Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era" By James Barrat 2023
Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the “smart” in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence.In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail—human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine.Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason" By Manuel DeLanda 2011
In this groundbreaking book, Manuel DeLanda analyzes different genres of simulation, from cellular automata and generic algorithms to neural nets and multi-agent systems, as a means to conceptualize the space of possibilities associated with casual and other capacities.This remarkably clear philosophical discussion of a rapidly growing field, from a thinker at the forefront of research at the interface of science and the humanities, is a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophies of technology, emergence and science at all levels.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Human Motives:Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect" By Peter Carruthers 2024
Motivational hedonism (often called "psychological hedonism") claims that everything we do is done in pursuit of pleasure (in the widest sense) and to avoid pain and displeasure (again, in the widest sense). Although perennially attractive, many philosophers and experimental psychologists have claimed to refute it. Human Motives shows how decision-science and the recent science of affect can be used to construct a form of motivational hedonism that evades all previous critiques. On this view, we take decisions by anticipating and responding affectively to the alternatives, with the pleasure / displeasure component of affect constituting the common currency of decision-making. But we do not have to believe that the alternatives will bring us pleasure or displeasure in the future. Rather, those feelings get bound into and become parts of the future-directed representation of the options, rendering the latter attractive or repulsive. Much then depends on what pleasure and displeasure really are. If they are intrinsically good or bad properties of experience, for example, then motivational hedonism results. Carruthers argues, in contrast, that the best account is a representational one: pleasure represents its object (nonconceptually, in a perception-like manner) as good, and displeasure represents it (nonconceptually) as bad. The result is pluralism about human motivation, making room for both genuine altruism and intrinsic motives of duty.Clearly written and deeply scientifically informed, Human Motives has implications for many areas of philosophy and cognitive science, and will be of interest to anyone wanting to understand the foundations of human motivation.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "The World of Perception" By Maurice Merleau-Ponty 2004
In 1948, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote and delivered on French radio a series of seven lectures on the theme of perception. Translated here into English for the first time, they offer a lucid and concise insight into one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth-century.
These lectures explore themes central not only to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy but phenomenology as a whole. He begins by rejecting the idea - inherited from Descartes and influential within science - that perception is unreliable and prone to distort the world around us.
Merleau-Ponty instead argues that perception is inseparable from our senses and it is how we make sense of the world.Merleau-Ponty explores this guiding theme through a brilliant series of reflections on science, space, our relationships with others, animal life and art. Throughout, he argues that perception is never something learned and then applied to the world. As creatures with embodied minds, he reminds us that we are born perceiving and share with other animals and infants a state of constant, raw, unpredictable contact with the world. He provides vivid examples with the help of Kafka, animal behaviour and above all modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne.
A thought-provoking and crystalline exploration of consciousness and the senses, The World of Perception is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Merleau-Ponty, twentieth-century philosophy and art.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" By Thomas Nagel 2024
A 50th anniversary edition of one of the most widely influential articles of 20th Century philosophy
“Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.” So begins Thomas Nagel's classic 1974 essay “What is it Like to be a Bat?” Nagel's essay initiated the now widespread attention to consciousness as a central problem for philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience; it also influenced the recognition of the consciousness of nonhuman creatures as an important subject of study. Nagel argued that the essential subjectivity of conscious experience--what it is like for the creature undergoing it--means that reductionist theories of mind, which attempt to analyze it in physical terms, can never succeed. It follows that the physical sciences cannot provide a complete description of reality, and that the physical conception of objective reality must be transcended if science is going to comprehend the mind.
