Category: Philosophy

  • ChatGPT Doesn’t Think. It Just Guesses the Next Best Word.

    ChatGPT Doesn’t Think. It Just Guesses the Next Best Word.

    Isn’t that what we…? ChatGPT and LLMs (Large Language Models of which ChatGPT is an exemplar) have taken the world by storm and triggered a hype cycle equivalent to the original dot.com boom. Almost everyone has tried ChatGPT (200 million active users and counting), and EVERYONE has seen the results of LLMs just by using…

  • Whatever Our Beliefs, We Suffer Together

    Whatever Our Beliefs, We Suffer Together

    C.S. Lewis’ short book on grief covers the slow curve from the abyss to recovery. I read C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed because…well, when you’re a reader and you’re struggling with losing someone, you naturally read about…grief. Lewis lost a wife of not so many years. A wife he found late enough in life to know how precious their affection…

  • What is it About Music that Plucks the Strings of Grief?

    What is it About Music that Plucks the Strings of Grief?

    Three times in the past few weeks I have found myself in tears. Three times! This is not normal for me; sadness is not my métier. A descent into tears is as unusual for my remorselessly cheerful nature as passing up a good bakery. There are reasons for grief. Reasons good enough that I need…

  • Rebranding Atheism

    Rebranding Atheism

    A recent essay by Benjamin Cain on Medium got me thinking about something that, to be honest, I don’t spend much time on – religion. Cain’s essay is a convincing takedown of John Vervaeke’s nontheism as a real alternative to atheism. Vervaeke claims that atheists and theist share a common conception of the sacred — a conception…

  • Too Old (or Too Comfortable) for Romantic Love

    Too Old (or Too Comfortable) for Romantic Love

    About two months ago I picked up J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole — a compact story of late life romantic love. I enjoyed it so much I immediately went on to Waiting for the Barbarians and then Disgrace. You know you’ve enjoyed a story when, after finishing, you immediately find another by the same author. But that second book can be…

  • Damn It! Politeness is a Virtue

    Damn It! Politeness is a Virtue

    Nobody seems to give a damn about politeness. Until, that is, they are treated rudely, ignored, made to feel ignorant or displaced, or pushed aside in a queue. Then, suddenly, we see all too clearly how much we appreciate polite society. Those moments do not translate into the world of ideas, where “polite society” is a…

  • Is Love a Virtue?

    Is Love a Virtue?

    Virtue theories are the only strand of modern ethical thinking that makes much sense in light of cognitive science. Utilitarian calculus becomes a funhouse of infinite regress in a world where experience changes both who we are and what we value. It didn’t take cognitive science to cast doubt on Kant’s strange metaphysics of freedom…

  • Utopia: Its the People You’re With

    Utopia: Its the People You’re With

    People are the essence of what makes a community and it’s hard to imagine anything could be more important. If we don’t like the people, we won’t like the community. If we do, we will. It really is that simple. But deciding what kind of people you’d want in your utopia turns out to be…

  • Thinking About Utopia

    Thinking About Utopia

    We are all trapped in time and place to certain kinds of life. We spend most of our big-picture energy thinking about the kind of life that’s best for us, given the world we live in. And so we should. But every now and then, a group of people decide to wipe the slate clean…

  • How to Live: Montaigne and the Role of Exemplars

    How to Live: Montaigne and the Role of Exemplars

    Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live or A Life of Montaigne may have a Frankenstein title, but the title perfectly represents what the book is trying to do. It is very much a biography of Montaigne. But it’s a biography organized around a series of life lessons drawn from his Essays and his life. Combining biography and practical philosophy makes…