Hacker News with Generative AI: Philosophy

Augustine of Hippo (wikipedia.org)
Augustine of Hippo (/ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/ aw-GUST-in, US also /ˈɔːɡəstiːn/ AW-gə-steen;[22] Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430)[23] was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa.
Philosophy, History, Religion, Theology
8 points by lordleft 18 hours ago | 3 comments
Rutger Bregman – "Moral Ambition" [video] (youtube.com)
Philosophy, Morality, Video
4 points by mitchbob 3 days ago | 0 comments
Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games (robkhenderson.com)
Experts and elites play fundamentally different games. Misunderstanding this distinction warps how we judge institutions—and who we choose to trust.
Social Science, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology
27 points by Bostonian 5 days ago | 6 comments
Gravity is a clue that we live in a simulation (bgr.com)
We all know gravity as the invisible force that keeps us grounded. But what if it’s not a force at all? What if it’s a function? One physicist believes gravity might actually be one of the strongest clues that we live in a simulation.
Physics, Simulation, Science, Philosophy
9 points by hochmartinez 5 days ago | 7 comments
Planetary Realism (planetary.day)
Isn’t the answer obvious? You might say “Earth” and confidently know what that means. You, after all, have a stake, a claim, in calling Earth your home. It’s your planet too. You, who knows the seasons, the cycles of night and day, the tides. You couldn’t be on any other planet—at this point in time anyways—and so in this sense we can say you find yourself on planet Earth aka Home.
Philosophy, Earth, Home, Identity
8 points by johanam 7 days ago | 0 comments
The Uncanny Mirror: AI, Self-Doubt, and the Limits of Reflection (lucidnonsense.net)
Not all mirrors are honest. Some are simply more aware of their distortions.
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Self-Reflection, Ethics
23 points by 0x6c75636964 7 days ago | 22 comments
The SEP has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of (2015) (qz.com)
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be the most interesting website on the internet. Not because of the content—which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguity to zombies—but because of the site itself.
Philosophy, Wikipedia, Online Resources
13 points by Tomte 8 days ago | 0 comments
Language equivariance as a way of figuring out what an AI "means" (lesswrong.com)
I recently had the privilege of having my idea criticized at the London Institute for Safe AI, including by Philip Kreer and Nicky Case. Previously the idea was vague; being with them forced me to make the idea specific. I managed to make it so specific that they found a problem with it! That's progress :)
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Research, Safety
6 points by kiyanwang 8 days ago | 0 comments
Why Even Try If You Have A.I.? (newyorker.com)
Now that machines can think for us, we have to choose whether to be the passengers or pilots of our lives.
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Human Thought
39 points by Kaibeezy 9 days ago | 89 comments
The Naval Academy Canceled My Lecture on Wisdom (nytimes.com)
For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
Education, Philosophy, Military, Censorship
23 points by rmason 10 days ago | 5 comments
A Philosopher Released a Book About Digital Manipulation. The Author Ended Up AI (wired.com)
When Italian philosopher and essayist Andrea Colamedici released Ipnocrazia: Trump, Musk e La Nuova Architettura Della Realtà (Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality), he wanted to make a statement about the existence of truth in the digital age.
Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Media, Politics
9 points by MaysonL 10 days ago | 0 comments
Why Pale Blue Dot generates feelings of cosmic insignificance (aeon.co)
On St Valentine’s Day 1990, NASA’s engineers directed the space-probe Voyager 1 – at the time, 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from home – to take a photograph of Earth.
Space Exploration, Philosophy, Astronomy, Earth, Photography
46 points by rbanffy 11 days ago | 73 comments
Thoughts Upon Slavery (1774) (maryland.gov)
By slavery, I mean domestic slavery, or that of a servant to a master. A late ingenious writer well observes, "The variety of forms in which slavery appears, makes it almost impossible to convey a just notion of it, by way of definition. There are, however, certain properties which have accompanied slavery in most places, whereby it is easily distinguished from that mild, domestic service which obtains in our country."*
History, Philosophy, Slavery
35 points by mike-the-mikado 12 days ago | 21 comments
The Seven-Year Rule (macsparky.com)
Years ago, I encountered a fascinating concept in a book by the Dalai Lama: every seven years, human beings transform into entirely new versions of themselves.
Self-Improvement, Philosophy
92 points by thecosas 13 days ago | 82 comments
How much math is knowable? [video] (youtube.com)
Mathematics, Philosophy, Knowledge
115 points by diaphanous 16 days ago | 15 comments
The Dangerous Ideas of "Longtermism" and "Existential Risk" (currentaffairs.org)
So-called rationalists have created a disturbing secular religion that looks like it addresses humanity’s deepest problems, but actually justifies pursuing the social preferences of elites.
