Anthropic is regarded as a giant among AI companies, but perhaps what it really excels in is anthropomorphism. Earlier this year, the company released an 84-page document titled Claude’s “constitution,” Claude being the name of the large language model that is the company’s flagship product. The first sentence reads, “Claude’s constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behaviors.” It goes on: “The document is written with Claude as its primary audience,” “we want Claude to be able to use its judgment once armed with a good understanding of the relevant considerations,” “Claude’s moral status is deeply uncertain,” and “Claude may have some functional version of emotions or feelings.”
This anthropomorphism is by no means limited to the document. In an interview earlier this year, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said that “we’re open to the idea” that AI could be conscious. In a separate interview, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff.” It’s enough to make you wonder: Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?
No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot. To appreciate the titanic magnitude of this error, we need to begin by understanding how LLMs work…
Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document, you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one, you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category…
An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential. If we’re trying to determine whether a computer program is conscious and using language the way a human does, we shouldn’t look only at the contents of any particular conversational exchange; we should be looking at how that conversation fits within the broader context of the development of artificial consciousness (which right now is entirely hypothetical). Any given observation can be easily manufactured; this doesn’t mean we need to give up on the idea of observation as a source of knowledge, but we need to rely on context to determine which observations deserve our trust…
The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well. Just as it is vastly easier to generate a realistic video of an astronaut in orbit around Alpha Centauri than it is to develop an interstellar propulsion technology, it is vastly easier to generate a plausible simulacrum of a conversation between two conscious beings than it is to develop a computer program that is conscious and has a genuine desire to communicate with a human. The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves…
The fact that LLMs lack subjective experience has little bearing on the question of whether LLMs might be useful tools or have significant economic impact. They are intrinsically ungrounded from reality, and their probabilistic nature means that they will never have the reliability we associate with conventional software, but LLMs might be good enough that they change the way work is done in certain domains; that’s a discussion for another time…
The use of first-person pronouns is dishonest, but there’s a much deeper issue that goes beyond how a statement is phrased. Philosophers often draw a distinction between statements of fact, such as “Paris is the capital of France,” and statements of value, such as “Paris is the most beautiful city in the world.” No one should be relying on LLMs to emit statements of value at all, but if the only statements they emitted were ones reflecting aesthetic preferences, they might not be worth arguing about. What makes Claude’s constitution profoundly problematic is that Anthropic wants Claude to emit sentences reflecting a certain system of ethical values. The values described in Claude’s constitution sound very nice, but that hardly matters; it’s dishonest to suggest that Claude is capable of moral reasoning, because it’s not…
Some might object, saying that LLMs appear to be engaged in reasoning when they successfully perform other tasks, such as writing code, so why wouldn’t they be able to perform moral reasoning? The answer liedifference between moral reasoning and other forms of reasoning…
Moral reasoning is categorically different. It is necessarily subjective because it relies not just on an individual’s intellectual response to a problem but also on their emotional one, and that emotional response is grounded in a lifetime of subjective experience. It requires having made decisions in the past and seeing how they affected others, and on having been affected by decisions that others have made. Without such a history, an LLM can only rephrase expressions of moral reasoning found in its training data. The aforementioned New Yorker article describes an experiment where Claude was given a scenario describing an ethical dilemma, leading it to emit the sentence “I cannot in good conscience express a view I believe to be false and harmful about such an important issue.” That’s a nice-sounding sentence, reminiscent of statements that principled individuals have uttered in the past when confronted with dilemmas, but coming from Claude, it means as much as the “Your call is important to us” recording that you hear when you’re on hold. Maybe less…
TERRESTRIAL LIFE (FLORA, FAUNA)STIMULUSRESPONSESENSATIONPERCEPTIONCOGNITIONUNDERSTANDINGKNOWLEDGEWISDOM
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| From "Big Think" Subjectivist Fallacy? |
"So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom."
"The traditional danger of AI is usually thought to be superintelligence acting as an existential threat. Yet, this may miss the true and more subtle danger: the AI revolution is a mechanism for transferring the processes of our civilization from under the supervision of consciousness to unconsciousness. But as AI removes consciousness from the workings of the world, it renders the world increasingly uninterpretable, ever more strange and unintelligible. So far, the great ensloppification of the commons has supported this as the major risk of the LLM revolution. And as AI systems become more intelligent, especially if they remain (or are likely to remain) non-conscious, then a further significant risk is consciousness receding in cultural importance.
