New links…

1. Which button should you press? — Richard Chappell on a recent viral poll
2. “It is somewhat puzzling that… so few universities have found ways to make the case [for] independent education and the advancement and preservation of knowledge” — Eric Schliesser on cynicism in the academy
3. “Qualia are not puzzles that can be solved by increasingly elegant syntax” — an argument that purports to “locate the exact logical collapse within computational functionalism” and show why today’s AI’s can’t be conscious — by a Google researcher (via MR)
4. “The music ranges from sprightly to pensive, romantic to mournful” — listen to Nietzsche’s music
5. “It’s kind of like housekeeping where you spill the stuff and then you clean it up and then you spill it again. A lot of analytic philosophy is like that” — some throat clearing by Rick Roderick, philosophy professor & popularizer, in an old but best-selling video series
6. “What we need for political philosophy… is a genre of fiction that treats political systems themselves as the primary speculative variable” — like sci-fi, but for politics. Call it “poli-fi,” says Barry Lam
7. Do current AIs understand anything? That depends on what we mean by “understand” — Pierre Beckmann & Matthieu Queloz argue for “fusing philosophical theory with mechanistic evidence” to support “a tiered framework for thinking about understanding”

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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. Thank you.
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