“He argued that all four sublunar elements, namely, earth, water, air, and fire, can be analysed into geometrical units which take two shapes: cubical when at rest, and pyramidal when in motion. This allowed him, in turn, to solve the difficulty of the participation of the cubical portions of earth in elemental transmutations, which was due to the triangular faces of the other elements.”
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins, 2020
With the wit, insight, and spellbinding prose that have made him a bestselling author, Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, combining them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder.
On the blog today, Victor Lange and Thor Grünbaum discuss their recent paper about transparency of experience and mindfulness meditation. #philosophy@philosophy
“Hermeneutical disarmament is the process by which a person is rendered less able to understand or communicate experiences, ideas, and other phenomena as a result of semantic change to the linguistic resources that could previously have been deployed for these purposes.”
“#SocialMedia has turned so many into public relations professionals who pursue likeability instead of #truth. That’s why people speak along pre-vetted party lines and silence their edgy ideas. First to others, later to themselves. When anything you say online can be instantly accessed with a Google search, the costs of independent thinking aren’t worth the benefits to most people.”
A New Basis for Animal Ethics: Telos and Common Sense by Bernard E. Rollin, 2016
“Possibly the most important book on animal welfare written to date. In exquisite chapter after chapter Rollin presents the philosophical background of what telos is, why it matters and demonstrates with stories, anecdotes, and data, why common sense is an important basis for understanding animals, their needs and their wants."
Now that it's been accepted to ACM FAccT'24, I've updated the preprint of my paper on why artists are right that AI art is a kind of theft. I hope this promotes more serious thought about the visions of generative AI developers and the impacts of these technologies.
New review: Alfie & Me is more than a memoir about nursing back to health a wild animal. Come for the owls, stay for Safina's philosophical reflections and piercing analysis of our environmental predicament.
On the blog today, Paweł Gładziejewski discusses how we should think of changes to people's metaphysical beliefs about the world after having taken psychedelics #philosophy@philosophy
You can tell #Kuhn is thinking of #Wittgenstein, PI here: "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life." This is from "Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product," 1977, first essay in The Essential Tension and also in The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn.
Latest papers: Manuel García-Carpintero argues that to address issues regarding self-ascriptions of conscious thoughts in light of claims of thought insertion in schizophrenic patients, the all-inclusive term ‘thought’ should be avoided https://buff.ly/3yj7jN4@philosophy#philosophy