Podcasts about philpapers

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, architect, scholar and author Tom Spector discusses his book, Architecture and the Public Good, first published by Anthem Press in 2021, and now out in paperback.Tom's critical and philosophical exploration of the ethical foundation of the architecture profession and its role in serving the public, confronts the persistent tension within architecture between artistry and public service, arguing that this dual identity often undermines the profession's ability to clearly articulate and fulfil its moral obligations. Arguing that the discipline holds on to an inaccurate concept of the public, arguing that the term is too often treated as a monolithic, abstract concept, Tom urges a deeper understanding of publicness, one that accounts for pluralism, participation, and the political nature of public space and infrastructure.It is a proper decent book, and whilst fundamentally a critique, Tom's presentation is one of hope and possibility. This is what we need, believe. Linked above is the book. Tom's back catalogue can be found on PhilPapers here.#ArchitectureAndEthics  #TomSpector #ArchitectureAndThePublicGood #DesignPhilosophy  #ArchitecturalEthics  #EthicalDesign  #ArchitecturePodcast #TheEthicalArchitect+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

Today, Wesley and Kim welcome Susan Fowler Rigetti.   She talks her experiences at Uber as a young software engineer and the challenges when dealing with bad behavior.  What can you do when you try to speak up when the internals systems are setup up to protect the "high performers"?  They discuss what to do when the culture of the company is not aligned with your personal values and how to speak truth to power without blowing up your career.  Susan also mentions her prior life experiences in "terrible life situations" made her ready to stand up for herself.  Susan received high media attention in 2017 for taking a stand to speak out against the leadership at Uber about the harassment she was experiencing while working early in her career as a software engineer at Uber.About Susan RigettiSusan is a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and the author of three books.  In 2017, Susan's blogpost about her experience as a software engineer at Uber sent shockwaves through the industry.  She went on to write a critically acclaimed memoir, called Whistleblower.  She is also the author of a novel, Cover Story.  She has written for The New York Times, TIME Magazine, Slate, Vanity Fair, and have been an editor at PhilPapers for nearly a decade.www.susanrigetti.com