This edition reissues this classic and widely influential article on its 50th anniversary, along with a new preface discussing the origins and influence of the essay, as well as “Further Thoughts: The Psychophysical Nexus,” a supplementary essay which describes Nagel's later thoughts about how to respond to the problem posed by “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” This second essay suggests that the most promising path forward for the mind-body problem, if one accepts the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness, is to seek a necessary connection between mental and neurophysiogical states through a more fundamental type of state which is neither mental nor physical but necessitates them both as essential aspects. In other words, a state that is physical from the outside and mental from the inside, just as we are. This would be a form of monism, requiring the formation of new concepts, since our present concepts of the mental and the physical do not entail such a necessary connection. The essay explains why the relation between the mental and the physical may be necessary, even though our present concepts make it appear contingent.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology" By Dan Zahavi 2025
What does it take to constitute a we with others and how does feeling, thinking, and acting as part of a we, transform one's sense of self, one's relation to others, and the way one experiences the world? Is individual subjectivity something that necessarily requires a communal grounding or does a we-relationship always presuppose a plurality of pre-existing selves? What kind of understanding of and relation to others is required if a we is to emerge? Questions regarding the ontological, epistemological, and social character of we is not only of contemporary societal relevance, but are also questions that were intensively discussed by early phenomenological philosophers such as Husserl, Reinach, Stein, Scheler, Walther, Gurwitsch, and Schutz.
Drawing on and engaging with ideas and distinctions found in these historical resources, Being We combines historical scholarship and systematic theorizing. It breaks new ground by interweaving work on selfhood and first-personal experience, social cognition, and collective intentionality, offers a much-needed cross fertilization between philosophy and theoretical considerations in the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, and social psychology), and provides a novel account of the complex interrelation between we, you, and I.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "The Character of Consciousness" By David J. Chalmers 2010
What is consciousness? How does the subjective character of consciousness fit into an objective world? How can there be a science of consciousness? In this sequel to his groundbreaking and controversial The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers develops a unified framework that addresses these questions and many others. Starting with a statement of the "hard problem" of consciousness, Chalmers builds a positive framework for the science of consciousness and a nonreductive vision of the metaphysics of consciousness. He replies to many critics of The Conscious Mind, and then develops a positive theory in new directions. The book includes original accounts of how we think and know about consciousness, of the unity of consciousness, and of how consciousness relates to the external world. Along the way, Chalmers develops many provocative ideas: the "consciousness meter", the Garden of Eden as a model of perceptual experience, and The Matrix as a guide to the deepest philosophical problems about consciousness and the external world. This book will be required reading for anyone interested in the problems of mind, brain, consciousness, and reality.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "The Parallax View" By Slavoj Zizek 2009
In Žižek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorizes the "parallax gap" in the ontological, the scientific, and the political—and rehabilitates dialectical materialism.
The Parallax View is Slavoj Žižek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Žižek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Žižek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Žižek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.
Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Žižek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which "nobody is home" in the skull, just stacks of brain meat—a condition Žižek calls "the unbearable lightness of being no one"); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Žižek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics—including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism.
The Parallax View not only expands Žižek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "The World as Will and Presentation: Volume I" By Arthur Schopenhauer, Daniel Kolak (Editor), Richard Aquila (Translator) c.1818/2019
Taking the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant as his starting point, Schopenhauer argues that the world humans experience around them—the world of objects in space and time and related in causal ways—exists solely as "representation" (Vorstellung) dependent on a cognizing subject, not as a world that can be considered to exist in itself (i.e., independently of how it appears to the subject's mind). One's knowledge of objects is thus knowledge of mere phenomena rather than things in themselves. Schopenhauer identifies the thing-in-itself — the inner essence of everything — as will: a blind, unconscious, aimless striving devoid of knowledge, outside of space and time, and free of all multiplicity. The world as representation is, therefore, the "objectification" of the will. Aesthetic experiences release one briefly from one’s endless servitude to the will, which is the root of suffering. True redemption from life, Schopenhauer asserts, can only result from the total ascetic negation of the "will to life". Schopenhauer notes fundamental agreements between his philosophy, Platonism, and the philosophy of the ancient Indian Vedas.
The World as Will and Representation marked the pinnacle of Schopenhauer's philosophical thought; he spent the rest of his life refining, clarifying and deepening the ideas presented in this work without any fundamental changes. The first edition was met with near-universal silence. The second edition of 1844 similarly failed to attract any interest. At the time, post-Kantian German academic philosophy was dominated by the German idealists—foremost among them G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer bitterly denounced as a "charlatan".
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Structure Phenomenology: Preconscious Formation in the Epistemic Disclosure of Reality" By Herbert Witzenmann 1983/2022
This is the first English translation of Herbert Witzenmann's seminal work, Strukturphänomenologie, which departs from the traditional phenomenological methods of Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty to introduce a fresh approach to the nexus of consciousness and reality.
