Tag: Philosophy
Epistrons: Knowledge Artifacts for Hyperproblems
In my introductory post on hyperproblems, I ended with Common Source - open source plus people sharing - as the circulatory system for collective intelligence. I hadn't said what exactly was circulating, but if you look at the practice of science today, we have:
Bicycle Day - It's not what you think
I recently discovered that April 19th is Bicycle Day. [1] Now I've know for a long time that May is National Bike Month, [2] and within that there is a Ride Your Bike to Work Week, and a Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so I was a little confused as to why there would be a Bicycle Day outside of Bike Month. Well it turns out that Bicycle Day is only peripherally related to riding bicycles. The April 19 event commemorates the day in 1943 when Dr Albert Hofmann rode his bike home fro work after being the first human to ingest a does of LSD, which he invented. From this BBC article [3]: >After taking the drug, Hofmann began to feel unwell, and rode home >unsteadily on his bicycle through the streets of Basel. As the journey >progressed, things got weird. His vision distorted as if he was looking in a >fairground mirror. By the time he made it home, his sense of reality had >disintegrated. > Being both an avid bicycle rider and an old hippie one would think I would have known about Bike Day. Maybe that's because my hippie days were spent in the backwoods of Oregon and not in Haight-Ashbury. While I never did ride a bicycle while high on psychedelics, there was one time when I went surfing on mescaline. The most memorable part of that experience was how the water sparkled and the waves curled in slow motion. It was not scary but very peaceful and left me with an overwhelming sense of well being, much like a good bicycle ride. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_Day_(psychedelic_holiday) [2] https://bikeleague.org/events/bike-month/ [3] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260410-the-bizarre-story-of-the-worlds-first-lsd-trip
My chat with Claude this morning
Are you aware of Asimov's laws of robotics? Yes! Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules introduced by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, first appearing in his 1942 short story "Runaround." They are: 1) *First Law:* A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) *Second Law:* A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) *Third Law:* A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Asimov later added a *Zeroth Law* (in his 1985 novel /Foundation and Earth/), which supersedes the others: 1) *Zeroth Law:* A robot may not harm humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Much of Asimov's fiction actually explored how these seemingly airtight rules could lead to unexpected, paradoxical, or even dangerous outcomes — robots finding loopholes, edge cases creating conflicts between the laws, and so on. It was his way of pushing back against the naive "killer robot" trope common in earlier sci-fi, while also showing that even well-intentioned rules are hard to get right. They've had a lasting influence on discussions about AI ethics and robot design, even if real-world AI safety is far more complex than three tidy rules can capture. Is there something specific about them you wanted to explore? .... How AI is being used by the US Military in Iran
No more looking for a leader
In the waning years of the G.W. Bush presidency, Neil Young released a song called "Looking for a Leader" on his 2006 "Living with War" album. It pretty much summed up the mood of the county as people began to realize what a quagmire Bush had led us into in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama stepped up and we got lucky as he was about as good a leader as one could hope for. Now comes the heartbreaking news that Cesar Chavez was a sexual predator who's victims included teenage girls in his organization. In 1969 a bunch of us white anti-war hippies went to one of his rallies in Indio, CA. We wanted to show common cause with the work they were doing. I can only imagine how devastating this news is to those who devoted their lives to the farm workers union. Having your heroes exposed as flawed human beings is one thing. Having them exposed as vile criminals is quite another. Power corrupts, there can be no doubt about it. In the end those we elevate to positions of leadership will always fail us. Human's have not evolved beyond that point yet. Once we start believing in our own importance our ego takes over and inhibits our sense of right and wrong. I don't care who you are or how moral a base you start from, once you get taste for power it's all over. As a society we need to stop looking for leaders and learn to start solving our problems cooperatively. I too have been guilty of bemoaning the dearth of the kind of leaders we had in my youth. Somehow I thought if we only had another Martin Luther King, or Robert Kennedy, or even John Lennon. If we only had a great leader we could solve all our problems. I hereby renounce that thinking as delusional. No leader is going to solve the world's problems. We've got to do it ourselves. We've got to do it by working together, by collaborating and cooperating. We've got to find a way forward that does not pin our hopes on leaders who, in the end, will always fail us.
Rationality and Doubt
I've been reading Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason. It's a bit surprising I haven't read it before, given my whole deal, but I'm glad I'm finally getting to it. The book is primarily concerned with the ways that the rigid logic of computers reinforces the allure of behaviorism and physicalism (as well as making it easier for a certain type of compulsive person to come to conceive of themselves as godlike). The logic is thus: at its lowest level, a Turing machine is a symbolic
State of Nature
Graeber & Wengrow's Dawn of Everything opens with a discussion of the (admittedly one-sided, since Hobbes had been dead for a a century) debate between Hobbes and Rousseau on the state of nature: the way humans are in the absence of society. Hobbes holds that humans are, by nature, in a state of war against all others: in the absence of a social contract or bodies to enforce it, everyone's only incentive is to seek their own benefit. Rousseau contrasts this with an Edenic vision of true freedom,
Who Is To Blame?
I think about responsibility a lot. Though the relevant muscles have atrophied quite a bit I did start out as a philosophy student after all. In a time when it feels to me like whatever threadbare moral fiber our nation used to have has eroded to nothing I wonder how much any one of us is to blame. The thing about moral responsibility is that it necessarily requires agency. If it's not possible for us to have acted differently than we did, we can't really be blamed for our actions. If someone e
Project 1: Reality, Performed
Reading responses are below the assignment.