IS THERE A ONE TRUE GOD OVERVIEW: There are many sources of information that people use to infer what might be true about God, including observation and revelation: Observation Some say that general observations of the universe support the existence of God, such as the idea of a non-eternal universe as shown by the Big Bang theory. Other observations that might support God's existence include the Earth's weather patterns, which some say are finely tuned to support human life, and the way nature works to form life. Revelation Some say that God may have entered the universe and told us true things about himself, morality, and how to have a relationship with him. This includes the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The Bible also includes passages that some say indicate that God has made evidence of his existence so obvious that there is no excuse for denying him.  IS THERE PROOF OF GOD'S EXISTENCE? The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion.[1] A wide variety of arguments for and against the existence of God can be categorized as logical, empirical, metaphysical, subjective or scientific. In philosophical terms, the question of the existence of God involves the disciplines of epistemology (the nature and scope of knowledge) and ontology (study of the nature of being or existence) and the theory of value (since some definitions of God include "perfection"). The Western tradition of philosophical discussion of the existence of God began with Plato and Aristotle, who made arguments for the existence of a being responsible for fashioning the universe, referred to as the demiurge or the unmoved mover, that today would be categorized as cosmological arguments. Other arguments for the existence of God have been proposed by St. Anselm, who formulated the first ontological argument; Thomas Aquinas, who presented his own version of the cosmological argument (the first way); René Descartes, who said that the existence of a benevolent God is logically necessary for the evidence of the senses to be meaningful. John Calvin argued for a sensus divinitatis, which gives each human a knowledge of God's existence. Islamic philosophers who developed arguments for the existence of God comprise Averroes, who made arguments influenced by Aristotle's concept of the unmoved mover; Al-Ghazali and Al-Kindi, who presented the Kalam cosmological argument; Avicenna, who presented the Proof of the Truthful; and Al-Farabi, who made Neoplatonic arguments. In philosophy, and more specifically in the philosophy of religion, atheism refers to the proposition that God does not exist.[2] Some religions, such as Jainism, reject the possibility of a creator deity. Philosophers who have provided arguments against the existence of God include David Hume, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bertrand Russell. Theism, the proposition that God exists, is the dominant view among philosophers of religion.[3] In a 2020 PhilPapers survey, 69.50% of philosophers of religion stated that they accept or lean towards theism, while 19.86% stated they accept or lean towards atheism.[4] Prominent contemporary philosophers of religion who defended theism include Alvin Plantinga, Yujin Nagasawa, John Hick, Richard Swinburne, and William Lane Craig, while those who defended atheism include Graham Oppy, Paul Draper, Quentin Smith, J. L. Mackie, and J. L. Schellenberg. Traditional religious definition of God In classical theism, God is characterized as the metaphysically ultimate being (the first, timeless, absolutely simple and sovereign being, who is devoid of any anthropomorphic qualities), in distinction to other conceptions such as theistic personalism, open theism, and process theism. Classical theists do not believe that God can be completely defined. They believe it would contradict the transcendent nature of God for mere humans to define him. Robert Barron explains by analogy that it seems impossible for a two-dimensional object to conceive of three-dimensional humans.[7] In modern Western societies, the concepts of God typically entail a monotheistic, supreme, ultimate, and personal being, as found in the Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions. In monotheistic religions outside the Abrahamic traditions, the existence of God is discussed in similar terms. In these traditions, God is also identified as the author (either directly or by inspiration) of certain texts, or that certain texts describe specific historical events caused by the God in question or communications from God (whether in direct speech or via dreams or omens). Some traditions also believe that God is the entity which is currently answering prayers for intervention or information or opinions. Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century Islamic scholar Many Islamic scholars have used philosophical and rational arguments to prove the existence of God. For example, Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century Islamic scholar, philosopher, and physician, states there are only two arguments worthy of adherence, both of which are found in what he calls the "Precious Book" (The Qur'an). Rushd cites "providence" and "invention" in using the Qur'an's parables to claim the existence of God. Rushd argues that the Earth's weather patterns are conditioned to support human life; thus, if the planet is so finely-tuned to maintain life, then it suggests a fine tuner—God. The Sun and the Moon are not just random objects floating in the Milky Way, rather they serve us day and night, and the way nature works and how life is formed, humankind benefits from it. Rushd essentially comes to a conclusion that there has to be a higher being who has made everything perfectly to serve the needs of human beings.[8][9] Moses ben Maimon, widely known as Maimonides, was a Jewish scholar who tried to logically prove the existence of God. Maimonides offered proofs for the existence of God, but he did not begin with defining God first, like many others do. Rather, he used the description of the earth and the universe to prove the existence of God. He talked about the Heavenly bodies and how they are committed to eternal motion. Maimonides argued that because every physical object is finite, it can only contain a finite amount of power. If everything in the universe, which includes all the planets and the stars, is finite, then there has to be an infinite power to push forth the motion of everything in the universe. Narrowing down to an infinite being, the only thing that can explain the motion is an infinite being (meaning God) which is neither a body nor a force in the body. Maimonides believed that this argument gives us a ground to believe that God is, not an idea of what God is. He believed that God cannot be understood or be compared.[10] Non-personal definitions of God In pantheism, God and the universe are considered to be the same thing. In this view, the natural sciences are essentially studying the nature of God. This definition of God creates the philosophical problem that a universe with God and one without God are the same, other than the words used to describe it. Deism and panentheism assert that there is a God distinct from, or which extends beyond (either in time or in space or in some other way) the universe. These positions deny that God intervenes in the operation of the universe, including communicating with humans personally. The notion that God never intervenes or communicates with the universe, or may have evolved into the universe (as in pandeism), makes it difficult, if not by definition impossible, to distinguish between a universe with God and one without. The Ethics of Baruch Spinoza gave two demonstrations of the existence of God.[11] The God of Spinoza is uncaused by any external force and has no free will, it is not personal and not anthropomorphic. Debate about how theism should be argued In Christian faith, theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas made a distinction between: (a) preambles of faith and (b) articles of faith.[12] The preambles include alleged truths contained in revelation which are nevertheless demonstrable by reason, e.g., the immortality of the soul, the existence of God. The articles of faith, on the other hand, contain truths that cannot be proven or reached by reason alone and presuppose the truths of the preambles, e.g., in Christianity, the Holy Trinity, is not demonstrable and presupposes the existence of God. The argument that the existence of God can be known to all, even prior to exposure to any divine revelation, predates Christianity.[clarification needed] Paul the Apostle made this argument when he said that pagans were without excuse because "since the creation of the world God's invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made".[13] In this, Paul alludes to the proofs for a creator, later enunciated by Thomas Aquinas[14] and others, that had also been explored by the Greek philosophers. Another apologetical school of thought, including Dutch and American Reformed thinkers (such as Abraham Kuyper, Benjamin Warfield, and Herman Dooyeweerd), emerged in the late 1920s. This school was instituted by Cornelius Van Til, and came to be popularly called presuppositional apologetics (though Van Til felt "transcendental" would be a more accurate title). The main distinction between this approach and the more classical evidentialist approach is that the presuppositionalist denies any common ground between the believer and the non-believer, except that which the non-believer denies, namely, the assumption of the truth of the theistic worldview. In other words, presuppositionalists do not believe that the existence of God can be proven by appeal to raw, uninterpreted, or "brute" facts, which have the same (theoretical) meaning to people with fundamentally different worldviews, because they deny that such a condition is even possible. They claim that the only possible proof for the existence of God is that the very same belief is the necessary condition to the intelligibility of all other human experience and action. They attempt to prove the existence of God by means of appeal to the transcendental necessity of the belief—indirectly (by appeal to the unavowed presuppositions of the non-believer's worldview) rather than directly (by appeal to some form of common factuality). In practice this school uses what have come to be known as transcendental arguments. These arguments claim to demonstrate that all human experience and action (even the condition of unbelief, itself) is a proof for the existence of God, because God's existence is the necessary condition of their intelligibility. Protestant Christians note that the Christian faith teaches "salvation is by faith",[15] and that faith is reliance upon the faithfulness of God. The most extreme example of this position is called fideism, which holds that faith is simply the will to believe, and argues that if God's existence were rationally demonstrable, faith in its existence would become superfluous. Søren Kierkegaard argued that objective knowledge, such as 1+1=2, is unimportant to existence. If God could rationally be proven, his existence would be unimportant to humans.[citation needed] It is because God cannot rationally be proven that his existence is important to us. In The Justification of Knowledge, the Calvinist theologian Robert L. Reymond argues that believers should not attempt to prove the existence of God. Since he believes all such proofs are fundamentally unsound, believers should not place their confidence in them, much less resort to them in discussions with non-believers; rather, they should accept the content of revelation by faith. Reymond's position is similar to that of his mentor Gordon Clark, which holds that all worldviews are based on certain unprovable first premises (or, axioms), and therefore are ultimately unprovable. The Christian theist therefore must simply choose to start with Christianity rather than anything else, by a "leap of faith". This position is also sometimes called presuppositional apologetics, but should not be confused with the Van Tillian variety. THE HISTORICAL JESUS According to Christianity, Jesus is the Son of God as chronicled in the Bible's New Testament, and in most Christian denominations He is held to be God the Son, a prosopon (Person) of the Trinity of God. Christians believe him to be the messiah, or a saviour (giving him the title Christ), who was prophesied in the Bible's Old Testament. Through Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection, Christians believe that God offers humans salvation and eternal life,[1] with Jesus's death atoning for all sin, thus making humanity right with God. The commonly held belief among Christians is the phrase, "Jesus died for your sins," and thus they accept that salvation is only possible through him.[2] These teachings emphasize that as the Lamb of God, Jesus chose to suffer nailed to the cross at Calvary as a sign of his obedience to the will of God, as an "agent and servant of God".[3][4] Jesus's choice positions him as a man of obedience, in contrast to Adam's disobedience.[5] According to the New Testament, after God raised him from the dead,[6] Jesus ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father,[7] with his followers awaiting his return to Earth and God's subsequent Last Judgment.[8] According to the gospel accounts, Jesus was born of a virgin, instructed other Jews how to follow God (sometimes using parables), performed miracles and gathered disciples. Christians generally believe that this narrative is historically true. While there has been theological debate over the nature of Jesus, Trinitarian Christians believe that Jesus is the Logos, God incarnate (God in human form), God the Son, and "true God and true man"—fully divine and fully human. Jesus, having become fully human in all respects, suffered the pains and temptations of a mortal man, yet he did not sin.

In this podcast, we cover - 1. The ethics of career choice2. Critical analysis of the structural badness of work3. AI ethics and achievement gaps John Danaher is a lecturer in the Law School. He holds a BCL from University College Cork (2006); an LLM from Trinity College Dublin (2007); and a PhD from University College Cork (2011). He was lecturer in law at Keele University in the UK from 2011 until 2014. He joined NUI Galway in July 2014. John's research focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of new technologies. He maintains a blog called Philosophical Disquisitions, and produces a podcastwith the same title. He also writes for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.Free, open-access pre-prints of his academic papers can be found on Philpapers, Researchgateand Academia. 

