Recent links…
- Aphantasia, Hume, and empiricism — some people seem to lack mental imagery, and this has philosophical implications, argue Uku Tooming & Roomet Jakapi
- Are philosophers who work for AI firms “arsonists who moonlight as firefighters”? — Hollis Robbins on humanity, “My Fair Lady”, and why “neither the world nor the AIs will become more moral” from the work of AI’s philosophers
- “For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around… Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar?” — now, we live in “uni-context,” which explains a lot, argues Agnes Callard
- “AI systems [probably] possess at least local analytical moral competence comprehensively. I suspect there is no fundamental obstacle to extending local competence to global competence, or to extending analytical competence to practical competence” — Seth Lazar on recent experiments on the moral reasoning of AIs
- “When caterpillars are in their chrysalises, their brains physically dissolve… and are rebuilt as butterfly brains. Yet experiments show that memories from their caterpillar days survive” — one of several examples from the animal kingdom that may raise problems for the idea that the mind is the brain
- “Are you a recliner or a refrainer?” — The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman on airplane passenger ethics
- “There’s a kind of epistemic transparency to our work in that everything you need to assess it is right there on the page” — Richard Chappell on whether external funding corrupts philosophy
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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