Suggested Readings

The Philosophy Garden, Stoicism and beyond

From “Transhumanism and misanthropy,” Daily Philosophy.

Transhumanism and misanthropy. I recently saw a graffito announcing 'Humanity sucks!' Without knowing what the artist meant, one can imagine. The human world as we know it is a world of violence, greed, selfishness, and zealous self-destructiveness. Inequality, hatred, and indifference corrupt our treatment of other people. Brutality and exploitativeness stain our treatment of billions of animals. Global heating, philistine assaults on the arts, warmongering — these and other failings are standard entries in a misanthropic litany. … (Daily Philosophy)

The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius wasn’t Pompeii’s only killer. Pompeii was destroyed by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., entombing residents under layers of volcanic ash. But there is more to this story of an ancient Roman city’s doom. Research published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science offers proof that Pompeii was simultaneously wrecked by a massive earthquake. The discovery establishes a new timeline for the city’s demise and shows that fresh approaches to research can reveal additional secrets from well-studied archaeological sites. … (New York Times)

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularitarians. I have met Ray Kurzweil on a number of occasions and written about him and his work, most recently in my 2018 book Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for The Afterlife, Mortality, and Utopia, in the context of the singularitarians and their goal of engineering immortality by, among other things, transferring your soul—the pattern of information that represents your thoughts and memories as stored in the connectome of your brain—into a computer. I am skeptical, inasmuch as even if this were technologically possible (which it isn’t), it would just be a copy of you (your MemorySelf or MEMself); your Point-of-ViewSelf (POVself)—the moment-to-moment experiencing self—would not awaken in the cloud but still be inside your head. … (Skeptic Substack)

Archaeologists find a 2,400-year-old ‘pot of gold’ in Turkey. It is the late fifth century B.C. and a mercenary soldier kneels in his modest quarters, digging a hole in the earthen floor. He places a small jug, called an olpe, in the hole for safekeeping and covers it with dirt. In the olpe are his savings — scores of gold coins, known as darics, each one equal to a month’s pay. But something happens to the soldier — possibly something sinister — and he never retrieves his hoard, which remains undiscovered for the next 2,400 years. That is one of several scenarios proposed by Christopher Ratté, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, to account for the cache, which he and his research team recently unearthed from the ruins of Notion, an ancient city-state in modern-day Turkey. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., the excavators found the remains of an earlier dwelling. “The coins were buried in a corner of the older building,” Dr. Ratté said. “We weren’t actually looking for a pot of gold.” … (New York Times)

Are we happy yet? Three times a day my phone pings with a notification telling me that I have a new happiness survey to take. The survey, from TrackYourHappiness.org, asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how focused I was on my task, how productive I was being and how happy I felt about it all. I measure my emotional levels with a little toggle that slides from “bad” to “good.” Though the trackers’ authors offer a disclaimer that “correlation does not prove causation,” results from thousands of its users published in 2010 suggest that people are happier when they are focused. After I took 100 surveys over about a month, that’s not what my results told me. I reported the most happiness when I was eating and the least when I was working. I was happier at home than I was outside or anywhere else. … (New York Times)

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Scientists seeking life on Mars heard a signal that hinted at the future. At sunset on a late summer weekend in 1924, crowds flocked to curbside telescopes to behold the advanced alien civilization they believed to be present on the surface of Mars. “See the wonders of Mars!” an uptown sidewalk astronomer shouted in New York City on Saturday, Aug. 23. “Now is your chance to view the snowcaps and the great canals that are causing so much talk among the scientists. You’ll never have such a chance again in your lifetime.” … (New York Times)

AI can change belief in conspiracy theories, study finds. Whether it is the mistaken idea that the moon landings never happened or the false claim that Covid jabs contain microchips, conspiracy theories abound, sometimes with dangerous consequences. Now researchers have found that such beliefs can be altered by a chat with artificial intelligence (AI). “Conventional wisdom will tell you that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely, if ever, change their mind, especially according to evidence,” said Dr Thomas Costello, a co-author of the study from American University. That, he added, is thought to be down to people adopting such beliefs to meet various needs – such as a desire for control. However, the new study offers a different stance. … (Guardian)

Some anger-management strategies. All of these techniques are used in cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), although different practitioners tend to combine them in different ways. Our main source for concepts and terminology used below will be the works of Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy. … (Donald Robertson’s Substack)

AI: A means to an end or a means to our end? So many questions. The first and perhaps the most urgent is … by what right do I stand before you and presume to lecture an already distinguished and knowledgeable crowd on the subject of Ai and its meaning, its bright promise and/or/exclusiveOR its dark threat? Well, perhaps by no greater right than anyone else, but no lesser. We’ll come to whose voices are the most worthy of attention later. I have been interested in the subject of Artificial Intelligence since around the mid-80s when I was fortunate enough to encounter the so-called father of Ai, Marvin Minsky and to read his book The Society of Mind. Intrigued, I devoured as much as I could on the subject, learning about the expert systems and “bundles of agency” that were the vogue then, and I have followed the subject with enthusiasm and gaping wonder ever since. But, I promise you, that makes me neither expert, sage nor oracle. For if you are preparing yourselves to hear wisdom, to witness and receive insight this evening, to bask and bathe in the light of prophecy, clarity and truth, then it grieves me to tell you that you have come to the wrong shop. You will find little of that here, for you must know that you are being addressed this evening by nothing more than an ingenuous simpleton, a naive fool, a ninny-hammer, an addle-pated oaf, a dunce, a dullard and a double-dyed dolt. But before you streak for the exit, bear in mind that so are we all, all of us bird-brained half-wits when it comes to this subject, no matter what our degrees, doctorates and decades of experience. I can perhaps congratulate myself, or at least console myself, with the fact that I am at least aware of my idiocy. This is not fake modesty designed to make me come across as a Socrates. But that great Athenian did teach us that our first step to wisdom is to realise and confront our folly. … (The Fry Corner)

The scientist-therapist chasm in psychology. Since the founding of Skeptic magazine in 1992 we have covered many fads and fallacies in psychology, from satanic panics, repressed/recovered memories of sexual abuse, and attachment therapies of the 1990s, to DEI training programs, anti-racism workshops, and trans contagions of today. With a graduate degree in experimental psychology myself, trained as I was to employ objective research methods and statistical analyses to determine what is likely to be true, false, or indeterminate, I have long wondered why psychology continues to be infected with bad and bogus ideas. This week’s guest columnist, renowned social psychologist Carol Tavris, has been studying this problem throughout her career and provides a cogent—albeit disturbing—answer. … (Skeptic)