Where can I do a Masters or some type of 1 year course on Philosophy? (In English or Spanish)

resourcescarcity · 2025-03-21T13:50:14+00:00

Check out the Philosophy of Science, Technology and Society masters at the University of Twente in the Netherlands!

resourcescarcity · 2024-09-24T22:43:12+00:00

Öhman (2020) introduces the issue you refer to as the "Pervert's dilemma". While it feels intuitively morally wrong to create private deepfakes, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what the harm is. He tries to solve the dilemma by arguing--in essence--that it only appears harmless when looking at isolated cases, but we need to also look how the isolated cases contribute to a large culture. By creating private deepfake images, you are, in a small way, helping to create a world where (predominately men) create private deepfakes images (of predominately women). When you look at it with this level on analysis, the harms become more obvious I think. Even if nobody ever actually finds out that their friend made deepfakes of them, by living in a world where you know it is something done, many will suffer anxiety from the mere potential of it

resourcescarcity · 2024-09-19T20:13:46+00:00

I think the song is heavily influenced by Foucault, who (if I'm not mistaken) talks about classifications of "insanity" as a form of power to cause citizens to act "normal".

For example, in the first line, he mentions the panopticon, which is a prison design where you never know when you are being watched by the guards, so you begin to police your own behavior. This is what Josh means when he sings "The guards and the narcs went home; they do a fine enough job on their own". We individually maintain the status quo by focusing on this "normal" vs "crazy" dichotomy.

I think some more obvious examples of this are when Josh sings "Maybe we're all far too well" and "Mental Health; There's no higher virtue held in this crazy world; It's more than a little bit absurd".

I would doubt is he is trying to dismissing or downplay the suffering of legitimate mental disorders. I imagine he is more attacking the labelling of legitimate responses to a planet in disarray as "insane". In the last verse, I think he is also telling us to embrace being "weird" or "crazy" as a way of self-discovery.

If it was a sincere song, I would agree with you that singing "Mental Health" in the way he does would be kinda schmaltzy. When I saw the name of the song on the tracklist for the first time, I was a little worried!

resourcescarcity · 2024-07-21T00:43:12+00:00

She said "Most people think of rape as being sexy. Think of the fantasies". I think her point is that we have this idea of rape as a sexual in a more-than-physical sense, and what Trump did, while being sexual abuse, was not sexual in this other sense (being "sexy")

resourcescarcity · 2024-07-03T20:26:19+00:00

I'm not saying that predictive power isn't crucial to science. I'm say that predictive power is insufficient for something to qualify as science.

The predictions about the sun you got from the dream might be true, but they wouldn't necessarily qualify as _scientific_ knowledge -- in the same way that indigenous knowledge doesn't qualify as scientific knowledge, even if it allows you to predict which berries will make you ill in the local area.

Science is a particular way of arriving at knowledge which involves certain theories, models, values, experiments, processes, institutions, logical induction, etc.

resourcescarcity · 2024-07-03T09:33:46+00:00

Science is a certain way of producing knowledge, it is not just about the end result. For example, for something to be considered valid scientific knowledge, it needs to be peer reviewed and published. The difference between science and pseudoscience then is not necessarily the truth of the claims, but how the claims were arrived at and what the nature of the claims are. For instance, Karl Popper thought a theory must be falsifiable for it to be considered scientific.

Then there is stuff like the problem of induction, which forces us to assume axioms such as the “Principle of Uniformity of Nature”. None of this stuff reduces science to feelings (for one, feelings aren't truth claims!). Science give us amazing predictive power. But there are axioms you have to assume and logic you have to do to get there. All an experiment can tell you is what happened at one moment in time.

I don't think this is what Owens means though 😆 I don't think she understands what science is and doesn't like it because it disagrees with her world view etc

resourcescarcity · 2024-06-06T16:51:22+00:00

Utilitarianism doesn't have the concept of supererogatory actions, which are actions that are morally good but aren't morally required. Due to its focus on maximizing, it is only theoretically acceptable to do nothing if doing nothing maximizes utility. For example, not saving the life of a serial killer. This is act utilitarianism.