In Structure Phenomenology, published open access, Witzenmann argues for the active mental, yet mostly pre-reflective, participation of humans in the emergence of individual consciousness of all kinds and the basic structure that determines it. While Witzenmann ascribes a derivative or memorative status to habitual states of phenomenal consciousness, even if they seem to refer to present objectivity, he proposes that the underlying formative processes be unveiled and explored through systematic first-person observation. Through his logically grounded and experience-based approach, he contends that it is not neural processes that produce consciousness, but rather one's own preconscious rootedness in reality which can be made conscious.
Influenced by the writings of Rudolf Steiner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Witzenmann's innovative approach casts new light on a number of philosophical, psychological, and scientific issues: from being and becoming to temporality and presence, and from remembering to mind and body. Even freedom takes on a new meaning when reality is not pre-given to human consciousness, but is rather a result of human participation in the basic process.
This annotated translation makes Witzenmann's text accessible to an English audience for the first time and, with a comprehensive editorial introduction by Johannes Wagemann, situates his ground-breaking insights within the development of phenomenology, as well as in current philosophical and psychological debates. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Kant's Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science" By Michael Friedman 2013
Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is one of the most difficult but also most important of Kant's works. Published in 1786 between the first (1781) and second (1787) editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Metaphysical Foundations occupies a central place in the development of Kant's philosophy, but has so far attracted relatively little attention compared with other works of Kant's critical period. Michael Friedman's book develops a new and complete reading of this work and reconstructs Kant's main argument clearly and in great detail, explaining its relationship to both Newton's Principia and eighteenth-century scientific thinkers such as Euler and Lambert. By situating Kant's text relative to his pre-critical writings on metaphysics and natural philosophy and, in particular, to the changes Kant made in the second edition of the Critique, Friedman articulates a radically new perspective on the meaning and development of the critical philosophy as a whole.
Ai generated & human edited. Introduction and summary of "Self-Knowledge and Self Identity" By Sydney Shoemaker 1963
Sydney Shoemaker's 1963 book, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity, investigates the philosophical concepts of how we know ourselves and what constitutes our individual identity. The text critically examines various historical and contemporary theories regarding the self, including those positing a substantial ego, a bundle of perceptions, and the importance of memory and the body. Shoemaker analyzes the nature of first-person statements, particularly those concerning psychological states and past experiences, questioning whether self-knowledge relies on criteria in the same way as knowledge of external objects. He explores thought experiments involving bodily transfer and considers the relationship between personal identity and bodily continuity. Ultimately, the work aims to clarify the logical foundations of our understanding of self and identity.
Ai generated. Human edited. Introduction and summary of "Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation" By Dan Zahavi 1999
Winner of the 2000 The Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize in Phenomenology
In the rigorous and highly original Self-Awareness and Alterity, Dan Zahavi provides a sustained argument that phenomenology, especially in its Husserlian version, can contribute something decisive to the analysis of self-awareness. Taking on recent discussions within both analytical philosophy (Shoemaker, Castaneda, Nagel) and contemporary German philosophy (Henrich, Frank, Tugendhat), Zahavi argues that the phenomenological tradition has much more to offer when it comes to the problem of self-awareness than is normally assumed. As a contribution to the current philosophical debate concerning self-awareness, the book presents a comprehensive reconstruction of Husserl's theory of pre-reflective self-awareness, thereby criticizing a number of prevalent interpretations and a systematic discussion of a number of phenomenological insights related to this issue, including analyses of the temporal, intentional, reflexive, bodily, and social nature of the self.
Ai generated. Human edited. Introduction and summary of "The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique" By Kim Sterelny 2012
A new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the role of information sharing across generations.Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from those of the other great apes. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes.
Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information-sharing practices across generations and how these practices transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.
Ai generated. Human edited. Introduction and summary of 'Descartes's Method: The Formation of the Subject of Science" By Tarek R. Dika 2023
Descartes's Method develops an ontological interpretation of Descartes's method as a dynamic and, within limits, differentiable problem-solving cognitive disposition or habitus, which can be actualized or applied to different problems in various ways, depending on the nature of the problem. Parts I-II develop the foundations of an habitual interpretation of Descartes's method, while Parts III-V demonstrate the fruits of such an interpretation in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and mathematics. The first book to draw on the recently discovered Cambridge manuscript of Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes's Method concretely demonstrates the efficacy of Descartes's method in the sciences and the underlying unity of Descartes's method from Rules for the Direction of the Mind to Principles of Philosophy (1644).
