Choose a topic





.. Epistemology
Language and thought

.. Art
Fake art

.. Cognition
General Artificial Intelligence
Observing My Experience

.. Computers
Microsoft

.. Economics
National Debt.

.. Epistemology
22 Theories of Consciousness
Consciousness defined
Correlation vs Causation
Dialectics and Evolution
Everything contains the seeds of it's own destruction
Free Will
Intentional Stance
Mental Telepathy
Projection
Subliminal Suggestion
Training vs learning
Validation
We cannot escape stories
What is a Vegetable?
Why Do We Like Pictures?

.. Evolution
Life is Amazing
Swarms
What is a Species?
Why are Tropical Birds So Colorful

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Philosophy
Amateur Philosophy

.. Politics
Silos
Strikes
Unelected Bureaucrats
Who Decides an Election?
Why Are So Many of Our Relationships Adversarial?

.. Science
The Sense of Balance

.. Society
Adversarial Legislatures
Altruism
Borders
Control
Cut Energy Use
Emotional Plague
Entropy and Life
Gender
Genocide
Getting Old
Improving Democracy
Jesus and the Money Changers
Merry Christmas
Misinformation and disinformation
Moral Hazard
Pay
Privacy
Red flags
Red Rover Red Rover
Religion in Schools
Reusable Bags
Sleeping in a tent
Social Media
The Myth of Leadership
We Live in Interesting Times
What is Wrong with Merry Christmas

.. teems
Cars made bicycles possible

... evolution
Philosophy of Plants

...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
Intelligence and Motivation
Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
Natural Law
Necessary Illusions
On Affordances
Pencil and Paper
Post Phenomenology
Reflective Equilibrium
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?

Epistmology
Dire Warnings

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
Sincerely Held Beliefs
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
Right Wing Freedom
The Sovereign Citizen
Tyranny of the Majority

Programming
Loopsidaisy

Science
Constructed Life
Correlation Wins
Fields
Neurophilosophy
Quack Doctors
The Great Shattering
The Material Space
Thinking about Interconnection
Time
Too Small to See
UFOs
Watching Pigeons
Weirdness in Physics

Society
A Job
A society needs a government.
Antisemitism
Babies and Bathwater
Belly of the Beast
Civilization
Compassion
Conservative
Corruption
Cultural Appropriation
Disinformation
Drag Story Tellers
Family Values
Governance
Governance and Power
Griefers and Misinformation and Disinformation
Homelessness
I Distrust the News
Immigration
Inclusion and Christmas
Indigenous
Its a Free Country
Life Extension
Magic
Moral Decline
Open Society and Falsification
Parents, Children, and Community
Possessions
Prisons
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







Entropy and Life

Everything falls apart

Entropy emerges from the fact that the universe tends to move towards a state of maximum disorder. Wikipedia says:

"Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. A consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that certain processes are irreversible. "

Britannica puts it this way: "the measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work."

A system is a particular way of arranging things. The things could be arranged differently and not work as a system. The ways of arranging the things so that they form a system is quite limited and the ways of arranging that don't form a system is unlimited.

Which is more probable?

One example that Penrose used was diffusion in gasses. Release perfume into a room and soon the room is full of the scent by diffusion. Once the room is full of the scent you can't get the scent back in the bottle. The probability of all those scent molecules being back in the bottle again is just too small.

Entropy is a central concept in physics. It can be defined mathematically and treated as a force of nature like gravity. I knew how to do that 50 years ago but I confess that now I use the term in a looser way.

Life is a way of organizing things in systems. It's a pretty complicated system with subsystems and subsubsystems and . . . .

Life seems to go against entropy. It takes disordered stuff and makes it into highly improbable things like us. This isn't strictly true. Life on earth isn't an isolated system because there is a continuous flow of energy from the sun.

People form societies and the concept of entropy applies to societies. There are far fewer ways of people organizing themselves so they can survive than otherwise. We're not approaching this as a blank slate. We have inherited capabilities that enable us to live as social animals that probably pre-date homo sapiens.

But its easy to see that those capabilities can enable many different societies. Heck, there are 195 countries in the world and each of those is subdivided in a sort of fractal way. Each country has "provinces" and each province has "cities" etc
All of these systems evolve. The system may initially emerge from some sort of constitutional convention - but I don't really think of political fora like that as rational as a whole. But they do hammer together a system that works. And then that system evolves.

On a smaller scale we have organizations like companies and clubs and coops. They are all hard to start but then they evolve.

Social systems share with life in general the capability of taking raw material in as a kind of nourishment.

Entropy comes in here because it's hard to build these structures but it's comparatively easy to knock them down. A human social structure can get sick and die.

Death is an essential part of Natural Selection. It's how systems adapt to everchanging conditions.

Canada has been a good place to live for 75 years. I've been lucky. I'm also aware of how precarious things are. Our Conservatives are sounding more Trumpish every day These days I'm dependent on CPP for income and it covers my modest needs. I get free healthcare. The Conservatives are getting ready to break those systems I think and once broken they will be hard to replace.

Sigh - as the Chinese sage said "may you live in interesting times"

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.