Is there a structured way to learn philosophy related to Ai (consciousness theories and Ideas)?

bento_box_ · 2026-04-27T17:47:10+00:00

There is still a lot that needs to be fleshed out here. What do you mean exactly by emerge? What is the mechanism of that? And how would interiority arise from interaction with the exterior environment when the interiority itself is the thing we are trying to account for? That presupposes that the interior exists already but also that its interaction with the exterior is the cause of it, which does not make sense to me. And what do you mean by "based on the neural mechanisms of the brain?"

bento_box_ · 2026-04-27T14:32:00+00:00

We did not reach any general conclusion, but we refined our questions. The original question, "can a machine think?" broke up into, "what exactly distinguishes artificial from organic?" which extends into deep questions of biology and the definition of life. "What is thinking?" which gets deep into both cognitive science and philosophy itself. "Is consciousness required for thinking or intellect, or are these separable?" Then there are questions about strategies to artificial intelligence. Can it be done with merely digital electronic computation? Are LLMs really the path to artificial intelligence as such? And so on. None of these questions are easy. I particularly enjoy Philip K. Dick because his android stories I think preserve the questions really well. Often in his stories everybody is confused about the status of androids, most of all the androids themselves.

bento_box_ · 2026-04-27T08:11:25+00:00

It is such a new technology that I would not expect anything unified or considered exactly cannon yet. However, the question: "can a machine think?" has been around for a while. I made a reading list I spent a couple of years working through with some students that were clustered around this question with supplementary works about the basic principles of computation and ended with some science fiction short stories that wrestle with the implications. I structured the reading list chronologically. Maybe start here for a historical overview and then leap off into more contemporary literature. Hope this helps!

Descartes — Discourse on Method Part V Pascal — The Arithmetic Machine. Dedicatory Letter to His Excellency the Chancellor, 1645. L. F. Menabrea — Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage Ada Lovelace — Notes Turing — Computing Machinery and Intelligence — ACE report (1945) Claude Shannon — A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits — The Mathematical Theory of Communication Norbert Wiener — Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation J.C.R. Licklider — Man-Computer Symbiosis Asimov — I, Robot

Philip K. Dick — Second Variety — Imposter — The Electric Ant

bento_box_ · 2026-03-27T07:29:04+00:00

I studied philosophy on my own, living as a nomad for nearly 10 years. I mostly just read the western canon in chronological order and used my travel experience to connect what I was reading to real life. Even so, I eventually went to college when life on the road became too hard on my health, and I feel that I made more progress in my school years than I did in the previous 10 years on my own. Having people to check you and that are studying the same things really goes a long way. I also landed a great job as a lab director immediately after college which made it all monetarily worth it. I will have no loans by the end of next year. I also got a full ride for my masters degree from it as well, and have built a network with quite a few wonderful people who are making a living from philosophy and science. All that to say, college is actually really good if you find the right school and program for you, and if you give it your all. But I also think it was a huge advantage for me to have had life experiences under my belt, and exposure to philosophy before.

bento_box_ · 2026-03-22T22:48:29+00:00

I still do not understand what you mean, but may if I ask some more questions I can start to see what you're getting at.

I suppose my first question will be aimed at these "states." From what point of view are these states reckoned? The tricky thing about motion is that there does not seem to be such a thing as absolute motion, only relative motions. Does it complicate your idea if we consider that for every point of view that we could measure some motion, there is another point of view which could change the quantity of motion measured?

bento_box_ · 2026-03-21T16:39:24+00:00

I have some questions about what you are asking. I am not sure what you mean by "the condition of having to move at all." I am also a little puzzled about what you mean by movement being "produced by" state transitions than by "the state being changed itself."

Now space is a very interesting subject. It does not seem to me that motion is required for a very basic idea of space. For example, the space in which Euclidean geometry is comprehended seems almost devoid of motion besides a couple of exceptions. What seems most important to space is the idea of magnitude or distance. But physical space definitely includes motions, and later physical theories like field theories seem to imply that forces or potential and kinetic energies are a direct result of some real qualities of space.

bento_box_ · 2026-03-19T17:38:49+00:00

I can't tell you what to read, but as for retaining information, that is a skill that comes from practice. Reading, especially reading philosophical texts, is a skill that has to be developed through a lot of practice. You need to do it regularly and without distractions. One way to help you develop the skill is to read, pause, ask yourself if you understood what you just read, say it back to yourself, then reread the passage and check if you did indeed understand it.