Ai generated. Human edited. Introduction and summary of "Self-Consciousness" By Sebastian Rödl 2007
The topic of this book is self-consciousness, which is a kind of knowledge, namely knowledge of oneself as oneself, or self-knowledge. Sebastian R dl's thesis is that self-knowledge is not empirical; it does not spring from sensory affection. Rather, self-knowledge is knowledge from spontaneity; its object and its source are the subject's own activity, in the primary instance its acts of thinking, both theoretical and practical thinking, belief and action.
The chapters of this book cover action and belief, freedom and reason, receptive knowledge and the second person. Each of these topics deserves its own book. And yet they would all be books on self-consciousness, for self-consciousness is the principle of their respective subject matters. Contemporary theories have been badly served by failing to acknowledge this. Taking the full measure of this insight requires a major conceptual reorientation in action theory, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology, which is begun in this book. As it can be said to be the principal thought animating Kant and his Idealist successors that self-consciousness occupies this central position, the book can be read as an attempt to recover and rejuvenate the achievement of the German Idealist tradition.
Ai generated. Human edited. Introduction and summary of "The Varieties of Reference" By Gareth Evans 1982
Evans' book The Varieties of Reference (1982) was unfinished at the time of his death. The introduction and first two chapters being rewritten by him in the last months of his life.[8] It was edited for publication, and supplemented with appendices drawn from his notes, by McDowell. It has subsequently been influential in both philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. Its central chapters have, according to Martin Davies, had "a profound influence on subsequent work in philosophy of psychology, particularly concerning the perception and representation of space, and more generally the conditions for an objective conception of a spatial world."
Covering the work of Frege, Russell, and more recent work on singular reference, this important book examines the concepts of perceptually-based demonstrative identification, thought about oneself, and recognition-based demonstrative identification.
The discussion in this book range over all the main kinds of referring expressions, starting with the work of Frege and Russell on singular reference. The work is guided by the view that an understanding of how singular thoughts relate to objects is essential for a proper treatment of the linguistic device by which such thoughts are expressed. It will be of interest to psychologist and philosophers of mind as well as to philosophers of language and linguists.
Ai generated. Human edited. Introduction and summary of "Hume on Causation" By Helen Beebee 2006
Causation is one of the most important and enduring topics in philosophy, going as far back as Aristotle. In this lucid and enthralling account, Helen Beebee covers all the major debates and issues in the philosophy of causation, making it the ideal starting point for those approaching the subject for the first time.Beginning with an introduction to the concept, the book examines the most significant philosopher of causation – David Hume – and assesses the problems of induction and necessary connection in light of his thought. Helen Beebee then investigates different theories of causation and challenges to the Humean approach. She considers the concepts of regularity, causal experience, necessity and essences. Throughout the book, she also critically discusses other key philosophers on causation, including J.L. Mackie, John Wright and Brian Ellis.
Ai generated. Human edited. Introduction and summary of "Origins of Objectivity" By Tyler Burge 2010
Tyler Burge presents a substantial, original study of what it is for individuals to represent the physical world with the most primitive sort of objectivity. By reflecting on the science of perception and related psychological and biological sciences, he gives an account of constitutive conditions for perceiving the physical world, and thus aims to locate origins of representational mind. Origins of Objectivity illuminates several long-standing, central issues in philosophy, and provides a wide-ranging account of relations between human and animal psychologies.
Ai generated. Human edited. Introduction and summary of "The Given: Experience and Its Content" By Michelle Montague 2016
What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience--of 'the given'--lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. Montague argues that conscious perception, conscious thought, and conscious emotion each have a distinctive, irreducible kind of phenomenology--what she calls 'sensory phenomenology', 'cognitive phenomenology', and 'evaluative phenomenology' respectively--and that these kinds of phenomenology are essential in accounting for the intentionality of these mental phenomena.