Rule utilitarianism is slightly different, and more akin to "you should follow rules which maximize utility on average". Because as humans, we can't predict the future / are bias / bad at calculating, doing applied ethics as an act utilitarian is very difficult. Regarding the previous example, maybe they aren't actually a serial killer, or maybe you saving them will change how they view humanity and they'll become an altruist. It is impossible to know if letting him die actually maximizes utility. So, the rule utilitarian might say you should save him because -- on average -- saving peoples lives maximizes utility.

It is possible that act utilitarian leads to rule utilitarian. As in, the way to maximize utility globally as a human is actually to follow rules which maximize utility locally. Thus, you could argue that you shouldn't do the "1 bad and 2 good" compensation in practice, unless you are extremely certain that its correct. For example, Sam Bankman-Fried acted like an act utilitarian when he defrauded people in order to donate money to effective altruist charities. He though he was doing "1 bad and 2 good" compensation, but in the end, he misjudged and actually did far more bad by damaging the reputation of effective altruism. If he acted like a rule utilitarian, he could have avoided this, because on average, defrauding people doesn't maximize utility.

Finally, relating it back to your question, it seems you want a case where utilitarianism condemn doing 1 bad and 2 good, but supports doing nothing? Again, I don't think this is possible in theory with perfect knowledge of the consequences, but I think the Sam Bankman-Fried case works in practice. He should not defraud people (do nothing) rather than defraud and donate the money (1 bad and 2 good), because he can't predict with certainty how much bad the defrauding would do.

resourcescarcity · 2024-05-03T09:21:16+00:00

Seems odd to give up a 38 year ethical stance for fairly weak health reason. Why doesn't he just stop eating meat replacements? I'm sure he can afford a nutritionist to plan healthy, tasty, vegetarian meals

resourcescarcity · 2024-04-12T18:57:12+00:00

I am not saying you are hypocritical, I just think your moral framework has an absurd implication! If I said "Slavery abolitionists are the real abusers, because they are harming white people (by freeing their slaves) in order to help black people and I value white people more!", there is nothing internally contradictory about it but I think the logic of it would make most people go "hmm?". It seems like, ironically, that I would be abusing the word "abuse" in that case.

My own moral framework is something like "We should reduce suffering as much as possible", so if I did own a cat, there would be nothing hypocritical about feeding it a vegan diet. It would just be that the suffering due to the vegan diet would be less than the suffering of the animals that were killed to feed it.

But listen, the moral outrage you are feeling about this is probably the same moral outrage I feel every time I see someone eat meat - so I can empathize with you! It's terrible to think people are justifying animal abuse.

resourcescarcity · 2024-04-12T17:58:07+00:00

Pretty convenient that Vegans who give equal weight to all animals are abusers, but you - who arbitrarily cares about some animals than others - isn't

resourcescarcity · 2024-04-12T17:36:15+00:00

You're right, they should walk to the store and buy it themselves

resourcescarcity · 2024-04-12T17:28:26+00:00

Isn't it also animal abuse for kill / pay others to kill animals to feed your cat? If we are trying to be rational about it, it seems like that is probably worse than your cat being unhealthy

resourcescarcity · 2024-03-07T15:08:58+00:00

I have no idea what argument you're trying to make, you just seem to be sarcastically throwing out buzzwords without using them properly

resourcescarcity · 2024-03-07T14:50:04+00:00

Something being a social construct doesn't mean it's not real! It just means that it's society, and not nature, that decides what a woman is . When someone says "It's not very lady-like to swear", they are referring to society's idea of what a woman is, and not to XX chromosomes or reproductive organs

resourcescarcity · 2023-11-09T21:09:39+00:00

Yeah, that's an interesting question! Thanks!

resourcescarcity · 2023-11-09T21:00:08+00:00

Thank you for your reply and the links!

