Hacker News with Generative AI: Philosophy

A brief meditation on formal systems and lying goblins (ghost.io)
The other day I came across some people on The Internet talking about a certain scene from Labyrinth, which is a movie from the 80s (if you haven't seen it you should - lavish musical numbers, very unsettling Jim Henson puppetry, David Bowie doing contact juggling in spandex, it's really got it all!)
Questions for William J. Rapaport (docs.google.com)
On March 27 I'll have a discussion with William J. Rapaport.
Thought-Tinkering – The Korean German Philosopher Byung-Chul Han (aeon.co)
Byung-Chul Han’s relentless critiques of digital capitalism reveal how this suffocating system creates hollowed-out lives
Gödel's theorem debunks the most important AI myth – Roger Penrose [video] (youtube.com)
Magic isn't real (pthorpe92.dev)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Bayes Is Not A Phase (dynomight.net)
People make fun of techie/rationalist/effective-altruist types for many weird obsessions, like stimulants or meditation or polyamory or psychedelics or seed oils or air quality or re-deriving all of philosophy from scratch. Some of these seem fair to me, or at least understandable.
Jan Łukasiewicz (wikipedia.org)
Jan Łukasiewicz (Polish: [ˈjan wukaˈɕɛvit͡ʂ] ⓘ; 21 December 1878 – 13 February 1956) was a Polish logician and philosopher who is best known for Polish notation and Łukasiewicz logic.[1] His work centred on philosophical logic, mathematical logic and history of logic.[2] He thought innovatively about traditional propositional logic, the principle of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle, offering one of the earliest systems of many-valued logic.
Philosophy Tube: Elon Musk (2018) [video] (youtube.com)
A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter (noemamag.com)
If we could stop bickering about which creatures do or don’t deserve to be called smart, an emerging movement of scientists and philosophers argue that we might discover fundamental elements of intelligence that are common to all life.
Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design (github.com/johnousterhout)
The False Promise of Digital Public Squares Was Always a Scam (joanwestenberg.com)
The Ancient Greek agora was a place where students and citizens could freely gather, give speeches, engage in debate, and challenge each other.
Gregory Bateson changed the way we think about changing ourselves (2019) (aeon.co)
There are times when a dilemma that seems like agony in adolescence can not only provide the basis for a prestigious career, but also lead to a profound shift in the world of ideas.
The Gods of Straight Lines (lesswrong.com)
“He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” - Adam Smith
Are you conscious? A conversation between Richard Dawkins and ChatGPT (richarddawkins.substack.com)
Is AI truly conscious, or just an advanced illusion of thought? Richard Dawkins shares his conversation between ChatGPT displaying the depths of machine intelligence and its success passing the Turing Test for consciousness.
The Complexity of Agency (thetransmitter.org)
As we attempt to build autonomous artificial-intelligence systems, we’re discovering that a capability we take for granted in animals may be much more complex than we imagined.
Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Defeats Most Proofs of God's Existence (astralcodexten.com)
It feels like 2010 again - the bloggers are debating the proofs for the existence of God. I found these much less interesting after learning about Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, and this doesn’t seem to have reached the Substack debate yet, so I’ll put it out there.
Western Civilization in the Intelligence Age (praxisnation.com)
We are fighting a war for the soul of the West.
All Is Unfinished: Henri Bergson's philosophy for our times (thenation.com)
Fama is a fickle deity. at the turn of the 20th century, Henri Bergson was one of the most famous people in the world, and certainly the most famous philosopher.
Beautiful, boring, and without soul (doc.cc)
What could be more important in life than how you make people feel?
Why Artificial General Intelligence Is and Remains a Fiction (osf.io)
So Many Unmarried Men (aeon.co)
In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men.
Nature loves patterns (fayziev.com)
As I drift through my winter vacation, detoxing from work, tech and world matters, I notice my little brother crawling toward a heat stove. With a week of rest behind me, my mind wanders into philosophical territory, and I can't help but map this moment to machine learning.
Ask HN: What is the best method for turning a scanned book as a PDF into text? (ycombinator.com)
I like reading philosophy, particularly from the authors rather than a secondhand account.
The Tao of Go (bitfieldconsulting.com)
You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf
Worthwhile Lives for Sensitive Young Men (librarianofcelaeno.substack.com)
I was very grateful for the opportunity to speak with Johann Kurtz and Dave Greene the other day and for the chance to hear their views expounded more directly, as well as to elaborate on my own. Johann Kurtz has offered an afterword and I thought I might do so as well.
How A Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian [Larry Sanger] (larrysanger.org)
It is finally time for me to confess and explain, fully and publicly, that I am a Christian.
The Mythology of Work (2018) (crimethinc.com)
What if nobody worked? Sweatshops would empty out and assembly lines would grind to a halt, at least the ones producing things no one would make voluntarily. Telemarketing would cease. Despicable individuals who only hold sway over others because of wealth and title would have to learn better social skills. Traffic jams would come to an end; so would oil spills. Paper money and job applications would be used as fire starter as people reverted to barter and sharing.
Relational Quantum Mechanics (plato.stanford.edu)
Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) is the most recent among the interpretations of quantum mechanics that are widely discussed today.
A Conversation with Ilya Sutskever on AI as Synthetic Life (accelerateordie.com)
Like the god of Genesis, we have created AI in our own image.
Google DeepMind: Agency Is Frame-Dependent (arxiv.org)
Agency is a system's capacity to steer outcomes toward a goal, and is a central topic of study across biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.