The latest links…

1. Can life—all life—be defined in terms of agency? — well what do we mean by agency?
2. From Newton’s few laws to Alphafold’s 93 million parameters: how should we understand the scientific virtue of simplicity today? — Eric Winsberg on science, simplicity, and prediction
3. This digital bibliography for consciousness studies has over 1,300 entries across 9 themes and 63 subtopics — created by philosophy PhD student Melinda Gülsüm Esen with “the aim of making the literature more navigable for students and researchers working in or entering the field”
4. “We can exercise some control over our beliefs” if we run different “modes of operation” and “recruit additional beliefs and heuristics” — Joshua Mugg begins a discussion of his book, “From Human Reasoning to Belief,” at the Brains Blog
5. Has the word “racist” been diluted through “conceptual inflation”? — two philosophers, Nat Hansen & Shen-yi Liao, investigated this using the “apparent time method”
6. “What is the ideal that America should aspire to? I think the person who best articulated an answer is the philosopher John Rawls” — for July 4th, the New Yorker asked a range of luminaries who their “favorite American” is
7. A philosophy of science reading group invites others to join — it was begun by philosophy PhD students at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal

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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