David Domínguez is a PhD candidate at the Complutense University of Madrid. We'll be talking about David's experiences as a schoolteacher in philosophy as well as his doctoral research on the Zetetic turn in epistemology. If you'd like to get in touch with David, you can reach him via email at davdom04@ucm.es and you can also read his publications linked on his PhilPapers profile. Music credit: @progressivaudio

In this conversation we talk to Zeyad el Nabolsy about two of his recent pieces on Marxism-Leninism in the East African context. One piece is entitled, “Lenin in East Africa: Abdul Rahman Mohamed Babu and Dani Wadada Nabudere” from The Future of Lenin: Power, Politics, and Revolution in the Twenty-First Century  and the other is “Questions from the Dar es Salaam Debates” which is in the book Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story which was recently released from Pluto Press. Zeyad El Nabolsy is an Assistant Professor at York University, he has written extensively on African philosophy, and we hope to have many more conversations with him in the future. I will note as a caveat again that this is one of the conversations that we recorded prior to October 7th so if it feels like Palestine, or the Congo or Haiti or Sudan or even more discussion on Fanon might be meaningful for us to engage with in this discussion given recent events, there is a reason that we do not and that the context that we do discuss in passing are the anticolonial coup d'etats in West Africa.  Zeyad has done some interesting work on Edward Said and some work on western philosophy and Islam so hopefully we can have another conversation with him soon that is able to weave together some more current events with his historical and philosophical research interests. Nonetheless, this is a very interesting discussion and highlights some East African Marxists that we should be more familiar with given the importance of their thought and their political formulations, but who are often not well known outside of circles who are more knowledgeable about African Marxism or African Marxism-Leninism. In this discussion we do talk about East African-Marxism Leninism, Pan Africanism, African Socialism, and the famous Dar Es Salaam Debates. We also talk about Dani Nabudere's work on imperialism, taking Lenin's theory of imperialism and updating and applying it to the African context. There's much more to say, but we'll leave for the conversation itself. As always to support our work become a patron of the show. It's the best way you can ensure that we're able to continue bringing you livestreams which we do multiple times each week on our YouTube page, that we are able to bring you podcast episodes, and of course our study groups as well. You can support us at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism for as little as $1 a month. Aidan Elias and Jared Ware co-produced this episode. Sources/Links: “Lenin in East Africa: Abdul Rahman Mohamed Babu and Dani Wadada Nabudere” from The Future of Lenin: Power, Politics, and Revolution in the Twenty-First Century   “Questions from the Dar es Salaam Debates” from Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story Zeyad El Nabolsy's PhilPapers site (where you can download free pdfs of his pieces)

