The latest links…

1. “Hopeful pessimism may not be a contradiction, but a manifestation of the wild power that is harnessed only when life’s darkest forces are gathered into the strange alchemy of hope” — Mara van der Lugt (St. Andrews) on how “hopeful pessimism breaks through the rusted dichotomy of optimism vs pessimism”
2. “Reminding ourselves that all of that work is on our side, the human side, is of critical importance because it allows us a clearer view of the present, in which we can more accurately track the harm that people are doing with technology” — Emily Bender (U. Washington) on the errors and risks of being “too impressed” with language models like GPT-3 (via Brian Edwards)
3. What are the big open scientific and philosophical questions about AI sentience? — Robert Long (NYU) lays them out
4. “Kids also don’t worry that they’ll make mistakes or seem silly as they puzzle things out. They haven’t yet learned that serious people don’t spend time on some questions like ‘Am I dreaming my entire life?’” — Scott Hershovitz (Michigan) on how children are philosophical
5. Is panpsychism a “new science of consciousness” or “the last gasp of a prescientific view of what consciousness is”? — Keith Frankish (Sheffield/Open) in The New Humanist
6. “Given his pervasive anti-moralism, any contemporary reader of Nietzsche is forced to ask: can Nietzsche have a political philosophy?” — Dan Little (UM-Dearborn) looks at recent attempts to determine Nietzsche’s political philosophy
7. “I can’t even track how many layers of meta this joke is, but one that just came to me is the idea that maybe the joke doesn’t actually make sense, but we need it to make sense, because we need the eggs” — a novelist, a comedian, a rabbi, an editor, and a religious studies scholar discuss the famous last joke in Annie Hall

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. Discussion welcome.

The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thanks!