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Category: Ideas/philosophy

Why real intelligence is something more than optimisation

Why real intelligence is something more than optimisation

Sasha Mudd writes: A few months ago, I sat in a packed university auditorium listening to a celebrated computer scientist explain the brilliance of large language models (LLMs). These systems optimise, he said. And they improve at optimisation on the basis of past experience. He paused. That, he said with a smile, is intelligence. The audience nodded along approvingly. Meanwhile, a philosophical alarm bell began sounding in my head. Not because the speaker’s claim was implausible. On the contrary, as…

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Jonathan Swift anticipated the flashy simulation of human knowledge called AI

Jonathan Swift anticipated the flashy simulation of human knowledge called AI

Dónal Gill writes: I have spent a significant portion of my life studying the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift — and in particular, studying Gulliver’s Travels, which turns 300 this year. While working on my Ph.D. dissertation, I was primarily interested in what Swift had to say about the politics of travel. Now, as a college professor teaching Canadian politics and battling to keep generative artificial intelligence out of my classrooms, I’m thinking a lot about what Swift had to say…

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Four Islamic polymaths prove breadth beats specialisation

Four Islamic polymaths prove breadth beats specialisation

Mariam Sabri writes: This semester, my students are learning about four polymaths who shaped Islamic science: al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different: one wrote his way out of scarcity; one was held under house arrest for a decade; one distilled an era’s medical knowledge into a text that ruled European universities for 500 years; and the last worked at the largest research institution of his age. But each shared the same underlying instinct:…

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Nietzsche’s startling provocation: You’re edible and delicious

Nietzsche’s startling provocation: You’re edible and delicious

Nicholas E Low writes: It looked like a piece of driftwood floating in muddy floodwaters. But then it grew a pair of eyes that peered above the waterline. As the canoe came closer, the crocodile struck, attempting to topple it. Not knowing what else to do, the woman inside paddled toward a set of trees with branches hanging over the water. When she jumped to grab one, the crocodile leapt, too, pulling her underwater into a death roll. ‘That was…

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It doesn’t have to be humanity versus nature

It doesn’t have to be humanity versus nature

Yadvinder Malhi writes: For much of the modern era, the global narrative of economic development has been imagined as a human story unfolding against a backdrop of nature as an externality to be exploited. Forests, rivers, soils and species appear as resources to be managed, inputs to be optimised, or constraints to be overcome. Human wellbeing advances; nature reduces. In some ways, this narrative has delivered. The condition and welfare of billions of humans have been improved beyond recognition. Yet…

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Why science needs the humanities more than ever

Why science needs the humanities more than ever

Xin Fan writes: A narrative has taken hold that science and the humanities are at odds. In universities around the world, investment in cutting-edge technologies often comes at the expense of retrenchment in philosophy, history, literature and the arts. Contraction of the humanities is presented as an unavoidable cost of modernization. But that ‘zero sum’ logic is flawed. As science and technology race ahead, the world needs humanities research to understand the reasons and implications. My experience at ShanghaiTech University…

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Zhuangzi and the case against meritocracy

Zhuangzi and the case against meritocracy

Christine Abigail L Tan writes: Deeply embedded in the ideals of justice and fairness is the idea that we ought to get what we deserve. Deservingness is thus an intuitively compelling concept, because we want the world to be intelligible. If the good suffer and the wicked flourish, then the world not only becomes a painful place to live in, it also becomes a place of moral chaos. Even if the world is bountifully unjust, it remains a necessary illusion…

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Why sophrosyne, an ancient Greek virtue, matters more than ever in the age of AI

Why sophrosyne, an ancient Greek virtue, matters more than ever in the age of AI

Sophrosyne is a constellation of characteristics that includes moderation, reflectiveness and self-knowledge. PM Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images By Ross Channing Reed, Missouri University of Science and Technology Texting while driving. Bullying people on social media. Buying into the latest conspiracy theory. Passing off AI-generated work as your own. That may seem like a random list of 21st-century vices. But I’d argue they’re all examples of the loss of one particular virtue: sophrosyne. An ancient Greek concept, sophrosyne – pronounced “suh-fros-uh-nee”…