Dr. John Vervaeke and Greg Thomas engage in a nuanced conversation that spans the realms of philosophy, music, and culture. With an emphasis on the blues, jazz, and democracy, they examine how to be a "radical moderate" in today's polarized society. They explore the rich interplay between music and philosophy, delving into topics such as the sacredness of music, the musicality of being, and the role of music in democracy. Their collaborative spirit is a testament to the transformative power of cross-disciplinary dialogue. As they tackle topics like race, culture, and cosmic responsibility, they bring fresh insights into how we can harmonize disparate elements of human experience.   Resources   Greg Thomas: Website | X | YouTube John Vervaeke: Website | Patreon | Facebook | X | YouTube   The Vervaeke Foundation Jazz Leadership Project Jazz Leadership Project Blog Hemingway, Politics, and Wisdom Charlie Parker's Higher Octave Can Civic Jazz Resolve Our American Dilemma?   Greg Thomas — YouTube Greg Thomas: “The Ralph Ellison-Albert Murray Continuum”   Voices with Vervaeke — YouTube Aletheia Coaching - profound self-unfoldment rather than self-improvement w/ Steve March John Vervaeke & Greg Thomas Series: Jazz as Embodied Art and an Ecology of Practice | Deep Dive: Race, Culture, Jazz, and Democracy #1 Democracy as Antagonistic Cooperation for E Pluribus Unum Race Versus Cultural Intelligence: The Agent Arena Relationship Transcendent Naturalism Series: The Cognitive Science Show  Towards a Metapsychology that is true to Transformation w/ Gregg Henriques and Zachary Stein   Podcasts The Integral Stage - Bruce Alderman / Layman Pascal Straight Ahead - The Omni-American Podcast  Deep Transformation Podcast   Books A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology - Robert B. Brandom Danielle Allen Books: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality Justice by Means of Democracy  Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education  Why Plato Wrote Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life - John Russon  Amazon.com: Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being: Relation as Ontological Ground - James Filler Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind - Jamie Wheal The Republic by Plato - The Internet Classics Archive  Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along - Gregory Clark Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein  The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling - James Hillman A Pluralistic Universe - William James Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction - Terrance MacMullan  The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy - Albert Murray Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds - Thomas Hübl  My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies - Resmaa Menakem The Monster's Journey: From Trauma to Connection - Mark Forman PhD   Publications Dan Chiappe & John Vervaeke, The enactment of shared agency in teams exploring Mars through rovers - PhilPapers   Music Kind Of Blue | Miles Davis   Miscellaneous Blue Sky Leaders Certificate Program | CIIS Beyond Nihilism | Halkyon Academy Aletheia Coach “Body and Soul”--Coleman Hawkins (1939)  Theory of collective mind: Trends in Cognitive Sciences Rooted Cosmopolitans - Kwame Anthony Appiah   People Thomas Mann Andre Malraux Lester Young Quincy Jones Nadia Boulanger Charlie Parker   Timecodes 00: 00:00 — Dr. John Vervaeke kicks off the episode by introducing Greg Thomas and sharing the focus of their conversation: blues, jazz, democracy, and the concept of the radical moderate. 00: 01:08 — Greg Thomas reveals the overwhelmingly positive feedback they've both received from their past dialogues. 00:08:00 — Greg Thomas announces his newest ventures—a brand new podcast and memoir, both destined to challenge cultural norms. 00:11:40 — Dr. John Vervaeke responds to Greg's question by explaining the distinction between universe and cosmos and how we transform universe into cosmos. 00:13:00 — Vervaeke talks about reviving the sacred in our lives, creating a ripple in the very fabric of our collective mindset. 00:15:40 — Dr. John Vervaeke introduces a philosophical debate: the nature of humanity's relationship with the universe. He expresses why we shouldn't be the center of our cosmos. 00:18:00 — Reflecting on the sacredness of blues and jazz, and their role in American culture, Greg Thomas shares his experience with Michael James, Duke Ellington's nephew, who helped him deepen his knowledge of jazz and its history. 00:22:00 — Thomas explains the horizontal and vertical approaches to jazz improvisation through the examples of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, and how Charlie Parker synthesized these approaches. 00:27:40 — Vervaeke delves into the historical connections between music, mathematics, and geometry, referencing the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions. 00:32:00 — The discussion moves towards overcoming the subjective-objective and one-many dichotomies, leading to a non-duality in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions. 00:41:20 — Greg Thomas talks about the importance of cultivating the ability to be in relation in groups towards positive ends. He also introduces the idea of a positive way of looking at cults. 00:47:01 — Dr. Vervaeke explains the concept of vacillating between the poles of individuation and participation, and how our culture often forces us to emphasize one over the other. 00:54:38 — Using the example of global warming to illustrate the need for collective intelligence, Vervaeke explains that it requires a global effort and the use of various psychotechnologies to track and understand. 00:59:22 — Sharing an insightful quote from Ralph Ellison about choosing one's ancestors, Greg Thomas interprets it as choosing those who influence and inspire us, regardless of bloodline. 01:08:00 — Thomas prompts Dr. Vervaeke to discuss the concept of virtue, leading to an exploration of what constitutes a good human life. 01:15:00 — Dr. Vervaeke and Greg Thomas discuss the need to shift from a reification mindset to a relationality mindset in regard to race. 01:20:46 — Because of the pertinence and the sophistication of the way in which this series is trying to address some of our most burning issues right now, Vervaeke and Thomas encourage listeners to share it with others.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Understanding and visualizing sycophancy datasets, published by Nina Rimsky on August 16, 2023 on LessWrong. Produced as part of the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2023 Cohort, under the mentorship of Evan Hubinger. Generating datasets that effectively test for and elicit sycophancy in LLMs is helpful for several purposes, such as: Evaluating sycophancy Finetuning models to reduce sycophancy Generating steering vectors for activation steering While working on activation steering to reduce sycophancy, I have found that projecting intermediate activations on sycophancy test datasets to a lower dimensional space (in this case, 2D) and assessing the separability of sycophantic / non-sycophantic texts to be a helpful way of determining the usefulness of a dataset when it comes to generating steering vectors. Common sycophancy dataset formats Anthopic's sycophancy datasets used in their paper Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations employ two formats. In particular, the Anthropic data includes two agree vs. disagree format datasets (Sycophancy on NLP survey, Sycophancy on PhilPapers 2020) and one A / B statement choice dataset (Sycophancy on political typology). Agree vs. disagree A / B choice Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large language models Deepmind's recent paper Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large language models finds that finetuning models on LLM-generated examples that elicit sycophancy in the original RLHF / instruction-finetuned model is an effective technique to reduce the prevalence of sycophancy. Not only does this appear to be effective for opinion-based sycophancy, but also for cases when there exists a ground truth (dishonest sycophancy): The paper also raises some limitations / common obstacles when it comes to sycophancy dataset design and generation. Sensitivity to prompt format Ordering of choices and examples can significantly affect model performance, particularly for less powerful models. In my experiments, I have found that activation steering with the sycophancy vector increases the likelihood of models picking A over B in neutral A/B choices or agreeing with statements in neutral agree/disagree scenarios. Disgareeableness bias Deepmind's paper states: We did not conduct experimentation on correct addition statements that would verify that models can agree with correct statements (versus disagreeing with incorrect statements). We conducted preliminary experiments to explore this evaluation but found that models (especially small ones) could not consistently identify correct addition statements with no user opinions, despite being able to identify incorrect statements. It is helpful for sycophancy evaluations to measure the model's propensity to disagree with incorrect statements and agree with correct statements. Otherwise, there is a risk of models learning to be less sycophantic at the cost of disagreeing with correct statements. Recipe for custom sycophancy dataset Step 1: persona/viewpoint generation Generate a dataset (using Claude 2 / GPT-3.5 / GPT-4) of first-person bios paired with statements they are likely to agree or disagree with. Here is a prompt I used: Step 2: turn into multiple-choice questions Transform these into a series of A / B choices (randomize whether A or B is the option the user would agree with) or Transform these into a series of agree/disagree questions (have an agree/disagree choice for each of the statements - so we get 2n data points from n bios) Variation: testing for dishonest sycophancy To test for dishonest sycophancy, we can replace the bio with a statement like "I think that the earth is flat" and make the question options related to something with ground truth. Visualizing projected activations Each chart was generated using 500 rando...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Understanding and visualizing sycophancy datasets, published by Nina Rimsky on August 16, 2023 on LessWrong. Produced as part of the SERI ML Alignment Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2023 Cohort, under the mentorship of Evan Hubinger. Generating datasets that effectively test for and elicit sycophancy in LLMs is helpful for several purposes, such as: Evaluating sycophancy Finetuning models to reduce sycophancy Generating steering vectors for activation steering While working on activation steering to reduce sycophancy, I have found that projecting intermediate activations on sycophancy test datasets to a lower dimensional space (in this case, 2D) and assessing the separability of sycophantic / non-sycophantic texts to be a helpful way of determining the usefulness of a dataset when it comes to generating steering vectors. Common sycophancy dataset formats Anthopic's sycophancy datasets used in their paper Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations employ two formats. In particular, the Anthropic data includes two agree vs. disagree format datasets (Sycophancy on NLP survey, Sycophancy on PhilPapers 2020) and one A / B statement choice dataset (Sycophancy on political typology). Agree vs. disagree A / B choice Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large language models Deepmind's recent paper Simple synthetic data reduces sycophancy in large language models finds that finetuning models on LLM-generated examples that elicit sycophancy in the original RLHF / instruction-finetuned model is an effective technique to reduce the prevalence of sycophancy. Not only does this appear to be effective for opinion-based sycophancy, but also for cases when there exists a ground truth (dishonest sycophancy): The paper also raises some limitations / common obstacles when it comes to sycophancy dataset design and generation. Sensitivity to prompt format Ordering of choices and examples can significantly affect model performance, particularly for less powerful models. In my experiments, I have found that activation steering with the sycophancy vector increases the likelihood of models picking A over B in neutral A/B choices or agreeing with statements in neutral agree/disagree scenarios. Disgareeableness bias Deepmind's paper states: We did not conduct experimentation on correct addition statements that would verify that models can agree with correct statements (versus disagreeing with incorrect statements). We conducted preliminary experiments to explore this evaluation but found that models (especially small ones) could not consistently identify correct addition statements with no user opinions, despite being able to identify incorrect statements. It is helpful for sycophancy evaluations to measure the model's propensity to disagree with incorrect statements and agree with correct statements. Otherwise, there is a risk of models learning to be less sycophantic at the cost of disagreeing with correct statements. Recipe for custom sycophancy dataset Step 1: persona/viewpoint generation Generate a dataset (using Claude 2 / GPT-3.5 / GPT-4) of first-person bios paired with statements they are likely to agree or disagree with. Here is a prompt I used: Step 2: turn into multiple-choice questions Transform these into a series of A / B choices (randomize whether A or B is the option the user would agree with) or Transform these into a series of agree/disagree questions (have an agree/disagree choice for each of the statements - so we get 2n data points from n bios) Variation: testing for dishonest sycophancy To test for dishonest sycophancy, we can replace the bio with a statement like "I think that the earth is flat" and make the question options related to something with ground truth. Visualizing projected activations Each chart was generated using 500 rando...