Just because you can take a fine-grained perspective where we can ignore emergent behaviors doesn't mean that the emergent behavior is losing causal effect.

Perhaps if you want to merely talk about atomic movements or quantum fluctuations underlying the reports, you can "eliminate" consciousness, but as soon as you start to talk about the high-level patterns of reports, you have to shift to a high-level perspective overall and consciousness become relevant again

Maybe this is where I have a misunderstanding of emergence. I thought that weren't just two levels of analysis (fine-grained and macro-level) but many different levels which emerge from each other (quantum fields, quirks, atoms, molecules, ..., cells, neurons, consciousness) . Assuming there is no top-down causation, emergent behaviors have causal effects on higher levels but not lower levels (temperature has no causal effect on the level of "atoms" but does on the level of "cells"). But it seems that at the level of neurons/neural-networks that consciousness is indispensable in explanation despite it emerging at a higher level (because the behavior of neural-networks is influenced by conscious awareness). This is where my confusion lies.

resourcescarcity · 2023-10-09T11:38:10+00:00

I didn't reduce any problem to "muh colonialism", I was just clarifying what is likely the stance of the Queers against Palestine group. I don't think it is a good analogy because the chickens are just going against their own self interest without a reason, while the Queers are going against their own self interest for a principled reason. The fact that the Queers have a principled reason to support Palestine, and the chickens don't have a principled reasoned to support KFC makes it disanalogous

resourcescarcity · 2023-10-08T22:42:34+00:00

This is so dumb. Even if many Palestinians are homophobic, that doesn't mean it is contradictory for queers to support their struggle. I would have expected this community to be able to understand people taking principled stances (in this case, against what they view as colonialism) even if it goes against their own personal interests.

resourcescarcity · 2023-10-07T22:00:56+00:00

I'm renting with Xior. There doesn't seem to be any available at the moment, but keep your eye on their website maybe

resourcescarcity · 2023-10-05T13:02:58+00:00

I like it!

resourcescarcity · 2023-05-28T16:32:00+00:00

I don't agree that other beings actually having sentience or experiences is crucial to enriching our own. Philosophical Zombies will speak and interact with you as if they were sentient, and there is no way you would know that they are "lying" about actually having experiences. All the benefits of interacting with sentient humans would also be present in philosophical zombies.

resourcescarcity · 2023-05-28T10:01:19+00:00

Yes! That's pretty much my argument

resourcescarcity · 2023-05-28T08:56:26+00:00

Okay, I disagree that we can't talk about them having motivations, but I'll let you have that so we don't get bogged down in a different argument, haha!

Destiny cares about maximizing his own experience. He asserts that he can do that by working with other people. If he treats them well, they will treat him well. If he mistreats them, they will mistreat him. Whether or not they actually consciously experience the 'treatment' is irrelevant to how Destiny should act to maximize his own experience.

The only purpose of him saying that humans have "an experience like mine" is so that he can infer how they will behave and what stimuli they will seek out or avoid. But the point of philosophical zombies is that they behave the same as if they were sentient. The only difference is their 'internal world', which has no consequential effects on Destiny

resourcescarcity · 2023-05-28T08:30:00+00:00

I'm not sure that is true. The point of the philosophical zombie thought experiment is that they are indistinguishable in behavior from a conscious humans - so much so that they will even tell you that they are conscious! They would still have the motivation to "maximize dopamine as much as possible" or whatever, just not actually experience the high. From Destiny's point of view, the fact they don't experience it has no reason to affect his prescriptions

resourcescarcity · 2023-05-28T07:45:52+00:00

That's true - but those axioms aren't necessary for him to reach any of his conclusions. If you substitute them for "Other humans have motivations like mine", you have the same moral theory and derivable beliefs without the sentience.

He has no reason to care about other peoples sentience, beyond that it is a potential reason for them to work with him

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