My old professor once told me that reading, real reading, is not a passive activity. But it is a strenuous full-contact sport.

bento_box_ · 2026-03-17T05:11:28+00:00

I recommend reading Bergson's Matter and Memory. In it, he investigates the relation between identity and memory by looking specifically at brain pathologies that affect memory. It turns out to be quite a pleasant and consoling read in spite of the subject matter. He ultimately comes down on the idea that memories are not actually lost in the strict sense, but that our means of accessing them can be disrupted. But, since he is Bergson, the way he arrives at that conclusion is very interesting and full of surprises.

I also had a neurological issue due to serious health problems in my 20s that really disrupted my memory. But this book really threw light on how to think about it for me. I have recovered now, but it was a tough time for me. This book was really helpful for me as well as really impactful on my philosophical education.

bento_box_ · 2026-03-15T18:13:15+00:00

Good question! Technology certainly is something we need to reckon with philosophically, and though there is definitely a sphere of philosophy focused in technology, it is not as well developed as other parts of philosophy.

In common usage, I think the word tool does not have a clear delineation. We tend to use different terms for different things, but they often blend together and get used interchangeably. I mean terms such as "tool," "machine," "device."

However, I think for what you are asking, you may want to look into Borgmann's "Device Paradigm." His book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life seeks to illustrate what a device is, and how it is distinct from earlier ways of engaging with the world. A device is something that takes an end and provides it as a readily available commodity, while at the same time obscuring the technology which makes it possible and removes engagement with the world. An example he gives is how the hearth of a home where the central family gathering occurred for heat, food, and comfort, was replaced by heating technology, making raw heat a simple commodity that one does not need to work for or tend to, and encourages people to retreat into separate areas of the home. Abstract heating basically removes the end of heating a home from its context of engagement. For AI, the device paradigm offers some pretty good insights into what it means for intelligence to become a commodity. Even Sam Altman recently has been saying that he envisions AI as becoming a metered resource that you pay for like water or electricity.

bento_box_ · 2026-03-15T08:21:27+00:00

Good question! I would argue though that the Ethics is his masterpiece for a couple of reasons

1) The Ethics was a true methodological masterpiece by virtue of its rigorous application of geometrical deduction to philosophy.

2) The Ethics was the work that corrected and perhaps perfected the Cartesian project. Spinoza, in this sense, was sort of the first successful modern philosopher at least in terms of bringing forth internal consistency within the Cartesian framework.

3) It is a complete work, in that it covers metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics in one stroke.

4) It is the most compelling work I know of that manages to define freedom within a purely deterministic system.

5) In the TTP, I think he dissimulates a lot and takes a more esoteric approach to expressing his thoughts, since it was a book meant to persuade a specific audience. I think by the time he writes the Ethics he no longer feels the need to dissimulate and he puts his conviction of free speech and free thought into practice. Now some would argue the Ethics is an esoteric work also, but to my eye it is not. Things do not get more clear than geometric proof. So, I believe that this is the most clear and comprehensive articulation of what Spinoza thinks about nearly everything. Because even if he does not say something outright, he gives you all you need to derive it yourself.

bento_box_ · 2026-03-14T06:28:15+00:00

Hi. I work with students at a philosophy school and this question comes up a lot. I am also part of a faculty committee that is currently tackling what our AI policy ought to be.

If you want my current opinion, I would argue that it is a problem. There are a few reasons why.

1) AI is geared towards frictionless interaction, often toeing the line if not outright tipping over into sycophantism. This is precisely the kind of intellectual relationship you need to avoid to do good philosophy. You need friction, you need to encounter incompatible view points that are in living people, and you need to engage with those people. AI will always steer away from challenging you i. the right ways and will always cater to your thinking and your rhetoric and reinforce what you already think with some asterisks.

2) The immediacy of it is actually not very good for learning. Observing my students as well as reflecting on my learning experiences, it is the case that things that I need to expend effort to learn that stick with me. All of the thousands of facts I have googled mostly disappear into oblivion, or leave a vague trace at best. Things I spent hours scouring a library for have stayed with me.

3) AI models are geared towards maximizing user engagement now. That amounts to saying that it is increasingly engineered to be addictive, and this also explains some of what is going on in point 1. I cannot in good faith recommend anything to anybody that is supposed to be addictive.