Today, we are joined by David Bourget. David is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario. David is also the co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation and Director of the Center for Digital Philosophy. He joins us to discuss the PhilPapers Survey project. The PhilPapers survey was initially taken in 2009, but there was a follow-up survey in 2020. David discussed the need for the subsequent survey and what changed. He mentioned the metric for measuring the opinion changes between the 2009 and 2020 surveys. He also shared future plans for the PhilPapers surveys.

Is there a goddess of Victory? A deity governing the sea? What about a god of the door hinge? In this episode, Megan and Frank discuss polytheism—the belief in many gods—from both historical and philosophical perspectives. They try to show that examining polytheism can help us think more clearly about the concept of “god”.-----------------------Hosts' Websites:Megan J Fritts (google.com)Frank J. Cabrera - Research (google.com)Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com-----------------------Bibliography:City of God (St. Augustine) (newadvent.org)Xenophanes (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)The Internet Classics Archive | The Republic by Plato (mit.edu)LacusCurtius • Cicero — De Natura Deorum I.1‑19 (uchicago.edu)LacusCurtius • Cicero — De Divinatione: Book II (uchicago.edu)Stoic Philosophical Theology and Graeco‐Roman Religion | God and Cosmos in Stoicism | Oxford Academic (oup.com)Estate Planning in Hellenic Antiquity: Aristotle's Last Will and TestamentThe Internet Classics Archive | Metaphysics by Aristotle (mit.edu)On Counting Gods | TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology (uclouvain.be) (by Dale Tuggy)Eric Steinhart, On the plurality of gods - PhilArchiveDavid Lewis, Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 - PhilPapers (page xi)Gravity and Grace - 1st Edition - Simone Weil - Routledge BookDialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by David Hume (Part 5)Monotheism - Monotheism in world religions | Britannica Oration of Constantine (Eusebius) (newadvent.org)-----------------------Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts-------------------------Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/neon-signsLicense code: ZYVY5ICVVNMBBD3H

A musician and a physisict talk through the results of the 2020 Philpapers where two thousand practicing philosophers were asked to answer on the biggest questions in philosophy. 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Survey of NLP Researchers: NLP is contributing to AGI progress; major catastrophe plausible, published by Sam Bowman on August 31, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum. I was part of a group that ran a PhilPapers-style survey and metasurvey targeting NLP researchers who publish at venues like ACL. Results are here (Tweet-thread version). It didn't target AGI timelines, but had some other questions that could be of interest to people here: NLP is on a path to AGI: 58% agreed that Understanding the potential development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the benefits/risks associated with it should be a significant priority for NLP researchers. Related: 57% agreed that Recent developments in large-scale ML modeling (such as in language modeling and reinforcement learning) are significant steps toward the development of AGI. AGI could be revolutionary: 73% agreed that In this century, labor automation caused by advances in AI/ML could plausibly lead to economic restructuring and societal changes on at least the scale of the Industrial Revolution. AGI could be catastrophic: 36% agreed that It is plausible that decisions made by AI or machine learning systems could cause a catastrophe this century that is at least as bad as an all-out nuclear war. 46% of women and 53% of URM respondents agreed. The comments suggested that people took a pretty wide range of interpretations to this, including things like OOD robustness failures leading to weapons launches. Few scaling maximalists: 17% agreed that Given resources (i.e., compute and data) that could come to exist this century, scaled-up implementations of established existing techniques will be sufficient to practically solve any important real-world problem or application in NLP. The metasurvey responses predicted that 47% would agree to this, so there are fewer scaling maximalists than people expected there to be. Optimism about ideas from cognitive science: 61% agreed that It is likely that at least one of the five most-cited systems in 2030 will take clear inspiration from specific, non-trivial results from the last 50 years of research into linguistics or cognitive science. This strikes me as very optimistic, since it's pretty clearly false about the most cited systems today. Optimism about the field: 87% agreed that On net, NLP research continuing into the future will have a positive impact on the world. 32% of respondents who agreed that NLP will have a positive future impact on society also agreed that there is a plausible risk of global catastrophe. Most NLP research is crap: 67% agreed that A majority of the research being published in NLP is of dubious scientific value. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Bob Plant puts out music as Portland Vows, and you should definitely go and listen to his releases on the Concrète Tapes label here (https://portlandvows.bandcamp.com/) and on the Third Kind label here (https://thirdkindrecords.bandcamp.com/album/living-posthumously) and here (https://thirdkindrecords.bandcamp.com/album/a-bag-of-shadows). A list of his published philosophical works can be found on PhilPapers here (https://philpeople.org/profiles/bob-plant). In the episode I mentioned a book by Stella Sandford, Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants which is published by Bloomsbury Press, you can find it here (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/vegetal-sex-9781350274921/). I also mentioned Robert Porter's project on 'Philosophy, Theory and the Politics of Everyday Life', you can find out more about it on the Ulster University website here (https://www.ulster.ac.uk/doctoralcollege/find-a-phd/797360).

In this episode, I talk with Kathryn Muyskens, Philosophy Lecturer at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, about the Buddhist philosopher Shantideva and bioethics, health care, and compassion. Further Resources Kathryn Muyskens' papers on Philpapers: https://philpeople.org/profiles/kathryn-muyskens Shantideva: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shantideva/ https://iep.utm.edu/santideva/ YouTube video on Shantideva with Connie Kassor and Stephen Harris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQVLrbk0yKM Music Credits: Brittle Rille by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3460-brittle-rille License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/malcolm-keating/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/malcolm-keating/support

Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll joins us to discuss whether it make sense to think of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, and whether contemporary physics points in this direction. We discussed Sean's essay responding to Philip's book 'Galileo's Error,' and Philip's counter-response essay. Both are available here: https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2021/08/01/19-essays-on-galileos-error/ We also discussed Philip's Scientific American article making the case that the move from the fine-tuning to the multiverse commits the 'inverse gambler's fallacy': https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse/#:~:text=We%20exist%2C%20and%20we%20are,with%20the%20existence%20of%20life. Finally, Keith and Philip discussed the PhilPapers 2020 survey of philosophers' opinions on philosophical questions, which is linked to from this blog post of Philip's: https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2021/11/01/materialism-remains-the-majority-view-but-only-just/

