What would Plato think of TV? And now Plato is on Twitter.
Author: Myers
Is consistency a hobgoblin of moral reasoning?
Do our moral beliefs need to be consistent? Why should we care about logical consistency in our moral beliefs? Maybe it’s a bit obsessive to focus on asking whether your moral beliefs could be universal law.
The war on reason
“Scientists and philosophers argue that human beings are little more than puppets of their biochemistry. Here’s why they’re wrong.” This is Paul Bloom’s very good review of neuroscience’s claim that we are biochemical puppets and social psychology’s demonstration that factors we are unaware of influence our thoughts and acts. But Bloom concludes: “Yes, we are physical beings, and yes, we are continually swayed by factors beyond our control. But as Aristotle recognized long ago, what’s so interesting about us is our capacity for reason, which reigns over all. If you miss this, you miss almost everything that matters.”
Time travel and killing Hitler
Time travelers: please don’t kill Hitler. One of the most popular mind experiments for exmining theories of knowledge and theories of reality is time travel. And for time travelers, one of the most common scenarios (perhaps the most common) is killing Hitler. But … “in almost any science-fiction scenario involving time-travel, the default action is to kill Hitler. As terrible a human being as he was, there are many reasons why this probably isn’t a good idea.”
Arguments against God
“I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist.” An interview with Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the editor of the essay collection Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life.
Why study philosophy?
To challenge your own point of view. An interview with philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.
Should we redesign humans?
… or, for that matter, monkeys? “Say you did create a human-chimp chimera that was like a dog, but much, much smarter. It loved you unconditionally and did what you wanted and was a sort of slave, but it enjoyed it. Does that being have a complaint against you? If it hadn’t been created in that way, it wouldn’t have existed. In that sense, it’s not harmed.”
Figuring out who the real you is
Experimental philosophy and self-identity. Joshua Knobe shows that blurring the line between psychology and philosophy can help us figure out who or what the true you is.
Is the universe a simulation?
Is the universe a simulation? Mathematical truths seem to be timeless and unchanging realities we discover rather than something we invent. But as fallible as we are, how could we ever discover these truths? One “possibility is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics — not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used.”
Socratically Speaking 