Category: Philosophy

What should a society seek to provide for its members? The most basic goals have to be the survival of members of the society and inducting new members into the society. Any society which can not achieve these goals will fail. (The most obvious way to induct new members is to have children, but there…

It’s possible that what we think of as reality is a simulation being run on some powerful computer. Perhaps the entire universe as we think it exists is a simulation. Or perhaps the simulation is much simpler, and merely covers the solar system and space around it in detail, with everything else being only sketched…

Steven Pinker wrote an interesting article in the New York Times magazine this Sunday. I’m not a big Pinker fan. I think he tends to simplify a little too much, and sometimes falls into the classic error of evolutionary psychology: thinking that a plausible explanation is the right explanation. This was a good article, though,…

Where do physical laws come from? Of course we can not know. We don’t even know if the physical laws are the same everywhere in the universe–we assume they are, but there is no way to be sure. In the absence of knowledge, we have to give up, or guess. My current favorite guess is…

I argued earlier that we can base a universal ethics on human nature, or biology. Is there anything we could use? Many universal ethical systems are based on some form of the golden rule or the categorical imperative. That itself tends to be taken as an axiom. Utilitarianism is based on a utility function, which…