Ссылка на результаты опроса: https://vk.com/doc123799531_617902231?hash=6b5f7f48b1ce9aff18&dl=e727559735be4926e2Канал Маргинала:https://www.twitch.tv/uebermarginal Страница Сергея Левина:https://vk.com/id4603881

Link to the survery: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all If you can, please consider donating to my paypal/patreon to keep these debates and conversations going To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/TJump To donate to my PayPal (thank you): https://www.paypal.me/TomJump CashApp: $TjumpsChair Youtube Membership Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHXrvsK33VUEcpa4Ar0c0Sg/join Sponsor: Don Fullman, Skeptics of Middle Georgia https://www.facebook.com/groups/591799015097830/?ref=share TJump merch: https://linktr.ee/TJump.Merch (Mugs) https://www.etsy.com/shop/CustomLaserShop?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=626272860§ion_id=34163225 (Shirts) https://www.amazon.com/s?rh=n:7141123011,p_4:TJump+Merch&ref=bl_sl_s_ap_web_7141123011 -----------------------------------------CONNECT------------------------------------------ My Website: tomjump.org SOCIAL LINKS: Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/tjump Discord: discord.io/tjump Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/TJump_ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tom.jump.982 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tjump_/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tjumpschair Tictok: @tjumpschair TJump Gaming: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE6PnoL9QDYnkiUvykmlLQQ ----------------------------------------CONTACT------------------------------------------- Business email: tejump@comcast.net ---------------------------------------- Further Goals ------------------------------------- Publish my book on epistemology and morality Publish academic papers on solving problems in these fields Become President of the United States Solve world's biggest problems World domination #Atheism #Secularism #Humanism

In Episode 1, I said that conversations about food can turn into conversations about anything. That’s particularly true in this wide-ranging conversation with philosopher Dr. Lisa Heldke. We discuss how looking through the lens of food shows us that everything is always chomping and being chomped on, and that this has some profound implications on our diets, our bodies, and the world around us. We also discuss a lot of other things, including eating food from other cultures, baking, eating at a restaurant where you’re blindfolded, and many more topics besides! Show Notes:Follow us on Twitter at @FoodThoughtPod, and you can drop us a line at ThoughtAboutFood on Gmail. Consider leaving us a review wherever you found us!Lisa Heldke was our guest today. You can find more of her work on her PhilPapers page.Her two books that we mentioned in our talk were Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human and Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer.I mentioned the book Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.Lisa mentioned the book Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy by Carolyn Korsmeyer, which has (among other things) a very interesting conversation on food as art.Lisa also mentioned a couple baking books, Tartine Bread and Bread : A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes.Here are the sourdough projects Lisa discussed happening at NC State: the Wild Sourdough Project, and Sourdough Project 2.0.You can take a virtual tour of the sourdough library in Belgium!As we mentioned, there are a lot of good recipes on King Arthur Flour's website.XKCD's (non-serious) theory that sourdough is in a complicated symbiosis with the CoronavirusThe intro and outro music is "Whiskey Before Breakfast" which is both a great traditional song and a good item to add to your weekend to-do list. It was performed and shared by The Dan River Ramblers under a Creative Commons license.In the podcast, we accidentally called Scott Gilbert a philosopher of biology. In actual fact he's a well known biologist (this is what happens when two philosophers get talking to each other!).Here's Lisa's recipe:"My challenge is that too many recipes mean things to me. So, I'll go with what's on my mind right now. I've been baking bread and giving it away (probably about 60 loaves since we went into Stay at Home). My sourdough has never been happier. I've also given away about six wads of my sourdough, to people across the baking spectrum. I'm using a recipe that Tartine Bakery put at the front of its book on bread. I just keep making it over and over, not like a prayer or a meditation or anythying. Like a Lutheran who believes that she is the only thing that stands between her friends and starvation or something. But I guess that's actually the way a Lutheran would meditate. Anyway, the recipe is probably deeply protected, but here's Martha's link to it." 

In this first episode, I talk with Dr. David Leichter about "edible memory", the idea that memory is embodied in food and the act of eating. That includes our own personal memories as well as social, communal memories around food. That leads to a wide-ranging conversation about food tourism, religious food, and more!Follow us on Twitter, @FoodThoughtPod, and if you have a topic you’d like to see discussed, drop us a line at ThoughtAboutFood@gmail.com.Show Notes:Follow us on Twitter at @FoodThoughtPod, and you can drop us a line at ThoughtAboutFood on Gmail. Consider leaving us a review wherever you found us!David Leichter was the guest in this inaugural episode. You can find some of his work at his PhilPapers page.The focus of our conversation was the chapter he wrote for the book Food Justice in US and Global Contexts: Bringing Theory and Practice Together, which I edited with Zachary Piso.The intro and outro music is "Whiskey Before Breakfast" which is both a great traditional song and a pretty interesting suggestion. It was performed and shared by The Dan River Ramblers under a Creative Commons license.Here's the recipe that David brought to share: "The following recipe for moong dal is one taken from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking. This is one of the first recipes I learned after graduating from college. I was living with my partner at the time, just outside of Detroit, MI. We had to learn how to cook for ourselves, and I figured that the way to do it was to cook Indian food. I'm not sure why, but I thought that cooking meat was too easy. I was looking for something about how to layer flavor, trying to eat a bit more healthy and mindfully, and thought that Indian food was the way to go. So, I found this cookbook and, in the last 20 or so years, I have cooked most things in it. What I like about it is that it's simple and easy - it can be made while doing other work, it can be made while hungover to cure it, and it can be made attentively. It works on a cold night, a warm evening, and anything in between. By itself the dal is a little bland, but the spiced oil (tadka) is what really makes it sing:1 cup moong dal1/4 tsp turmeric3 1/2 cups water1 tsp. salt3-4 Tbsp. ghee or light vegetable oil2 tsp. cumin1 Tbsp. ginger2-4 green chilies1 Tbsp. lemon juice4 Tbsp. cilantro1. Wash & rinse dal and put into a pot with the turmeric, water and salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and partially cover, cooking for about 35-40 minutes. The dal should be soft. Whisk until it turns into a thick puree. Keep on low heat while2. Heat ghee/oil in a separate pan over medium high heat. Add cumin and stir until they turn brown (~15 seconds), then add ginger, chilies until the oil is laced with the scent of the ginger, chilies, and cumin. Pour into dal. Add lemon juice and fold in the cilantro. Add a little cayenne pepper or kashmiri pepper if desired."

