Philosophy
After a long and distinguished career in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, evolution and artificial intelligence, philosopher Daniel Dennett has picked up a number of mental tools along the way to help him reason his way through various interesting and thought-provoking conceptual puzzles and questions.
And nice guy that he is, he has taken the time to write a whole book about them to share with the rest of the world. These intuition pumps can be deployed to deal with a myriad of different scenarios, from the mundane to the highly abstract and philosophical, and no matter what kind of work you do or what kind of circles you run in, chances are these tools are going to make your life easier and more interesting.
- Poker And Ai: I'll See Your Turing Test And Raise You An Algorithm
Alan Turing came up with the first standard criterion for artificial intelligence. According to the Turing test, if you were to interact with the computer and not know it was a computer, say by asking it questions and having it answer, then we could say...
- Philosophers Are No Longer Allowed At Summer Camp
When it comes to the question of the metaphysics of diachronic personal identity (the question of whether you are the same person at different times), philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Derek Parfit, David Lewis and others, have come up with...
- Daniel Wolpert - The Real Reason For Brains
I know what you're thinking, but no, it's not for feeding zombies... but it's also not "for" thinking either because brains evolved long before any organism developed the ability to think and reason. So, while thinking is a great adaptation...
- David Sloan Wilson - Religion And Other Meaning Systems
Even though I'm not as vociferous about my antagonism toward religious belief as people like Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne or Bill Maher, my feelings on the subject are probably not all that different from theirs. Arguing about supernatural...
- Is Atheism The New Fundamentalism?
Atheists have been around for a long time, but until recently, they usually tended to keep their free-thinking disbelief to themselves, both because they considered their opinion a personal matter and out of politeness for believers. The rise of increasingly...
Philosophy
Daniel Dennett - Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
And nice guy that he is, he has taken the time to write a whole book about them to share with the rest of the world. These intuition pumps can be deployed to deal with a myriad of different scenarios, from the mundane to the highly abstract and philosophical, and no matter what kind of work you do or what kind of circles you run in, chances are these tools are going to make your life easier and more interesting.
- Poker And Ai: I'll See Your Turing Test And Raise You An Algorithm
Alan Turing came up with the first standard criterion for artificial intelligence. According to the Turing test, if you were to interact with the computer and not know it was a computer, say by asking it questions and having it answer, then we could say...
- Philosophers Are No Longer Allowed At Summer Camp
When it comes to the question of the metaphysics of diachronic personal identity (the question of whether you are the same person at different times), philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Derek Parfit, David Lewis and others, have come up with...
- Daniel Wolpert - The Real Reason For Brains
I know what you're thinking, but no, it's not for feeding zombies... but it's also not "for" thinking either because brains evolved long before any organism developed the ability to think and reason. So, while thinking is a great adaptation...
- David Sloan Wilson - Religion And Other Meaning Systems
Even though I'm not as vociferous about my antagonism toward religious belief as people like Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne or Bill Maher, my feelings on the subject are probably not all that different from theirs. Arguing about supernatural...
- Is Atheism The New Fundamentalism?
Atheists have been around for a long time, but until recently, they usually tended to keep their free-thinking disbelief to themselves, both because they considered their opinion a personal matter and out of politeness for believers. The rise of increasingly...