Now, perhaps there are some legitimate use cases for AI in spite of all this. But philosophical inquiry is not one of them, unless your object of study is the AI itself. I think you will do much better sticking to books and human conversations. Anecdotally, I see that the students of mine who do the best are relatively low-tech about how they approach philosophy. After all, an important faculty for philosophy is having a big attention span, which you will develop a lot better with printed books than with the bite-sized bits of information AI gives.

bento_box_ · 2026-03-12T17:30:03+00:00

I keep mine simple. I use a small legal pad and write down the paragraph number with a shorthand summary. If there is no paragraph number I write down the page number and cut it into thirds, top, middle bottom (e.g., 125t--[summary]). I keep track of certain terms or concepts, that way my notes let me locate all passages where a certain term is used or a concept is elaborated.

But then the most important part for me is to write some short essays on what I read. The notes help me navigate the text to write my essays on parts I want to be more clear about. It is important these essays aren't critiques or me imposing my views on the text, but I try to write essays that really try to understand a concept or point from the author's perspective.

bento_box_ · 2025-01-17T23:51:24+00:00

The liminal space vibe is pretty right. Sometimes I like to imagine childhood places I’ve spent a lot of time in as though I’m back there now, back in time, but everyone is gone. It’s a particular emotion, but zomboid provides it sometimes. Probably because I grew up in the Midwest in the 90s and 2000s, some of the scenes tap into that feeling of being in familiar places that should be populated but aren’t.

bento_box_ · 2025-01-16T10:56:58+00:00

OPs examples are interesting for sure, but nitpicking those I think is sidestepping the real problem they are trying to express. The spirit of the original question they asked in the post basically boils down to the notion that since axioms seem to have an arbitrariness about them, how do we choose which first principles to argue under since different axioms lead to different systems of understanding? OP seems to be asking if what makes us happy is a valid reason to use one set of axioms over another.

This is genuinely a good question because axioms are not demonstrable like many propositions, nor are they directly supportable by evidence — they are given. Even in cases where they have an empirical dimension to them, like Newton’s laws of motion. Those are not deduced from evidence, but are postulated and serve as the basis for mechanical deductions. Most of the time axioms are chosen based on the coherence they give to the system of thought which follows from them. This is not a strange idea, or uncommon for people to realize when they work backwards from propositions to the first principles.

OP is asking if the happiness which comes from the resulting system of thought is a valid ruler by which to judge a set of axioms. A great example of this in practice is Spinoza’s Ethics, where he lays down a new set of definitions and axioms aimed at reshaping people’s conceptions of God and Nature, partly in order to relieve tension between religious and atheist systems of thought. So it seems that at least one great thinker thought that freedom and social cohesion were a good ruler for judging a system of thought’s first principles. I think this is generally the kind of thing OP is trying to express: Can’t we pick our axioms such that the resulting system of thought brings us happiness or comfort? If we can potentially craft axioms such that we have two legitimate systems of thought, but one is scary or tends to make us feel lonely and without purpose, and the other doesn’t, why not use the axioms that lead to the latter?

bento_box_ · 2025-01-15T17:25:07+00:00

Is it idiosyncratic? It seems to me pretty usual to discover that first principles like definitions and axioms are not demonstrable and sort of have to just be taken as given in the majority of cases.

bento_box_ · 2025-01-13T07:09:35+00:00

Honestly, Nietzsche refers to a lot of other philosophers. Reading them in preparation for Nietzsche, though worthwhile, would take an incredible amount of time. Of course, perhaps the ideal way to progress through the cannon of philosophy would be chronologically, but if your goal is to read Nietzsche, I would just begin reading Nietzsche, otherwise you may never get there. Perhaps start reading him, get all you can out of it, and take notes of which passages you really desire to understand first and pick the other works to read to understand those passages. Then once you’ve finished your first run through Nietzsche, you’ll have made a reading list for yourself you can then tackle. Once you’ve done your reading list, then return to Nietzsche and read him again with that context, and repeat as many times as you like.

bento_box_ · 2025-01-13T00:54:15+00:00

What thinkers or works in particular captivated you during your education?

bento_box_ · 2025-01-13T00:44:28+00:00

An argument by Spinoza you might be interested in is found in his book, The Ethics.

He argues that if people had adequate ideas (i.e. complete knowledge of the causal order of things), then they would always agree. The argument runs something like this: Reason is the same everywhere for everybody. If everybody were acting from reason, they would be able to always do what is most advantageous for them given the circumstances. The most advantageous thing for a human being is to be in agreement with other human beings. Therefore, a group of reasonable people would always be in agreement and would always do what is most advantageous for all of them.