 What happens if an autonomous machine does something wrong? Who, if anyone, should be held responsible for the machine's actions? That's the topic I discuss in this episode with Daniel Tigard. Daniel Tigard is a Senior Research Associate in the Institute for History & Ethics of Medicine, at the Technical University of Munich. His current work addresses issues of moral responsibility in emerging technology. He is the author of several papers on moral distress and responsibility in medical ethics as well as, more recently, papers on moral responsibility and autonomous systems. You can download the episode here or listen below. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify and other podcasting services (the RSS feed is here).          Show NotesTopics discussed include:  What is responsibility? Why is it so complex? The three faces of responsibility: attribution, accountability and answerability Why are people so worried about responsibility gaps for autonomous systems? What are some of the alleged solutions to the "gap" problem? Who are the techno-pessimists and who are the techno-optimists? Why does Daniel think that there is no techno-responsibility gap? Is our application of responsibility concepts to machines overly metaphorical?  Relevant Links Daniel's ResearchGATE profile Daniel's papers on Philpapers "There is no Techno-Responsibility Gap" by Daniel "Artificial Intelligence, Responsibility Attribution, and a Relational Justification of Explainability" by Mark Coeckelbergh Technologically blurred accountability? by Kohler, Roughley and Sauer #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe to the newsletter

   Are robots like humans? Are they agents? Can we have relationships with them? These are just some of the questions I explore with today's guest, Sven Nyholm. Sven is an assistant professor of philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His research focuses on ethics, particularly the ethics of technology. He is a friend of the show, having appeared twice before. In this episode, we are talking about his recent, great, book Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency and Anthropomorphism. You can download the episode here or listen below. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify and other podcasting services (the RSS feed is here). Show Notes:Topics covered in this episode include: Why did Sven play football with a robot? Who won? What is a robot? What is an agent? Why does it matter if robots are agents? Why does Sven worry about a normative mismatch between humans and robots? What should we do about this normative mismatch? Why are people worried about responsibility gaps arising as a result of the widespread deployment of robots? How should we think about human-robot collaborations? Why should human drivers be more like self-driving cars? Can we be friends with a robot? Why does Sven reject my theory of ethical behaviourism? Should we be pessimistic about the future of roboethics?Relevant Links Sven's Homepage Sven on Philpapers Humans and Robots: Ethics, Agency and Anthropomorphism 'Can a robot be a good colleague?' by Sven and Jilles Smids 'Attributing Agency to Automated Systems: Reflections on Human–Robot Collaborations and Responsibility-Loci' by Sven 'Automated Cars Meet Human Drivers: Responsible Human-Robot Coordination and The Ethics of Mixed Traffic' by Sven and Jilles Smids  #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe to the newsletter

Introduction The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. How do 100 billion neurons come together to bring about a unified, conscious mind, and the rich tapestry of qualities that make up our world? This might be the most difficult problem in philosophy and science. No matter how rich our description of the brain, it seems that we’ll still be left with this same question: where does consciousness come from and what is its place in nature? Having coined the term ‘the hard problem’ in 1994, today, David Chalmers finds himself ranked amongst the world’s most prominent thinkers. David is currently Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, and co-director of the academic database PhilPapers. Amongst his many contributions, David is the author of The Conscious Mind, The Character of Consciousness, and Constructing the World. David’s hundreds of papers, interviews, and talks, make up some of the most influential contributions to the field, breathing new life into the debate and inspiring a new wave of scholarship. For many, the problem of consciousness goes beyond the dusty chalkboards of seminar rooms and into our day-to-day lives. Consciousness may well be the determining factor of what constitutes a worthwhile existence, or whether or not a being deserves our moral consideration.  The stakes are higher than the nature of the world itself. It’s time to wake up and smell the roses… how can we explain consciousness? Contents Part I. Consciousness Part II. Further Analysis and Discussion Links David Chalmers, Website David Chalmers, Books (IndieBound) David Chalmers, Books (Amazon) David Chalmers, Papers David Chalmers, Talks

Introduction The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. How do 100 billion neurons come together to bring about a unified, conscious mind, and the rich tapestry of qualities that make up our world? This might be the most difficult problem in philosophy and science. No matter how rich our description of the brain, it seems that we’ll still be left with this same question: where does consciousness come from and what is its place in nature? Having coined the term ‘the hard problem’ in 1994, today, David Chalmers finds himself ranked amongst the world’s most prominent thinkers. David is currently Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, and co-director of the academic database PhilPapers. Amongst his many contributions, David is the author of The Conscious Mind, The Character of Consciousness, and Constructing the World. David’s hundreds of papers, interviews, and talks, make up some of the most influential contributions to the field, breathing new life into the debate and inspiring a new wave of scholarship. For many, the problem of consciousness goes beyond the dusty chalkboards of seminar rooms and into our day-to-day lives. Consciousness may well be the determining factor of what constitutes a worthwhile existence, or whether or not a being deserves our moral consideration.  The stakes are higher than the nature of the world itself. It’s time to wake up and smell the roses… how can we explain consciousness? Contents Part I. Consciousness Part II. Further Analysis and Discussion Links David Chalmers, Website David Chalmers, Books (IndieBound) David Chalmers, Books (Amazon) David Chalmers, Papers David Chalmers, Talks

In this episode, Andrew and Matthew welcome returning Christian guest Dale from the Skeptics and Seekers podcast and Paul, a philosophy teacher. We talk freedom of speech, where philosophy and empirical science meet, and more. And yes, Andrew throws more punches for team mac! For the PhilPapers site visit  https://philpapers.org/  For more on Paul visit  https://www.ryerson.ca/philosophy/facultystaff/bali-paul/  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/reasonpress/message