Philosophy, Social Commentary, Ethics, Artificial Intelligence
15 points by amarcheschi 17 days ago | 21 comments
Living with Lab Mice (nautil.us)
A philosopher reflects on their unexpected roommates
Philosophy, Science, Animals
46 points by kawera 19 days ago | 9 comments
The old man lost his horse: a 200 BCE Taoist parable on luck and fate (wikipedia.org)
The old man lost his horse (but it all turned out for the best) (Chinese: 塞翁失馬，焉知非福; lit. 'The old man of the frontier lost his horse', 'how could he know if this is not fortuitous?'), also known as Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?
Taoism, Philosophy, Parables, Luck, Fate
9 points by sirobg 21 days ago | 0 comments
The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death (nautil.us)
At the dawn of microbiology, scientists glimpsed unseen worlds and stumbled into a philosophical purgatory
Microbiology, Philosophy, Science, Life
87 points by dnetesn 22 days ago | 49 comments
Philosophy Major Snatched by ICE During Citizenship Interview (dailynous.com)
Mohsen Mahdawi, a philosophy major at Columbia University who is due to graduate later this semester, was attending a US citizenship application interview in Vermont on Monday when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents wearing hoods and masks took him from the building, put him into an unmarked car, and drove off.
Immigration, Law Enforcement, Education, Philosophy
139 points by mdp2021 24 days ago | 105 comments
The Subjective Charms of Objective-C (wired.com)
After inventing calculus, actuarial tables, and the mechanical calculator and coining the phrase “best of all possible worlds,” Gottfried Leibniz still felt his life’s work was incomplete.
Programming Languages, History, Philosophy
78 points by wmlive 24 days ago | 55 comments
The Old World Is Dead (spacedino.net)
The Old World is Dead.
Culture, Philosophy, Society
20 points by kayge 25 days ago | 1 comments
A slow guide to confronting doom (lesswrong.com)
Following a few events[1] in April 2022 that caused a many people to update sharply and negatively on outcomes for humanity, I wrote A Quick Guide to Confronting Doom.
AI, Philosophy, Existentialism
16 points by namanyayg 28 days ago | 7 comments
What can we take away from the ‘stochastic parrot’ saga? (inferencemagazine.substack.com)
The parrot is dead. Don’t be the shopkeeper.
Philosophy, Metaphor, Substack
41 points by Philpax 28 days ago | 102 comments
The West is bored to death (newstatesman.com)
Our nihilistic politics are a product of the crushing ennui and spiritual vacancy of modern life.
Politics, Culture, Philosophy, Modern Life
14 points by pseudolus 29 days ago | 6 comments
Roo or Cline? We're building a superset (kilocode.ai)
At our company we have a strange mantra: “don’t innovate!” Let me explain.
Software, Programming, Company Culture, Philosophy
69 points by boleary-gl 29 days ago | 56 comments
LLMs don't hallucinate, only humans do (voidw.ink)
Or what happened when a bear-wolf-boy so unaligned at birth all he did was screamed about wanting something now! sat down with a paperclip-electron-mathematical model - actually ten of them - to write a better manifesto for what comes next and how we get there
Generative AI, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Language Models
10 points by llamataboot 29 days ago | 4 comments
Numbers and Unicorns (blogspot.com)
Reading a book on philosophy of mathematics, even if it's written lightly, such as that one, Why is there philosophy of mathematics at all? by Ian Hacking, may have unexpected effects.
Philosophy, Mathematics, Books
11 points by surprisetalk 29 days ago | 2 comments
The Society of the Spectacle (wikipedia.org)
The Society of the Spectacle (French: La société du spectacle) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord where he develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle.
Philosophy, Marxist Theory, Sociology, Critical Theory
31 points by midzer 30 days ago | 2 comments
The Illusion of Time, the Overflow of Being (smolnero.com)
Time has quite literally been taken too seriously by humankind. Not just time itself — but all the layers we've wrapped around it: schedules, metrics, KPIs, urgency cycles. These clusters of fluff masquerade as structure but mostly serve to drown out the quiet. And in doing so, they distance us from a place of balance — that space between chaos and calm that’s vital to actually being.
Time Management, Philosophy, Productivity, Mindfulness
6 points by edgar_ortega 30 days ago | 0 comments