I have picked up Cass Sunstein’s latest book on cost / benefit trade offs, and am enjoying it. But it seems to me that there is a fundamental problem here with the framing. The model being put forward is one in which we straight-forwardly calculate costs and benefits for any choice and then we make the right, informed and rational…
In the literature on memory it is almost mandatory to cite the curious case of the man who who after an accident could remember no more than a few minutes of his life before resetting and then forgetting everything again. He had retained long term memory from before the accident, but lacked the ability to form any new long term…
The discussions and debates about privacy are key to trust in the information society. Yet, the our understanding of the concept of privacy is still in need of further exploration. This short essay is an attempt to highlight one aspect of the concept that seems to be crucial, and highlight a few observations about what we could conclude from studying…
A cursory examination of the landscape of sad songs suggest that they fall into a number of categories: break up songs, songs about missing someone, songs about falling apart — but the best ones probably mix all of these different categories and are about the sudden loss of meaning. Think of “Disintegration” by The Cure, and its despair: […]But I…
Philosopher Galen Strawson challenges the idea that we have a cohesive, narrative self that lives in a structurally robust setting, and suggests that for many, the self will be episodic at best and that there is no real experience of self at all. The discussion of the self – from a stream of moments to a story to deep identity…
Our view of death is probably key to exploring our view of the relationship between man and machine. Is death a defect, a disease to be cured or is it a key component in our consciousness and a key feature in nature’s design of intelligence? It is in one sense a hopeless question, since we end up reducing it to…
In the remarkable work A Conspiracy against Humanity, horror writer Thomas Ligotti argues that consciousness is a curse that captures mankind in eternal horror. This world, and our consciousness of it, is an unequivocal evil, and the only possible set of responses to this state of affairs is to snuff it out. Ligotti’s writings underpin a lot of the pessimism…
Why are games consisting of knowledge tests so popular? In 2004 it was calculated that Trivial Pursuit had sold around 88 million copies worldwide, and game shows like Jeopardy and the 64000 dollar question have become international hits. At their core, these games are surprisingly simple. They are about what you know, about if you can answer questions (or find…
What is the opposite of fake news? Is it real news? What, then, would that mean? It seems important to ask that question, since our fight against fake news also needs to be a fight _for_ something. But this quickly becomes an uncomfortable discussion, as evidenced by how people attack the question. When we discuss what the opposite of fake…
Herman Hesse’s glass bead game is an intriguing intellectual thought experiment. He describes it in detail in his eponymous last novel: “Under the shifting hegemony of now this, now that science or art, the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another.…
Philosopher and writer Simone Weil laid out a few principles on automation in her fascinating and often difficult book Need for Roots. Her view as positive, and she noted that among workers in factories the happiest ones seemed to be the ones that worked with machines. She had strict views on the design of these machines however, and her views…
Are there social institutions that work better if they are biologically bounded? What would this even mean? Here is what I am thinking about: what if, say, a market is a great way of discovering knowledge, coordinating prices and solving complex problems – but only if it consists solely of human beings and is conducted at biological speeds? What if,…