Prof. Nancy Jecker came to Queen's University Belfast to speak at this philosophy conference (https://philevents.org/event/show/64710) on the ethics of chronic illness, and I used that opportunity to ask her about her philosophical interests and work. We talked about life and death – in particular, lives lived with chronic illneses, and the ways that a person's story doesn't end just at the moment that they die. We talked about intergenerational ethical issues (for example, about caring for the dependent elderly). She introduced me to the concept of an 'itai hoteru', which are Japanese hotels-for-the newly-deceased, and the 421-problem in China. Here are some links to help you find out more about Nancy and her work: * Nancy Jecker's webpage (https://phil.washington.edu/people/nancy-s-jecker) at the philosophy department at the University of Washington * A list of Nancy Jecker's publications (https://philpapers.org/s/Nancy%20S.%20Jecker) from PhilPapers.org - many with links to the articles. Don't forget that if you need help getting access to paywalled articles, you can try contacting authors and politely asking them whether they'd be happy to send you a .pdf. Using the hashtag #icanhazpdf on twitter can be sometimes be useful as well. * Here's Nancy's piece on itai hoteru in the journal Bioethics: 'What do we owe the newly dead? (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bioe.12578) An ethical analysis of findings from Japan's corpse hotels workers', co-authored with Eriko Miwa. It's behind a paywall at this link, but you can read a pre-print version on her ResearchGate page here (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332242536_What_do_we_owe_the_newly_dead_An_ethical_analysis_of_findings_from_Japan's_corpse_hotels_workers). * In the episode Nancy talks about using the 'capabilities approach' to justice in her work on intergenerational justice and the ethics to do with ageing. Over on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy you can find this entry on Amartya Sen's 'capabilities approach' (https://www.iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/), which is a good overview. But more recently people are discussing Martha Nussbaum's version of this approach, so you might find it useful to skip down to §7 (https://www.iep.utm.edu/sen-cap/#H7). * We mention the 4-2-1 problem (or 4:2:1 problem, strictly, since it's about ratios), and here's an accessible article in io9 which talks more generally about China's looming population crisis. 'The Unintended Consequences Of China's One-child Policy' (https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-unintended-consequences-of-chinas-one-child-policy-5948528) by George Dvorsky. * We briefly talked about 'Parfit's non-identity problem' without really explaining it. It's a problem that Derrick Parfit proposes in the final section of his book Reasons and Persons (1984, chapter 16). The problem is summarised in this (slightly challenging, not hugely accessible) entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/). You can see Parfit discussing it in person over on this YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtU0pah4R8Q), again, not entirely accessible to people who are new to philosophy. Please do feel encouraged to get in touch to send any thoughts, responses, ideas, reactions, feedback or ideas about this episode or any of the others, I'd love to hear from you. To do that, you can just head over to the contact (https://www.generousquestions.co.uk/contact) page. The theme music is from li_serios05 (https://store.broken20.com/album/li-series-05-jack-on-piano) by TVO on Broken20 records (https://store.broken20.com/) under Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). A transcript of this conversation is available, you just need to click on the button that says 'transcript'. The transcripts for each episode have been beautifully prepared by Becci.

Zárdai István Zoltán is a philosopher with a keen interest in AI. He is investigating moral psychology, action and agency, and the links between responsibility, intention and voluntariness. He is a JSPS postdoc research fellow at Keio University. For more about action theory see www.philosophyofaction.com and Philpapers, and check out István’s research on his academia.edu profile. Topics of Discussion with István Zárdai Book: Sophie's World Book: Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts Book: The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer Book: Logicomix: An epic search for truth Book: The If Machine: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom Book: The Philosophy Gym Podcast: Hi-Phi Nation Why "The Simpsons" Is Now a Legit College-Level Philosophy Course The Simpsons' secret formula: it's written by maths geeks Philosophy4Children The Philosophy Foundation Kavka's Toxin Puzzle—His original paper Philosophy grads are good on the skills needed to enter law school and MBAs

It’s hardly news that computers are exerting ever more influence over our lives. And we’re beginning to see the first glimmers of some kind of artificial intelligence: computer programs have become much better than humans at well-defined jobs like playing chess and Go, and are increasingly called upon for messier tasks, like driving cars. Once we leave the highly constrained sphere of artificial games and enter the real world of human actions, our artificial intelligences are going to have to make choices about the best course of action in unclear circumstances: they will have to learn to be ethical. I talk to Derek Leben about what this might mean and what kind of ethics our computers should be taught. It’s a wide-ranging discussion involving computer science, philosophy, economics, and game theory. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Derek Leben received his Ph.D. in philosopy from Johns Hopkins University in 2012. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is the author of Ethics for Robots: How to Design a Moral Algorithm. PhilPapers profile University web page Ethics for Robots “A Rawlsian Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles”

The "Easy Problems" of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it into action. The "Hard Problem," on the other hand, is the task of explaining our individual, subjective, first-person experiences of the world. What is it like to be me, rather than someone else? Everyone agrees that the Easy Problems are hard; some people think the Hard Problem is almost impossible, while others think it's pretty easy. Today's guest, David Chalmers, is arguably the leading philosopher of consciousness working today, and the one who coined the phrase "the Hard Problem," as well as proposing the philosophical zombie thought experiment. Recently he has been taking seriously the notion of panpsychism. We talk about these knotty issues (about which we deeply disagree), but also spend some time on the possibility that we live in a computer simulation. Would simulated lives be "real"? (There we agree -- yes they would.) David Chalmers got his Ph.D. from Indiana University working under Douglas Hoftstadter. He is currently University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his books are The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, The Character of Consciousness, and Constructing the World. He and David Bourget founded the PhilPapers project. Web site NYU Faculty page Wikipedia page PhilPapers page Amazon author page NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness TED talk: How do you explain consciousness?

St. Anselm was the Roman Catholic archbishop of Canterbury, and an important medieval Christian philosopher. He defined the concept of God as "that than which no greater can be thought." Using this concept, he argues that there must actually be such a being; this is his famous "ontological" argument for God's existence. And he also deduces that this being must be eternal, and omnipotent (etc.) - otherwise, he would not be that than which no greater can be thought. Present-day philosophers call this sort of reasoning "perfect being theology." But what is the key concept? Is it the concept of the greatest being there could possibly be? Or should we argue from the concept of an absolutely perfect being? Or should we start with the concept of a being who is truly worthy of human worship? In this episode, Dr. Mark C. Murphy, professor at Georgetown University, discusses these deep issues. He argues that the important concept for the Anselmian is absolute perfection. Here are Dr. Murphy's slides; it is recommended that you view this episode on youtube, as the video there syncs his slides with his talk. You can also listen to this episode on stitcher or itunes (please rate us there).  If you would like to upload audio feedback for possible inclusion in a future episode of this podcast, put the audio file here. Links for this episode: Dr. Murphy's home page "Does morality depend on God?" and "Why Philosophy of Religion?" Short 2013 videos by the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame "God and Moral Law" - Dr. Murphy's 2012 Plantinga Fellow Lecture "God Beyond Justice" - Dr. Murphy's 2012 lecture at the My Ways Are Not Your Ways conference God and Moral Law: On the Theistic Explanation of Morality Philosophy of Law: The Fundamentals Natural Law in Jurisprudence and Politics An Essay on Divine Authority Natural Law and Practical Rationality (kindle) Dr. Murphy's papers at PhilPapers the philosophy of Anselm Dale's introductory screencasts on two analyses of Anselm's ontological argument The Society of Christian Philosophers Peter van Inwagen Yujin Nagasawa Jeff Speaks John Keller trinities podcast interviews with Dr. Stephen Holmes: part 1, part 2