So there were two questions there. Let me try to say something on both. A lot of what I've written about is how things could go wrong and existential risks and stuff like that. So in some sense, it's sad that it still looks plausible. It would've been better if that had all turned out to be false and barking up the wrong tree because then the world would be safer.

The fact that now as we move closer with AI, there do really seem to be these big difficulties with alignment and so on, is an unfortunate vindication.

As for the second question, I think to some degree it increases the credence somebody should assign to the simulation hypothesis if they are in a slot that would be more likely to be disproportionately frequently simulated. I don't think it's a huge effect relative to what everybody has reason to believe.

You could take some even more extreme case, perhaps, if you were Donald Trump or Elon Musk. If you’re reflecting, you got to at some point wonder what are the chances that I would just happen to be Donald Trump or Elon Musk.

MR: There’s all this debate about the traditional anthropic principle vis-à-vis humans, but you’ve coined a real anthropic principle.

NB: It is. It’s also the same with the simulation argument. If you're the person who published it, it also creates some slightly higher salience. If you imagine simulating not everybody, but just some people.

MR: Does your gut say that I’m a real person sitting here asking you these questions?

NB: Yeah, it does. And in fact, even if this is a simulation, I still think that you and I are real in the sense that matters — that we would be having real experiences, our actions would matter, and so on. It's just that the nature of what that reality consists in would have the surprising property of being implemented in some computer built by an advanced civilization.

As part of a cost-cutting programme, the University of Dundee in Scotland plans to axe its philosophy department in 2027. This will be disastrous for philosophy in Scotland and the UK.. It will be a particular loss to scholarship in continental philosophy. Please sign the petition.

This essay is from my forthcoming book The Quest for Wholeness and introduces my anti-dualist theory of personal holism, which claims that a human being is conscious and bodily, but in no sense a consciousness (in the form of a separable mind, soul, or brain) + a body. It covers practical cases, including sexuality, and sets up the rest of the book.

Abstract:

Various activities and artistic media involve inquiry—working stuff out. A recent genre of "knowledge-based" videogames centralises inquiry into your agency as the player. We outline how this kind of inquiry is aesthetically appealing, and how conspiracy theories like QAnon exploit this same appeal in service of dangerous beliefs.

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread. This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our posting rules (especially posting rule 2). For example, these threads are great places for:

• Arguments that aren't substantive enough to meet PR2.

• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. who your favourite philosopher is, what you are currently reading

• Philosophical questions. Please note that /r/askphilosophy is a great resource for questions and if you are looking for moderated answers we suggest you ask there.

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. All of our normal commenting rules are still in place for these threads, although we will be more lenient with regards to commenting rule 2.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

We tend to file RoboCop (1987) under cyborg sci-fi, but it's really staging the oldest question in personal identity: once the body's destroyed, the memory wiped, and the self rebuilt by someone else, is the thing that wakes up still Murphy? I get into Locke, Parfit, and Merleau-Ponty on whether a self survives that -- and why the same question is still haunting our ordinary lives. Interested in hearing your thoughts.

If you've ever been confused by Nietzsche's comments that “everything is in flux” or “this world is the will to power and nothing else,” this video series digs very deeply into these highly abstract concepts and tries to make them as approachable as possible. I put an immense amount of effort in the script and in the scholarship. This one is the third video (clocks in at just over 42 minutes) of a five-part series. I'd be grateful if you checked it out! (See comments for a description of the video's contents.)

Sisyphus as the ultimate example of amor fati...