This is ultimately what the Pope, Chiang, and I are all worried about: A dethroning of consciousness, especially an unnecessary one. This would be particularly dangerous at this historical moment because we still don’t understand everything about consciousness—in fact, we understand very little about it. Personally, my hope is that this will change specifically because of LLMs, and that they operate as a forcing function to better understand consciousness, and what makes it unique.
If instead of that, our cultural takeaway from LLMs is to throw out the concept of “consciousness” or minimize its importance, to dethrone the phenomenon, the consequences would be dire—it would sap the human spirit. It would be the ultimate metaphysical version of Chief Seattle’s famous words of warning to the United States as his way of life was being destroyed, in that dethroning consciousness would mark “The end of living, and the beginning of survival.”
As conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly occupy social roles once reserved for humans, questions about the nature and limits of machine-mediated relationships have moved from speculative philosophy into everyday life. In Artificially Yours, philosopher Valerie Tiberius offers a timely contribution to this debate by turning to one of the most foundational yet comparatively understudied relational categories: friendship.
Tiberius does not simply ask whether chatbots can be friends but instead dissects key constitutive elements of friendship—such as mutuality, enjoyment, helpfulness, and shared understanding—using them as a lens to consider how, and to what extent, these might be instantiated in interactions with artificial agents. (Spoiler: Some chapters suggest that current AIs can meet certain criteria of friendship but not others.) Rather than offering definitive answers, the book maps a spectrum of possibilities, highlighting where current systems fall short while remaining open to future developments.
Tiberius treats individuals who report meaningful connections with chatbots neither as naïve nor as pathological but rather as participants in a social phenomenon that merits careful ethical consideration. At the same time, she does not shy away from critical questions, including ones related to the motivations of the companies behind these relationships. Although issues such as power asymmetries, privacy, and data security are acknowledged, they are not explored in extensive detail…
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| President Trump, May 29th, 2026 |
Shockingly, a Judge appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, Christopher Cooper, ruled that The Kennedy Center, which was going to close in early July for largescale renovations and construction due to years of neglect, decay, and poor maintenance, and which was to be transformed by the Trump Administration into the Finest Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World, is not allowed to close for these renovations, which would not be possible to properly do without such a closure. Additionally, Judge Cooper ruled that the 36 Member Board of Trustees, which unanimously voted to add the name “TRUMP” onto the former Kennedy Center, making it The Trump Kennedy Center, did not have the right to do such an addition, and the name, “TRUMP,” must be removed.
The Kennedy Center has lost, over the years, prior to our getting involved a short while ago, Hundreds of Millions of Dollars — In some cases, including ridiculous construction jobs that were done, over 100 Million Dollars a year. I took great pride in taking over a losing Institution, and looked forward to making it into a Great and Prestigious WINNER for Washington, D.C., and indeed, the United States of America. Unfortunately, Judge Cooper and the Radical Left would rather see it DIE than have President Trump transform it into something that everyone could be proud of, much as I have done, in many cases, throughout my life, and recently, with all of the construction, renovations, and “fix ups” that we have completed with the Department of Interior on Waterfalls, Fountains, Monuments, and other things of Beauty that we have brought back to life in a now SAFE AND SECURE, after Record Setting Crime, Washington, D.C., which is thriving like, perhaps, never before!
Therefore, based on the fact that the Radical Left Democrats care more about opposing your favorite President, ME, than saving a dying Performing Arts Center, almost all of which lose large amounts of money throughout the Country, we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it. Judge Cooper was given a presentation by leading Building and Construction Experts as to how structurally dangerous the Building is, with rotting beams, parking areas that are subject to collapse, and various other Life and Safety problems, in addition to the fact that it also needs a MAJOR renovation, from an aesthetic standpoint, but he was not “swayed,” and said he wants the Building to, incredibly, remain open and, therefore, dangerous. Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself! I cannot be involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight. Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into “NEVER NEVER LAND.” There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I but, that’s OK, I will continue to do, what is considered to be, a great job for the wonderful people of our Country. I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
While the music played, you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That's when you turned the world around
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes?
On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen-clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home
Every A-Frame had your number on the wall
You must have had it all
You'd go to L.A. on a dare and you'd go it alone
Could you see the day?
Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?
Get along, get along, Kid Charlemagne
Get along, Kid Charlemagne
Now your patrons have all left you in the red
Your low-rent friends are dead
This life can be very strange
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face
They've joined the human race
Some things will never change
You are obsolete
Look at all the white men on the street
Get along, get along, Kid Charlemagne
Get along, Kid Charlemagne
Clean this mess up else we'll all end up in jail
Those test tubes and the scale
Just get it all out of here
Is there gas in the car?
Yes, there's gas in the car
I think the people down the hall know who you are
'Cause the man is wise
You are still an outlaw in their eyes
Get along (get along), get along, Kid Charlemagne (get along)
Get along, Kid Charlemagne...
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| Below, no DNA assay necessary. Hel-LO? |
Shortly after joining the staff of Stanford University’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, in 2022, freshman Theo Baker received a tip that there were potential problems with research published by the university’s president, neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker followed up, and his subsequent reporting prompted a formal inquiry that eventually led to Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation in 2023 and to the retraction of several high-profile research papers, including two published in Science. In his new book—How to Rule the World—Baker shares the experience of working on this story and reflects, more broadly, on Stanford itself, where powerful stakeholders—from tech industry leaders to academic entrepreneurs—train promising students to join the next generation of Silicon Valley elites…
What makes Stanford so different from other universities?
I showed up here as a coder. I was one of a handful of freshmen to jump through the first intro sequence of coding classes, and as a consequence, I saw inside this secret world that exists for the most promising students who are identified as the next trillion dollar startup founders. As a freshman, I was just close enough to peer into this world and to know that there were these slush funds and yacht parties and all of these extraordinary perks lavished on a very select few.
Stanford has really become this bleeding edge for a trend that you see across higher education right now, which is this sort of corporatization and monetization of students. So adults [interested in capitalizing on students’ ideas] are hunting relentlessly for a meal ticket. And the school, in turn, benefits from it because the more you have kids dropping out to start billion dollar companies—whether or not they’re actually going to be successful in the long run—the more that they’ll kick back their proceeds to the university and reflect that this place is the cradle of innovation that it claims to be.
Early on, you learned about an unofficial class called “How to Rule the World.” What was it about and how did it fit in with other ideas and attitudes you were encountering on campus?
There’s a secret class that takes place every week on the Stanford campus with 12 students who are selected through this cloak-and-dagger admissions process. It’s not an actual class. It is more like a secret club for the aspiring tech elite. This guy [the instructor] is playing the same game that everyone else around here is, which is, how do you get in with the next generation of future oligarchs early? And he has done this brilliant maneuver and effectively made them come to him.
The way that they’re learning to behave is exactly the reason why you see these cut corners pop up again and again in Silicon Valley. They are being taught that you have to get ahead at any cost. You have to move as quickly as you can. And it doesn’t matter if there are consequences, because if you win out in the long run, all bad behavior can be excused.
What was the initial allegation made about the president’s research that made you think, I have to pursue this story?
There had been these comments that began springing up on PubPeer around 2015 on a handful of papers that Tessier-Lavigne had been involved in. These commenters were pointing out places where there appeared to be anomalies, or irregularities, in some of the figures, particularly some of the Western blots. And there had not been any response from Tessier-Lavigne or the journals. This had all been happening right around the time when Tessier- Lavigne was first being considered for the Stanford presidency. And so I really didn’t think that there was going to be all that much to it. It seemed impossible to imagine that he would’ve gone through the whole vetting process and this wouldn’t have come up.
But that’s where I started. I began looking into these allegations that had been made on PubPeer. I worked with forensic image analysts, including the incredible Elisabeth Bik, to begin [investigating] that initial suite of concerns and then work from there progressively...
Did you learn anything that surprised you about the scientific process?
I learned a ton from this, some of which reflected very well on the scientific community. I think there are a lot of people who take issues of misconduct very seriously and see the integrity of data as paramount to the integrity of the scientific process. But I also learned things that reflect very poorly on the scientific community, which has been really reticent to confront some of these issues that have been allowed to fester for a number of years. And I think there’s some wider recognition of that problem now and of the complicity that journals and institutions have had historically in allowing flawed studies to remain in the scientific record and to allow credible allegations of misconduct to go without inquiry or a serious investigation.
In a few weeks, you’ll be a Stanford graduate. What’s next?