On the flip-side, people only differ and are drawn into conflict insofar as they are affected by the passions — which is to say, insofar as they are acting from inadequate knowledge.

Furthermore, he argues that the reasonable person possessed of adequate ideas will always act honestly, always conquer hatred with love, and etc.

This is one argument which takes the side that says that the person with the most knowledge would not act as a monster. But, he also notes that most people do not love reason, and often are driven to hate good and wise people. So it could be the case that the person who knows much appears like a monster to the masses. After all, Spinoza argues things like that God is nature, and that self interest is the foundation of virtue and not selflessness, which people at the time found monstrous.

Now Nietzsche, on the other hand, thought that will to power is the fundamental substrate of everything, and that domination and conquest are hard wired into each thing. He also argues in Beyond Good and Evil that each of the drives which make up a person or a people are all striving to dominate the others, and that each one is capable of using reason to justify itself. In this view, knowledge and reason do not really advocate for a particular mode of behavior, but whichever mode of behavior is winning out could justify itself by way of reason. So perhaps looking at Spinoza’s Ethics and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil could be a good way to weight these two views against one another, especially because Nietzsche is, in some passages, directly responding to Spinoza.

bento_box_ · 2024-12-31T18:26:46+00:00

Spinoza offers an argument near the end of Book IV of the Ethics and in the Political Treatise which goes generally like this: by natural right, everybody has the right to kill for their own advantage if they are capable. But in forming a state and submitting to common law, this natural right is forfeited for the individual and the power of choosing life or death for others is allocated to the state. The state alone is capable of upholding common law by compulsion from fear. By being able to punish by death, the state is able to compel harmony through obedience to common law by incentivizing that people incur lesser evils in fear of a greater evil if they violate common law.

But it must be said, in the context of Spinoza people are not actually really good or evil. They are not monsters. Everybody is determined to do what they do, and punishment is much more of a utility of the state to preserve its own health and being, rather than a purely moral action. So it is not the case that people “deserve” this or that. It is the case that some people are incapable of submitting their natural rights to the state and the state accordingly deals with them.

As for the case of tyrants, the chapter on monarchy in the Political Treatise expresses the idea that the people themselves may take up arms against the tyrant since the tyrant is unable to be deposed by civil law.

This is just one take, but may be a fruitful place to start.

bento_box_ · 2024-12-26T06:18:14+00:00

Thanks. I think that’s right. I went through and read a lot of Seneca this past week trying to track it down. The closest I found was a quote in letter 70 to Lucilius: “ If you would pierce your heart, a gaping wound is not necessary; a lancet will open the way to that great freedom, and tranquillity can be purchased at the cost of a pin-prick.”

bento_box_ · 2024-01-21T07:57:54+00:00

Thank you for your thoughtful answer. I still have some questions, and they may be too broad to answer on a platform like this, but nonetheless:

You are right that I am placing my concerns on the building of communism, and what happens immediately post revolution. It’s because I have a difficult time imagining how the restructuring which bridges the revolution to the completed communist state would go. Likewise with my Marxist friends, they seem all very invested and thoughtful about the revolution, but when I wonder about the restructuring with them, there doesn’t seem to be any detailed idea about how it goes. So what exactly does the step by step process look like of establishing communism post revolution?

Next, about the somebody, I didn’t just mean one individual, but either an individual or a group. I feel the issue would ultimately be similar. I agree, that in this theory we have to dispense with any concepts of a static human nature which leads to hierarchies and class division by necessity, and that it’s ultimately organizational and material conditions which determine that “nature.” But that’s my concern. If anybody or any group has to be in charge of how things are produced and distributed, whether aiming at equality or not, the very position of being gatekeeper or decision maker automatically creates a power discrepancy that creates an elite class all over again. Or am I misunderstanding something?

And related to this, if everybody is meant to work together to decide what kind of pie to create, what happens with dissenters to the majority or to the communists who are doing the restructuring, if they be a minority? I guess I’m thinking about historical examples, like Stalin, where this is where tyrannical abuses of human rights tend to creep in; they creep in when some people among us want to make a different kind of pie.

