Daily Nous

• "I have exposed myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians" -- David Hume is interviewed at 3:16AM
• Electrons seem to spin, but actually don’t. So what is really going on? -- Scientific American considers the answer given by philosopher Charles Sebens (Caltech)
• "It’s the method of using opposing views to seek truth; Hegel thought his own style of it was better than Plato’s" -- Hegel was a category on Jeopardy! last night
• "The organoids are coming!" -- and their use is a step forward not just scientifically, but morally, says Katharine Gammon
• "Nothing is true": big, if true -- David Liggins (Manchester) on why we should take alethic nihilism seriously
• "Weirder options are conceivable, but exceedingly improbable" -- two physicists have "calculated an equation that counts universes. And they’ve made the striking observation that universes like ours seem to account for the lion’s share of the conceivable cosmic options"
• "Twitter makes preexisting elites accessible, but it also creates its own elites… Still, I think our situation with hierarchy is improved by Philosophy Twitter, not because the hierarchy it institutes is more intrinsically fair, but because it diversifies the unfairness of hierarchy" -- Mason Westfall (WUStL) applies the multiple-status-hierarchies approach to unfairness to the world of academic philosophy
• "Having a higher sense of purpose appears protective against all-cause mortality," according to a recent study -- or to put it another way: a purpose of purpose in life is life
• "I take these to be the most important human achievements — language, literacy, human rights and the spread of these things — but I think our next level up is for everyone to have the conceptual framework for their own life be open to them for modification and reflection" -- Agnes Callard (Chicago) interviewed about her life and work
• "Concepts of philosophical interest vary across cultures, ages, generations, genders, and socio-economics status" -- a video summing up some of the results of the Geography of Philosophy Project, via Edouard Machery (interesting also as an example of philosophy research PR)
• "Even if it were possible, to build infallible memory into machines would mean forgoing some of the important benefits of forgetting" -- Ali Boyle (LSE) on why it's important that AI learns to forget
• "Did any parent ever say to their toddler, ‘The dog… now I can say that because there is exactly one member of that species that is salient to us at the present moment…’? I doubt even Russell did that. But young children learn to use definite descriptions just the same" -- an interview with Paul Elbourne (Oxford)
• "Successful social movements have frequently—and appropriately—drawn on the socially transformative possibilities of imagination to help make space for justice" -- Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia) on the connection between imagination and political life
• "In an overheated debate, your fatigue may lead you to misinterpret the situation and believe that your opponent is too dim or too deluded to see the truth… We humbly suggest that sometimes it’s not them; it’s you" -- Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State) and Jared Celniker and Peter Ditto (UC Irvine) on "persuasion fatigue"
• "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over; eventually it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony" -- Kafka's aphorisms (via Oran Magal)
• "Why lotteries and not voting? The Athenians weren’t fools; they learned through bitter trials that elections are tools of elites" -- Nicholas Coccoma discusses the case for abolishing elections in Boston Review
• The first philosophy unboxing video — Pete Mandik (William Paterson) contributes to the popular YouTube genre
• "It’s fine if a vindicatory strategy is question-begging, so long as it achieves a kind of explanatory unity through which mysteries are not left to linger. And I think my strategy does just that." -- Andrew Sepielli (Toronto) is interviewed about his "pragmatist quietism" in meta-ethics at 3:16AM
• "A Søren Kierkegaard in skirts" -- Kristin Gjesdal (Temple) on how Ibsen's "women characters play out ideas and positions on stage"
• 9 philosophers interviewed about "Philosophy Illustrated" -- in a New Books Network podcast
• "It’s a commonplace among lecturers that students don’t know how to read anymore" -- so what advice should we give them about how to do it better? Martin Lenz (Groningen) has some suggestions
• One might think that much AI art isn’t just bad, but that it’s not art -- but "AI art is art as much as readymades, minimalist art, or photography" argues G. M. "Boomer" Trujillo, Jr. (Texas - El Paso)
• The philosopher who helped kill the king -- on the "mess of paradoxes" in Lucy Hutchinson's "war against the disorder of England’s craven nobility"
• "Constructionism was never a matter of ‘just saying whatever’, and science can never be simply a matter of reading the dictates of the natural world off of our instruments" -- Justin E. H. Smith with an appreciation of Bruno Latour and of what it means to "have a choice as to how read the world."
• "When asked to select Dennett’s answer to a philosophical question from a set of five possible answers, with the other four being [GPT-3] digi-Dan outputs, Dennett experts got only about half right" -- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) et al on what happens when large language models are trained on philosophical texts
• "Unlike most scientific thinkers of the period… Cavendish insisted that humans are part of nature—not above it—and thus that we lack the perspectival leverage to see and understand its operations" -- on Margaret Cavendish's combination of fantastical imagination, thoroughgoing materialism, and desire for immortality
• "As we bridge the gulf between now and then to sympathize with ourselves at other times, we sympathize, too, with the suffering of others" -- Kieran Setiya (MIT) on his chronic pain and its philosophical lessons
• A philosopher is invited to take part in a Netflix television show with a magician, the premise of which is that free will is an illusion -- the magician thinks he has cornered the philosopher, but Christopher Kaczor (Loyola Marymount) is the one with a card up his sleeve
• "Utilitarian longtermism is objectionable. Longtermism sans consequentialism is another matter" -- Elliott R. Crozat (Purdue Global) considers deontological longtermism
• "Most of Earth thus mobilized toward figuring out what is widely thought to be the easiest problem of the three: the line between Anna and not Anna" -- a story by Patrick House about how to delineate the boundaries of consciousness