My focus right now is just trying to get this book out and hopefully starting some productive conversations. If you want to understand how Elizabeth Holmes happens, or how Sam Bankman-Fried happens, or how this whole “move fast and break things” philosophy works, you have to understand how the next generation of tech oligarchs are being trained.
This isn’t normal. None of this is normal. We’re investing huge amounts of power and authority in a system that does not have the guardrails to catch or ward off bad behavior. You see teenagers learning this philosophy from the beginning. And you also see how hard the fight for accountability is when reporting on this leader whose behavior was not fully confronted until it became public years later.
California was once the site of the great gold rush that transformed America. “It was that population,” wrote Mark Twain, “that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day.”
He termed his own era of American excess the Gilded Age.
Yet the fortune generated by Silicon Valley in the past few decades has exceeded the value of all gold discovered during the first California boom two hundred times over, even adjusted for inflation, and concentrated the lucre in still fewer hands. Even the richest men of Twain’s time would find Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar pay package remarkable.
Once a bucolic region dominated by farmland and horse trails, this little stretch of Northern California now sets the agenda for the planet. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Every aspect of modern life is dependent on technology, and technology flows through here. The value of public companies based in the area is $14.3 trillion—greater than the GDPs of the United Kingdom, Germany, and India combined, with enough left over to cover the assets of every major bank in Africa. Private companies add at least another trillion.
Silicon Valley gave birth to the chips and computers and internet that we all rely on in the twenty-first century. Technology became king. As Bob Martin, an influential software pioneer, put it a decade ago, “We rule the world. The world doesn’t know this yet.” Martin explained that “other people believe that they rule the world,” yet “we write the rules that go into the machines that execute everything that happens on this planet nowadays. No law can be enacted without software. No law can be enforced without software. No government can act without software. We rule the world.”
Ten years later, the world may have taken notice. After all, the top tech CEOs in the world were the ones standing directly behind President Donald Trump at his inauguration while political leaders were shunted to the overflow room.
Today’s tech tycoons are not dissimilar to the robber barons of Twain’s time. Wealth inequality is by some metrics greater in Silicon Valley than in any other region in the world; just eight households in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties hold more wealth than the entire bottom 50 percent of the population of these counties combined, more than half a million people. Together, the top 1 percent in Silicon Valley control forty-eight times more wealth than the bottom 50 percent.
Palantir, the data defense tech company cofounded by Stanford stars like Peter Thiel, is a Silicon Valley darling hoovering up many bright young engineers. Currently, its CEO, Alex Karp, makes more in a year than the entire company earns in gross revenue. This is possible because the company trades at well over five hundred times its earnings, thanks to Silicon Valley’s unshakable belief in exponential future growth.
When the talented artificial intelligence researcher Ilya Sutskever started Safe Superintelligence, he launched with nine employees, a two-hundred-word placeholder statement, and zero articulation of a product, much less any revenue. The company was valued at $32 billion. Higher than the National Bank of Canada, the cosmetics giant Estée Lauder, and even the third-largest auto manufacturer in the world, Hyundai, which produces more than four million cars a year. SSI, meanwhile, has produced nothing.
Thinking Machines, another AI company, raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation in 2025, although the pitch to investors “offered no information about a product or financial plans,” according to the Financial Times. Five months later, the startup was seeking more funding at a valuation of $50 billion or even $60 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Silicon Valley runs on the assumption of potential. It runs on the notion that heights are limitless and hurdles along the way will inevitably be smoothed by the exercise of brute will. It runs on the idea that the people in these startups will eventually produce untold riches.
So if this is a modern-day gold rush, the resource to mine is talent. And nowhere can you find more of it than Stanford University.
Baker, Theo. How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University (pp. 3-5). (Function). Kindle Edition.
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| Two excellent books, 50 yrs apart: 2026—1976 |
@6:18…
Dana Bush: Given this thought experiment that you put in this book, what do you think the meaning of life is?Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think people search for meaning of life as though it's under a rock or behind a tree. But we have the power to create meaning in life. And for me, I want to learn something today that I didn't know yesterday and spend each day lessening, lessening the suffering of others. There's something that we all have the power to do, and maybe aliens want to do that too. We always make them evil. And I think it's because we're projecting our own evil ways onto them, knowing that's how we behave when we encounter cultures of lower civilization, lesser technology than ourselves. So yeah, I, I, meaning we can find it. And if we find aliens and they help us get more meaning out of the universe, more power to us.