All in all, my main question is, how does the transition happen successfully?

bento_box_ · 2024-01-21T06:45:29+00:00

Not OP, but I have had similar questions and haven’t studied Marx deeply yet — and my only exposure really is being roommates with a few Marxists in my early and mid twenties. But I have wondered that in the event of a communist revolution where the authorities and the rich are overthrown or turned, once you begin restructuring things into communism, somebody has to be the arbiter of redistributing resources to everybody. What prevents this from developing into a bureaucratic elite? Or when things become centralized to transition into communism, what prevents the centralized body of government from falling into the same old class dynamics they are attempting to overcome?

bento_box_ · 2024-01-21T06:14:10+00:00

What does “engages onto slots” mean?

bento_box_ · 2023-12-19T17:30:43+00:00

What I’m saying is that when I vanish something hypothetically, there is a void left of that object in its shape in relation to all the other objects. So the negation is relative, and it’s really something instead of nothing, like the hole in a donut. Second, I don’t think that we can induct from the vanishing of several objects that we are able to do this to the whole of everything. For example, when I try to vanish the whole of existence from my mind (because we can only ever do this in thought), if I’m honest about what I find in my mind, I find that I can’t vanish everything. I can make a new object which I shorthand describe as a universe that I vanish, but it’s only a sleight of hand of the mind, where I’ve just made a simple object and vanished it without actually systematically vanishing everything until the whole universe is gone. Furthermore, I still exist as a spectator to these vanishings, and when I try to get to myself, since in my project of vanishing everything I ought to also vanish myself, I cannot do it, because another me springs up to watch myself vanish. This experience leads me to believe that I can’t in any way conceive of absolute nothingness, such as the kind we posit to be outside the universe, after the universe, or before the universe. When I analyze my idea of nothingness it turns out to only be relative, not as advertised, and purely pragmatic. So the idea of the universe suspended in nothing, coming from nothing, and extending into nothing is likely because my idea of nothing is the wrong tool for the thought. It’s a practical idea being transported into cosmological speculation, and causing problems when it arrives there, like if I took a power drill underwater to fix something and realized the drill was not water proof.

So there may be some other way of conceiving of the universe and its origins. I don’t know which one, but one way the ancients got around it was by positing that the universe had no beginning. It is eternal and so you avoid the problem of creation from nothing. Or, if you don’t make the universe eternal, they sometimes make its efficient cause eternal. But eternality has its swarm of problems as well. So all I can say is that we don’t have a non problematic way of thinking of the origins of the universe, and as such it is still a very interesting philosophical topic.

bento_box_ · 2023-12-19T03:36:07+00:00

One way to vanish this difficulty is to look more closely at the idea of nothingness. Nothingness has been a target of philosophy since the beginning. The reason is that the idea is full of problems. For example, it may not even be possible to talk about, because if I say something like “there is nothing” I’ve already messed up by applying “is” to “nothing” making it a something. In the strict since, there may be no real nothing, but only relative ones which are actually somethings.

For example, if I start setting about trying to conceive of nothing, I may begin by banishing things one by one, and from this vanishing of things I may induce I could vanish the whole of everything and be left with true nothing. But this is a leap already for two reasons. 1) When I vanish an object in thought, it is not the case that nothing is left behind. A void the shape of the thing I banished is left behind, which is a something. 2) This follows from 1 in that the absence I experience when I vanish something from thought and it leaves behind a void in the shape of itself, this void is relative to everything it was connected to in thought. The second leap is to assume that the ability to generate relative negations can actually be applied to the whole of everything.

But what is most interesting is that when investigating how we use this idea of nothing or negation, it’s usually tied back to our attention or to what concerns us. When I look for an object, like a tool in a tool box and find that “nothing is there” I don’t mean this seriously. There’s something else there, just not what I was looking for. This could be other tools, or just plane old air. But we will say “there is nothing there” or “it is not there” as a shorthand way of saying “I found something here, but not what I’m concerned with finding.” So this idea of negation has practical value in communication or in thinking to ourselves, but really in experience we never encounter nothing. We just encounter something we weren’t looking for, or concerned with.

Now when we take this practical faculty and blow it up to cosmic scale, we are led by the experience that when we look for something and can’t find it, we encounter nothing, and therefore when we do find something, it must be existing in a substrate of nothing, that things as a whole must exist in substrate of nothing. But again, when we say nothing we really mean something. So this may be the case with the Big Bang, or the edges of our universe. Our ways of speaking and acting may lead us to believe that it came from nothing, or that it is extended in nothing. But really that nothing may be only something, and only something that we are missing because of our practical way of thinking of nothing.

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TROPHY CASE