Category: Philosophy

A couple of times I’ve alluded to an idea I first saw from Peter Singer, that the structure of society creates a great deal of the value which flows to the wealthy. Our legal system and our stable system of property ownership is crucial for building successful companies. Yet the value gained from companies flows…

The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a short piece by Jim Holt on the idea of universal consciousness. The idea is that consciousness can be found everywhere in the universe, even in rocks. This is based on the premise that “physical properties alone cannot account for subjectivity. (How could the ineffable experience of tasting…

Larry Niven’s classic science fiction short story “All the Myriad Ways” points out a problem with the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics: if there is no collapse of the quantum wave function, then all possibilities actually happen. That would seem to imply that we make all possible personal choices, including the really bad ones. This…

Can we ever have a science of ethics? That is, some way to determine how people ought to live, and some way to demonstrate its truth? And can there ever be some way to persuade people to live according to its guidelines? Philosophers and prophets have proclaimed the truth many times, and in fact their…

As we all know, Plato argued that the objects we see in the world are just instantiations and specializations of abstract template classes. Any given chair is just an instance of the abstract class Chair. The existence of the abstract class is what permits us to identify the chair as a Chair. The very fact…