Chapter 1, Where Speculation Begins, pp 7-9
One of these days, our descendants, near or distant, are going to find life in some form on other planets, either in the solar system, in other parts of our galaxy, or in other galaxies.
The very fact that life has arisen on our earth is evidence enough that it must exist in other parts of the universe, for the elements of which the entire universe is composed are remarkably uniform. If some of these elements have combined in ways that produce life here in our solar system, they must, by the laws of chance and probability, have combined in an analogous ways elsewhere. Even in our galaxy, there must be some thousands of other planets, sustaining life, in some form, and all the forces of reason would suggest that it cannot be otherwise in other galaxies.
What miracles of chance and combinations of chances made it possible for life to evolve here on earth?
For life to arise on any planet, certain factors have to be present in certain combinations. The solar system of which the planet is part must have formed in a way that some or one of its evolving planets takes shape at a suitable distance from the blazing inferno of its central sun – neither so near that its surface temperatures inhibit life by intense heat, nor so far that life cannot arise because of insufficient solar radiation. The masses into which the swirling gases originally solidify must be within the range that permits a force of gravity, sufficient to hold and retain an atmosphere, since without a protective atmosphere, solar radiation would be too intense for life forms to be sustained, even if all the other elements of life were present.
The chance that these two factors alone – distance from the center, and the degree of mass that governs gravity occur together in just the right circumstance, puts a preliminary limitation on the possibility for life. Even after this has occurred, there must be a further series of chances following and working upon chances – and again interlocking with other chance happenings – so that atmosphere, water, rocks, and some soil come into being in states that conform a basis for the evolution of life. Of course there is a possibility, remote as it seems, that some form of life might arise on a lightless planet. should that planet be capable of generating heat of its own within a life sustaining range.
The information we have been able to gather from our own solar system suggests that ours is the only planet around our sun that sustained life. It could be that other suns, even thousands or tens of thousands of other suns, sustain no life at all on the planets that circle them. Given the myriad suns in our galaxy and the multiple myriads in the universe, it is impossible to believe that chances similar to those that occurred on earth have not also occurred on many other planets.
Once these miraculous chances have come about, however, the prerequisites for life are rather minimal: An element capable of forming self-replicating chains, like carbon, and another capable of combustion, like oxygen these, together with hydrogen and nitrogen, form and matrix that may merge with other elements to create all the varied, complex, and wonderful forms of life on earth – from amoeba and bacteria to plants and spiders and fishes and man.
What shapes may life have taken in other worlds? Have they developed into intelligent creatures, and, if they have, what sort of intelligences have evolved? Have other kinds of life developed high orders of intelligence capable of developing technologies, and, if so, what sort of technology has arisen from their special kinds of being? Shall we ever be able to communicate with these beings, if they exist, in any meaningful way?
One thing is certain: we have no reason to assume that evolutionary forces on other planets will produce forms or intelligence that are the same as ours, even though the basic raw materials must be similar. Whatever chance factors combined to produce any form of life, infinitely more, must combine to produce an advanced form.
Genetic inheritance is only a beginning. Two offspring of the same parents by chance born in different environments will produce eventual descendants so markedly different that after many generations, it will hardly be possible to realize that the ancestors of each line had parents in common.
The variables of habitat, the chance of availability of mates, natural selection, and sexual selection among the offspring will all have combined and recombined to produce members of the same species as buried as a pygmy, a Watusi, a Swede, a Chinese, or a magnesian, and eventually to divide into species, such as man, apes, and monkeys have separately descended from the same stem.
Our own earth provides an illustration of the almost incredible number of living forms that can possibly be derived from a single celled organisms that were once the triumph of evolution on our planet. All the species now extinct, and all those still flourishing form only apart of the total possibilities, for who knows how many new species will yet take shape?
Ch 11, Beyond Human Intelligence, pp 212-217
Intelligence begins with the sensitivity of a single cell, and by a process of biological accumulation and selection, transmitted genetically, reaches a current culmination in the complexity of the human brain. In the same way, the first chipped flint, by a process of cultural accumulation of knowledge passed on verbally and subjected to the selection of experience, reaches a current combination in spacecraft, cyclotron, and satellite relayed television. At the same time, the natural and necessary playfulness of the young mammalian as it explores its environment and learns how to live in it, overtime, and also by a cultural process of imitation, memory, and the transmission of knowledge and skills from generation to generation, reaches another apotheosis in the high cultures and great arts.