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What ancient philosophy really thought about domestic life

What ancient philosophy really thought about domestic life

Sandrine Bergès writes: Political philosophy – a discipline we trace back to Plato and Aristotle – is reasoning about how we live together in political units. It is about states, government, laws, institutions and citizenship. But it doesn’t have much to say about homes, families, marriage or parenting. The discipline that studies how we live together in family units, as opposed to political ones, used to be called economics, from the Greek oikonomika, or science of the home. This was…

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Nick Land’s philosophy of accelerationism and the no-human future

Nick Land’s philosophy of accelerationism and the no-human future

Vincent Lê writes: It surfaces in terrorism reports and tech presentations, in the manifestos of mass shooters and the public declarations of billionaires. What is ‘accelerationism’? Over the past decade, especially the past few years, this term has migrated from the dark corners of the internet into mainstream politics and culture – and in the process has split into two dominant forms that could not be more contradictory. One group of accelerationists dreams of burning down the world and building…

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What do Gödel’s incompleteness theorems truly mean?

What do Gödel’s incompleteness theorems truly mean?

Natalie Wolchover writes: In 1931, by turning logic on itself, Kurt Gödel proved a pair of theorems that transformed the landscape of knowledge and truth. These “incompleteness theorems” established that no formal system of mathematics — no finite set of rules, or axioms, from which everything is supposed to follow — can ever be complete. There will always be true mathematical statements that don’t logically follow from those axioms. I spent the early weeks of the Covid pandemic learning how…

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Mexistentialism embraces uncertainty

Mexistentialism embraces uncertainty

Carlos Alberto Sánchez writes: I recently spent an evening trying to convince my father not to go back to Michoacán. I told him it wasn’t a good time. He reminded me that he’s been a naturalised US citizen since the George H W Bush administration. I reported what I’ve seen on the news: people with decades of US residency, with Green Cards and outstanding civic engagement, are being deported, and the rationale seems to have something to do with previous acts of criminality, like…

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When we turned time into a line we reimagined past and future

When we turned time into a line we reimagined past and future

Emily Thomas writes: ‘It’s natural,’ says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘to think that time can be represented by a line.’ We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen line ahead. We ride an ever-moving arrow – the present. However, this picture of time is not natural. Its roots stretch only to the 18th century, yet this notion has now entrenched itself so deeply in Western thought that it’s difficult to imagine…

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The next scientific revolution won’t come from scientists

The next scientific revolution won’t come from scientists

Steve Fuller writes: The most influential work on the nature of science for at least the past fifty years has been The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962 by a young physicist-turned-historian, Thomas Kuhn. Although influential, the book has also been widely misunderstood. It is quite common to think—certainly based on the title—that Kuhn was providing a formula for producing scientific revolutions. On the contrary, he was arguing that revolutions only happen once scientists confront insurmountable obstacles in…

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Wikipedia operates in good faith — unlike its critics

Wikipedia operates in good faith — unlike its critics

Renée DiResta writes: Late last month, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia with 855,279 articles, no human editors, and no way for users to request improvements beyond a suggestion box addressed to its eponymous chatbot author. The tech entrepreneur is eager, he has said, to “purge out the propaganda” that he argues afflicts Wikipedia, the venerable user-generated reference source. But some Grokipedia articles are near replicas of Wikipedia entries. Other articles in the new source seem conspicuously sanitized: The…

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We see the world suffused with causality

We see the world suffused with causality

Mariel Goddu writes: Causal understanding is the cognitive capacity that enables you to think about how things affect and influence each other. It is your concept of making, doing, generating and producing – of causing – that allows you to grasp how the Moon causes the tides, how a virus makes you sick, why tariffs change international trade, the social consequences of a faux pas, and the way each event in a story leads to what happens next. Causal understanding is the foundation of all thoughts why, how, because, and what if….

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