So to the extent that moral judgments are divorced from the particular context of individual or group self interest, they are entirely arbitrary, as there can be no other basis for determining whether a particular act is "good" or "bad."
adequate guides to decision making. Choosing virtues can be as arbitrary as any other value judgment. We have no reliable guide to whether virtuous behavior leads to beneficial consequences just as we have no objective value judgments that can decide whether specific consequences are good or bad.
Sloman naively overlooks the deep flaw in consequentialism. It tells you what the consequences are but absolutely does not tell you whether those consequences are "good" or "bad". To decide that you must make a value judgment, whether sacred or otherwise. Neither Deontology nor Consequentialism are
The poorly research article is linked here. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/a...
It also refers to East Hampton as a "hamlet" something that has been rarely done since the 1960s & came from contemporaneous reports of Pollock's fatal car crash en route to patron Ossorio's cocktail party at The Creeks.
her own work suffered badly by comparison to Pollock.
Doing the same again at the Met will have the same result.
Krasner even displayed a painting that many thought was a Krasner copy of Pollock's style as a Pollock original. Krasner (known as the "Bitch" to Pollock's friends) did herself no favors.
Art ignoramus? Amei Wallach's NY Times article suggesting that #LeeKrasner was "finally" getting equal billing with Pollock comes 45 years too late.The 1981 Krasner/Pollock exhibition at East Hampton's Guild Hall presumptuously organized by Krasner to give herself top billing over Pollock showed how
are inescapable and fundamental. We can never experience what it feels like to be a bat regardless of what we know about bats nor could bats understandably convey to us that experience even if bats could speak to us using language.
Nagel nails it in his essay and you can see LW's influence on #Nagel in his "What is it Like to be a Bat" essay which deals with the problem of subjectivity. Wittgenstein points out that the meaning of language is not fixed or objective as it includes biological, personal, cultural influences that
Understanding #Wittgenstein through a 3 page 1971 essay in the Village Voice. Thanks to @birchlse.bsky.social & @nigelwarburton.bsky.social for posting this remarkable Thomas Nagel piece on X. philpapers.org/archive/NAGW...
I also recommend Anthony Gottlieb's superb 2025 short biography of LW.
If he thinks #consciousness is a machine, he should build it.
And if he thinks insects aren't conscious he should try to catch one in his hands.
have any information except through the experiences it gains from the senses. A brain in a vat has no information to process. Human experience is irreducibly subjective, self-interested and goal oriented. Graziano is not even on the right track when he thinks of consciousness as a machine.
#MichaelGraziano's reductionist view of humans as information processing machines is quasi-behaviorist, absurdly simplistic and wrong. Humans are not machines or computers. Nobody understands the mechanisms of animal consciousness. Humans do much more than process information. The brain doesn't even
Karlis means well but gets almost everything wrong. We help people because we value doing so. Those who don't won't except to gain praise for doing so. Capitalism doesn't cause lack of caring. It arises because people value their own interests. Everyone is different in how much they care for others.
Nice talk on how evolutionary theory has moved away from the narrow gene-centric theory to an extended evolutionary synthesis that accounts for development, epigenetic, environmental & cultural evolutionary factors. This is a topic @thedissenteryt.bsky.social knows well & he asks great questions!
When you pick up a book to read you aren't predicting that you can lift it or that there there are words on the pages. You simply see that you can and start reading the words. There's no "prediction" involved. The prediction idea is a false abstraction. We don't predict how we will act, we just act.
There's only one problem with the predictive processing theory of consciousness that's taken over neuroscience. It's wrong. People don't go around predicting what will happen to them. When you go for a walk you don't "predict" there will be sidewalk under your feet. You just see that it's there.
Hannah Arendt on a bad hair day. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/b...
Hannah Arendt was excoriated for pointing out the obvious fact that Nazis created a corporate bureaucracy of genocidal mass murder in which thoughtless middle class German bureaucrats could mindlessly participate while feeling nothing.
Consciousness in the animal kingdom is incontestable. We don't have any credible theory for how any animal could survive without it. The idea that animals are robots who don't feel or experience emotions is one of the most destructive ideas ever to disgrace human scientific inquiry.
Excellent talk on animal consciousness with the forward thinking #KristinAndrews. Progress on animal consciousness was poisoned by behaviorist biases against animal consciousness. We know that consciousness is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. The very idea of "unconscious animals"
is preposterous.
Despite believers in physicalism's general objection to things that lack a "physical" mechanism, it could well be true that there's no such thing as nonbiological consciousness. If so, all talk of #AGI, the singularity & human like super intelligence is just speculative fiction and marketing hype.
Nice talk. So far we have no examples of nonbiological consciousness. While Physicalism requires that consciousness has a mechanism,we have no remotely credible theory of such a mechanism. Thus any assertion that machine #consciousness can exist is either pure speculation or quasi-religious faith.
Thus spake Zarathustra: "Meow."
meaningless and begs the question of how we can ever know what is true when we can't overcome our own subjectivity or access objective reality. Jennifer needs to review epistemology 1001.
simulation theory is a fairy tale, objective morality doesn't exist or is indeterminate, racist beliefs are false and Jesus, if he existed at all, was not the son of any god. All human perspectives are fundamentally subjective. Founding a philosophy on the idea that everything we 'know" is true is
Epistemically naive Toronto philosopher Jennifer (no relation to Thomas) Nagel believes we only know what's true. She doesn't understand the word "knowledge". Many basic beliefs that people are certain they know are manifestly false & evidence free. There are no gods, panpsychism is nonsense,
Nagel ignores the fact that knowledge is subjective and personal. She simply assumes that people only know what is true. That's just silly, and her arguments all fail based on this assumption. One can just as easily assume that everything we know is false, as we have no access to objective reality.
example, 3 religious wise men believe god exists & that Jesus is his son. They say & feel they know this as much as anything else in the world. Yet this statement is manifestly false & evidence free. Or, X knows that Burger King is better than McDonalds. But this is just a matter of personal taste.
Jennifer Nagel (no relation to Thomas) starts off on the wrong foot here by assuming that knowledge means knowledge of a fact that is true. This begs the question of how we know what is true by assuming it away. Nagel thinks anything we know is true. In fact "knowledge" includes untrue beliefs. For
Merry Christmas from the magnificent #Zarathustra Lord of all #cats and #kitties!
3 million years ago amidst an explosion of evolutionary diversity triggered by climate changes causing forests to retreat and driving primates to come down from the trees and seek animal prey. This triggered changes in the jawline and the larger teeth and brains necessary to catch and consume meat.