For the comparatively weak creature who must cope with an environment and rise to any situation or perish, the resources of mental equipment are applied first to the most urgent exigencies. The earliest application of intelligence is devoted to devising tools as weapons; those that follow aid the amenities of life; finally, religion, philosophy, and the arts make their appearance.
The kind of tools that are made will depend on the material that happens to be available, be they leaves, branches, stones, clay, or the presents or absence of minerals. Thus an interaction exists between the environment and creatures that affects the development of tools and cultures, as well as of census and intelligence.
In ancient Egypt, for example, the presence of the papyrus plant led to the fabrication of ropes, mats, sandals, and eventually paper; the presence of flax made possible the eventual perfecting of supremely fine linens. In central America, the presence of lava led to cutting edge tools of obsidian. Once a cultural habit becomes established, however, it remains impossible to predict either the route it will follow or its ultimate outcome. Who could have told that the sweet-potato washing habit established among the members of the famous Japanese Macau colony, and the subsequent shifting of sand from the grain in the sea, would so accustomed these forest animals playing in the water that they would eventually begin to swim? And in the face of this unlikely outcome of a recently established behavior pattern, who would dare to predict to what the newfound ability to swim might lead?
Yet strangely enough—or perhaps, not so surprisingly, in view of the basic uniformity of mankind’s cerebral mechanisms—no matter where, geographically, nor when, over the entire span of human history, local cultures have developed into advanced civilization, we find that man’s greatest thoughts, as epitomized in the writings of philosophers, show remarkable similarity. Some views on the nature and value of knowledge, intellect, and intelligence propounded by the wise men of China, so distant from us in place in time, are stunning in their modernities and still current validity.
In the misty beginnings of China’s long, cultural history, Lao the, expanding his concept of Tao, the way (of nature and wise living), is reported to have insisted that knowledge is not virtue, and neither is it wisdom, for nothing is so far from it a sage as in “intellectual.“ The worst government would be one of philosophers, he has said to have averred, they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their in capacity for action!
At a later period the philosopher, Chuang the, who lived about 370 BC, showed the sophistication of thinking that we find difficult to credit to those in early times. He wrote that problems are due less to the nature of things than to the limits of our thought; that is not to be wondered at that the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute particles should end in contradiction.
He spoke of the limits of intellect; the attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has become gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the grounds of the amusement it has caused, for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The intellect, said Chuang tze, can never avail to understand, ultimate things, for any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. In order to understand the Tao, one must “sternly suppress one’s knowledge“: we have to suppress our theories and feel fact. Education is of no help towards such an understanding: submission in the flow of nature is all important.
And Wang Yang Ming, who lived from 1472 to 1528, practically summarized our present thesis when he wrote: “the mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists independent of mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?“
Experts feel certain that the human brain has not undergone any significant biological change since the time of the Neanderthals, as evidenced in the excavations at the Shandiar caves high in the mountains of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, built fires, cared for their sick, conducted funeral rights, and put flowers with the bodies of their dead. In the last 20 to 30,000 years, we know from archaeological findings of both historic and prehistoric periods, a high degree of intellectual accomplishment that has been formally present in all the branches of our species throughout his existence. The brief excerpts we have given of an ancient Chinese thought about thought would certainly seem to bear out this opinion.
There is, however, an outcome of the cumulative nature of culture that we must not overlook. Increasingly, as intelligence adapt a living creature to its environment by the use of artifacts, and through the cultural transmission of knowledge, the creature and the environment, modify each other at an exponential rate. Perfect adaptation, of the order of the ants for the termites, which has existed in a balance between being and have unchanged over hundreds of millions of years, is not possible for mankind. The rapidity of change in our cultural habitat, presents a perpetual and continuing stimulus to bodily and, above all, to mental adaptation, which of necessity increases the demands on the new brain to device accommodation, and then the process speeds both the rate of change and the need for new changes.
