Choose a topic


.. Art
Fake art

.. Cognition
General Artificial Intelligence
Observing My Experience

.. Epistemology
Dialectics and Evolution

.. Evolution
What is a Species?

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Society
Borders
Cut Energy Use
Emotional Plague
Genocide
Jesus and the Money Changers
Merry Christmas
Misinformation and disinformation
Moral Hazard
Privacy
Social Media

...HUM
Culture is Ordinary

Art
AI and Art
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Excellence is a Plateau
Is this picture real?
NonFungible Tokens
Public Art
Tearing Down Statues
Weave
What is Art?
Working With Reality

Cognition
Artificial Intelligence and the Collingridge Dilemma.
Bird Brains
Bounded Rationality
Competence Without Comprehension
Consciousness is More Like Fame Than Television
Developmental Processes
Emergence and Cognition
Gender dysphoria
Genius
GIGO
I Lost My Knife
Illusion
Incomplete Information and Stories
Instinct
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Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
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On Affordances
Pencil and Paper
Post Phenomenology
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Return of the Law of Forms
Shifting Meanings
Structures of Understanding
Superstition
Taking Things on Faith
The Hard Problem
The I Love You Gesture
The Imagined Order
The Phenomenology of Swim Bladders.
Thinking about medical procedures
Thinking About Risk
Underdetermination and Redundancy
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
What Does Google Know?
What is going on?

Economics
A Country Is Not Like A Company
Alternate ideas lying around waiting for disaster
Blood and Money
Can Capitalism Survive?
Do Our Minds Own Our Bodies?
Everyday Communism
Inflation
Invisible Hand
Job Creators
Job Destroyers
Markets
Money and Value
Money is Different
National Accounts
Necessary Production
Paper Wealth
Post Capitalist Society
Profit Motive Fails
Rentier Capitalism
Social Wealth vs Surplus Value
Spending Money Into Existence
The Metaphysics of Money
The Ontology of Debt
Thinking about Money
Wealth is What Money Buys

Environmentalism
Blowing Up Pipelines

Epistemology
Absolute Knowledge
Equivalence
Exists
I do not know everything
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Rethinking Knowledge
Rethinking Knowledge
Semiotics and Body Language
The Curious Ineffectiveness of Facts
The Past and the Future.
Uncertainty and Unpredictability
Unpredictability
Verificationism
Whatever happened to The Truth?

Evolution
Body Plans
Competition and Cooperation
Dr Malthus would be pleased
Error Correction
Evolution Defended
Evolution is not Religion
Evolution of Cars
Extinction
Forces of Nature
Is Natural Selection Obsolete?
Networks
Omicron
Politics and Evolution
Roles
Temes
The Evolution of Purpose.
The Problem with Natural Selection.
The Source of Bad Behavior
Thinking about Tails
Why Does a Leopard Have Spots?
Wildlife

Freedom
Free Speech in the age of Twitter
Freedom and Badness
Freedom and Morality
Freedom From and Freedom To
Freedom in the Age of Convoys
Laws
Libertarian Coercion

HUM
10 Views of Landscape
Affect and Effect
Dataism
I pay rent.
Listening to Corn
The Reform vs Revolution Paradox
What is Public Schooling For?

Levels of Abstraction
Levels of Abstraction and Minds
What is a newspaper?

Mathematics
As Much As Possible
Zipfs Law

Memetics
Emotional Plague
Memes: Imitated Behavior.
The Problem with Memes
What is a replicator?

Morality
Beyond Rules Based Morality
Freedom and Morality
Moral Realism.
What do we owe animals?

pending
Police

Philosophy
Agency
Being
Maps and Territories
Metaphysics Without Absolutes
Philosophy Buds
Ratchets
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Sorites Paradox
Stereoscopic Vision and The Hard Problem
The Gorilla in the Room of Science
The Purpose of Science
What is Going On?

Politics
If It Walks Like a Duck
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Programming
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Science
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Fields
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Quack Doctors
The Great Shattering
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Thinking about Interconnection
Time
Too Small to See
UFOs
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Society
A Job
A society needs a government.
Antisemitism
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Compassion
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Disinformation
Drag Story Tellers
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I Distrust the News
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Its a Free Country
Life Extension
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Parents, Children, and Community
Possessions
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Privacy
Race
Rethinking Rights
Rules in a Knife Fight?
Sex and Gender
Should We Go to Mars?
Social vs Individual Responsibility.
Society and The State
Society evolved
Spheres of Influence
Swimming
The Care and Feeding of Free Speech
The Collingridge Dilemma
The Common Good
The Dual Meaning of Power
The Homeless
The Problem with Hedonism
The Rule of Law.
Thoughts on Justice
To the Moon
Totalitarianism
Trial by jury
Virtue Signalling
Voting
We Live in the Present
What is to be said?
What made freedom a bad word?
Why is there a shortage of nurses?
Work - Productive, Useful, Worthless, and Bad.

UBI
Implications of Very Productive Technology
Modest Proposal
Problems with Universal Basic Income
Tormenting Unlucky People
Why there are oligarchs







Disinformation

There's a sucker born every minute.

Chatbots have a new name - they are "generative AI's" and they are stirring up a storm among right wing people.
Seems they are biased. One would write a poem praising Biden but wouldn't write one praising Trump.
But think about it - is that really bias?
Could you find anything praiseworthy to even say about Trump, let alone say it as a poem? I couldn't.

The companies building chatbots actually do try to filter inflammatory material from it's output.
We already have experience from facebook and twitter with how inflammatory material can just mushroom into self-reinforcing silos of conspiracy theories.
It's dangerous.

But that danger really has been with us for a long long time; going back to when people first started talking. We've always needed to be good at evaluating the information that other people give us.

I think we're actually pretty good at evaluating information.
But that breaks down when you have silos of mutually reinforcing information.
We identify disinformation by checking out how it fits into what we already know.
If you are steeped in QAnon theories and everyone you talk to is too, then disinformation about pedophiles holding kids in the basement of a pizza shop would seem reasonable.
If everyone you know is a white christian nationalist then the great replacement seems reasonable.

The world is full of silos like that.

I'm in one.
Right wing people sneeringly call the silo I'm in 'woke'.
I accept the term and think it's about time that the right wing people woke up.
The woke silo includes science and all we've learned from that. QAnon ideas just cannot survive in that silo. It also looks at the social world using the same tools of rationally evaluating evidence that science applies to the physical world.

From my perspective the woke silo is expanding.
It's still a minority but the information I've seen is that about 25% of people globally are in the woke silo and going up.
So ironically, the great replacement idea fits the facts but it's just not a plot by some shadowy cabal - it's evolving demographics.

Rep George Santos of Long Island in the USA is a liar. Donald Trump is a liar.
Lies are a special sort of disinformation. A lie is a deliberate violation of trust. A lie is a tool used to manipulate people. And lies have the pernicious effect of corroding everyone's trust of information.

I'm aware that, especially in politics, everyone does their best to present themselves and their ideas in the best possible light and that can morph into saying things that are not really true.
Joe Biden was recently awarded 4 pinochios by the Washington Post after all. The difference is a matter of scale..

What do you think?

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.