Why nothing is truly alive. “Life is a concept, not a reality.” But if there is no precise threshold between living and nonliving, wouldn’t it be as plausible to say nothing is truly not alive?
P2: What can I know?
Faith and reason …
When and why did faith start to fade? An interesting review of the reasons and causes of contemporary disbelief. Or maybe faith isn’t fading: The False Equation of Atheism and Intellectual Sophistication.
Can metaphysics tell us what reality is really?
Tim Crane explains what metaphysics is about. “It’s abstract and not everyone’s cup of tea but, in many ways, inescapable. Cambridge University philosopher Tim Crane introduces the best books on metaphysics.”
This will change your life
What makes an idea valuable … that it is true or that it is startlingly new and different? “Even in the world of academia, most people aren’t motivated by the truth. What they want, above all, is not to be bored.”
More about Plato, Google, neuroscience, etc.
Colin McGinn’s review of Rebecca Goldstein’s “Plato at the Googleplex.” Here “Ms. Goldstein employs her novelistic skills to sparkling effect by weaving abstract concepts into concrete modern narratives. At a cable news station, he is grilled by one Roy McCoy, who is not a bit intimidated by his distinguished Greek guest: ‘Okay, so they tell me you’re a big deal in philosophy, Plato. I’m going to tell you up front—because that’s the kind of guy I am, up-front—that I don’t think much of philosophers.’ Plato coolly responds: ‘Many don’t. The term attracts a wide range of reaction, from admiration to amusement to animadversion. Some people think philosophers are worthless, and others that they are worth everything in the world. Sometimes they take on the appearance of statesmen, and sometimes of sophists. Sometimes, too, they might give the impression that they are completely insane.'”
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.
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.”
Where does consciousness come from?
Panpsychism. “It’s a question that’s perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: Where does consciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from chemistry and electricity in our brains is an unsolved mystery. Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, thinks he might know the answer. According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That’s just the way the universe works.”
It’s hard to change your mind
“The New Atheist Sam Harris recently offered to pay $10,000 to anyone who can disprove his arguments about morality. Jonathan Haidt analyzes the nature of reasoning, and the ease with which reason becomes a servant of the passions. He bets $10,000 that Harris will not change his mind.” Why? Because “people deploy their reasoning powers to find support for what they want to believe.”
Socratically Speaking 