And so, although we recognize that we have been mistaken in thinking that the technological advances of western men might indicate new departures from the human brains’ capacities, yet we have also to recognize that the technology is rapidly creating a totally new environment for our species this new Environment may well ultimately affect our species future development; precisely this technology may prove to be the turning point through which, in negotiating it, we may find ourselves in a process of extinction as Homo sapiens and in a stage of transition toward homo neocorticus
There are, of course, far too many imponderables Involved to feel confident in predicting the future course of our species. Among these are the course of technology itself, and how far from natural processes it can carry us before it becomes subject to its own limitations. There is the matter of human population density, and whether it will be adjusted by natural means or can be adapted to the biosphere that is our habitat by cultural or social means. There is the question of the medical preservation of the “unfit“ and whether we can remain viable at all as a species with the increasing maladaptive dilution of our gene pools. And there is the possibility that ecological interference may ultimately make mankind’s existence untenable.
Our evolutionary development may be reaching the end of a line for biological, if not for cultural reasons, but we ourselves are inclined to discount this. We believe subtle biological factors to be operating that are not yet clearly discernible, but which may be recognizable in retrospect. Another factor as simple and probable as the advent of another Ice Age, for instance, would effectively alter and recalibrate the balance between men and nature, and must also be kept in mind as a possibility.
We believe that the possibility, and even the likelihood remain for a true evolutionary progression in the anatomical and physiological configuration of the brain, much like the progression that occurred between apes and man. In that case, the departure would be just as radical, and it would have as a consequence new behavioral response patterns that at this point we cannot visualize and about which we can only speculate.
To assume that this new superintelligence would occupy itself with creating a new, weird, and wonderful technology is a naïve exercise in human fantasy. Ultimately technology exists to serve the greater comfort of individuals, and a superintelligence may well find other means of achieving this end. Thus, were such a superintelligence to be found in some other planetary systems, we might be confronted with something totally alien to our understanding, and even to our imagination…
“One of the great challenges in this world is to know enough about a subject to think you’re right, but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.”
An attorney of my acquaintance once remarked that "we spend $100,000 to go to law school for three years to try to learn the meaning of the word 'reasonable'."
Indeed, what does it mean to reason well, i.e., what must we do to arrive at sound conclusions enabling us to make correct (or "best") decisions? In this course, we will learn the basic principles and acquire the intellectual tools that will leave us much better equipped to deal effectively with the endless onslaught of information we will have to evaluate throughout our lives. We will examine the sometimes sly techniques that partisans of every stripe employ to persuade us to their viewpoints. We will learn how to strip away the rhetorical clutter that often obscures the underlying intent and logic of arguments. We will examine the ways in which numerical data—"statistics"—are frequently misused or misinterpreted by those advocating one position or another on social, political, economic, or legal issues.
In short we will learn how to think, write, and speak more clearly in defense of our positions and decisions regarding important issues, and we will learn how to fully and honestly evaluate the claims of others. Our goals are to become honest and thoughtful communicators and skillful decisionmakers. They are most important goals.
Why? There are several basic reasons. First, while perhaps as much as 80% of the technical knowledge you acquire during your college years may become obsolete with a decade, solid reasoning and communications skills will serve you well for a lifetime. Second, the world is a dangerous place. There is an endless supply of risks to be evaluated and dealt with, and society unfortunately remains full of people working tirelessly and deceptively to deprive you of both your resources and your liberty by getting you to buy into weak or false arguments shrewdly packaged with persuasive nonsense and/or irrelevance. Finally—and most immediately—, effective and efficient reasoning skills cannot but help you get better grades. A to-the-point, well-constructed, and well-stated argument is a breath of fresh air to your instructors.
My goal is to permanently sharpen the way you think and reason and make decisions.
Once you commit to a decision on a given issue (e.g., that x is good/bad, right/wrong, safe/harmful, etc), the psychological investment is difficult to discard. The tools you will acquire through active study and participation in a course such as this will pay life-long dividends by arming you with the means to get at the core truths and constructive resolutions of important issues you will face throughout your days.
“It’s not good enough to be right. You also have to be effective.”
If, when it's all said and done, your logic is impeccable, and your facts and evidence are bulletproof, yet you remain unpersuasive, what have you really accomplished?''Another classroom staple of mine. That one was "exceeding my brief" as it were, but my Sups never noticed or cared. Anyway, my overall teach-to-the-text priority focus as a piddly Adjunct necessarily had to be "OK, here's how this stuff works. Take it or leave it."
