Recent additions to the Heap…

1. “AI developers really have no idea what their advanced chatbots are really learning above and beyond ‘telling us what we want to hear’” — Marcus Arvan (Tampa) on how AI developers are playing with fire
2. “Most philosophers don’t seem troubled by imposing a social order on people who pretheoretically reject it” — Thomas Mulligan (Georgetown) is interviewed about his meritocratic theory of justice
3. “We should exercise great caution against both over- and under-attributing sentience to AI systems. And also consider slowing down.” — Robert Long on what to think when a language model tells you it’s sentient
4. “Rather than ignoring relations of power, a recognition of the unequal distribution of power is a founding premise of Rawls’s political theory” — Nick French on Marxism, methodological individualism, Rawls, and analytic philosophy. (Also see “Is Analytic Philosophy Counter-Revolutionary?” by Ben Burgis) (via Andy Lamey)
5. “Is this phenomenal consciousness thing something ordinary people believe in or is it just some wacky idea that anglophone philosophers have come up with?” — Michelle Liu (Hertfordshire-Monash) and Edouard Machery (Pitt) hash it out on “Mind Chat”
6. “When AI lifts the burden of working out our own thoughts, it is then that we must decide what kinds of creatures we wish to be, and what kinds of lives of value we can fashion for ourselves” — a thoughtful essay by Steven Hales (Bloomsburg)
7. “We have innate mathematical perception—an ability to see or sense numbers” — philosophers Jacob Beck and Sam Clarke (York) “supplement thousands of years of philosophical thinking about this issue by drawing on a mountain of experimental evidence that simply was not available to past thinkers”

Discussion welcome.

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.

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!