Philosophy

Elon Musk says we may live in a simulation. Here’s how we might tell if he’s right

Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics

Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had damaging effects on the fertility of science. I also suggest that recent important empirical results, such as the detection of the Higgs particle and gravitational waves, and the failure to detect supersymmetry where many expected to find it, question the validity of certain philosophical assumptions common among theoretical physicists, inviting us to engage in a clearer philosophical reflection on scientific method.

Lost in Math: Beauty != truth

In Lost in Math, Hossenfelder delves briefly into the history of particle physics in order to explain the success of the Standard Model of particles and forces. She touches on why we’ve not had any unexplainable data from experimental particle physics for the last 50 years. She then takes us on a tour of the data that make us think we should be looking for physics that is not explained by the Standard Model—dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation.

Human nature matters

A strange thing is happening in modern philosophy: many philosophers don’t seem to believe that there is such a thing as human nature. What makes this strange is that, not only does the new attitude run counter to much of the history of philosophy, but – despite loud claims to the contrary – it also goes against the findings of modern science. This has serious consequences, ranging from the way in which we see ourselves and our place in the cosmos to what sort of philosophy of life we might adopt.

Why Water Is Weird

It’s striking that water can illustrate and elucidate a martial arts philosophy while also being, to this day, the “least understood material on Earth,” as researchers reported recently.

Why symmetry gets really interesting when it is broken

A hypothetical alien visitor, sent to observe all of human culture – art and architecture, music and medicine, storytelling and science – would quickly conclude that we as a species are obsessed with patterns. The formal gardens of 18th-century England, the folk tales of medieval Germany and the traditional woven fabrics of Mayan civilisation have little in common, but they each owe their aesthetic appeal to being composed of smaller, identical parts arranged into a harmonious whole.

Can a Wandering Mind Make You Neurotic?

On the positive side, mind-wandering promotes planning for the future, allowing my daughter to lay the groundwork for financial security and a career with a long endgame. And it may be an essential ingredient in creativity. Several studies have shown that creativity blossoms under the same conditions that encourage mind-wandering—for example, an incubation period in which the mind is only lightly focused on an easy task is especially conducive to flashes of insight and imaginative solutions to problems.

Ratings inflation on Uber and elsewhere

Uber asks riders to give their drivers a rating of one to five stars at the end of each trip. But very few people make use of this full scale. That’s because it’s common knowledge among Uber’s users that drivers need to maintain a certain minimum rating to work, and that leaving anything less than five stars could jeopardize their status.

Social Inequality Leaves a Genetic Mark

In humans, the profound biological differences that exist between the sexes mean that a single male is physically capable of having far more children than is a single female. Women carry unborn children for nine months and often nurse them for several years prior to having additional children. Men, meanwhile, are able to procreate while investing far less time in the bearing and early rearing of each child.

Does my algorithm have a mental-health problem?

Is my car hallucinating? Is the algorithm that runs the police surveillance system in my city paranoid? Marvin the android in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had a pain in all the diodes down his left-hand side.

AI Psychosis

Unknown is if they will remain uniquely human. Research in artificial intelligence is making spectacular progress; for manyresearchers, this progress is along the path to developing human-like general AI. This leads to a troubling thought: will a human-like AI inherit human-like disorders of thought?

The Troubling Calculus of Human Value

For most of us we use only the numerical literacy necessary to stay employed. And even fewer of us think about numbers in a way where we can see their intrinsic value. We think about a million dollars, in a very loose, abstract way.

We Still Don’t Understand Why Time Only Flows Forward

Every moment that passes finds us traveling from the past to the present and into the future, with time always flowing in the same direction. At no point does it ever appear to either stand still or reverse; the “arrow of time” always points forwards for us. But if we look at the laws of physics—from Newton to Einstein, from Maxwell to Bohr, from Dirac to Feynman—they appear to be time-symmetric.

Dark Matter Is in Our DNA

While some point to galaxy cluster work by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, dark matter was truly “discovered” in the 1970s by Vera Rubin, who was studying the rotation of spiral galaxies. Rubin found that galaxies were spinning too fast for the matter we could see in them, yet they weren’t flying apart. Rubin’s work left astronomers with a choice: Either our laws of gravity were wrong, or there was something else out there pulling on the galaxy’s stars and speeding them up while keeping them together.

Unhappiness Is a Palate-Cleanser

Happiness, in one form or another, seems to be a common goal that most of us would like to attain. We often behave as though we might find a route to contentment—comfort, satiety, warmth, or some other reward—and be happy all the time if we could just make the right choices. But pleasure is often fleeting, even from the most appealing experiences, giving rise to ennui and sparking the drive for something new and sensational.

What’s the best option?

Some parents urge their children to be the best in everything they do. They push them to be the best athlete, and the best scholar, and the best musician, and so on. Other parents urge their children to pursue whatever they are best at, whether it be athletics, academics or music.

Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad

In a recent paper, economists at the University of Chicago reported that working for a socially responsible company motivated employees to act immorally. In one experiment, people were hired to transcribe images of short German texts and paid 10 percent upfront, with the remaining payment being delivered if they completed the transcriptions, or if they declared the documents too illegible to transcribe. When they were told that, for every job completed or marked illegible, 5 percent of their wages would be donated to Unicef’s educational programs, the instances of cheating rose by 25 percent, compared to where no charitable donation was offered.

Why the Tiny Weight of Empty Space Is Such a Mystery

Our Microbiomes Are Making Scientists Question What it Means to Be Human

Can Many-Worlds Theory Rescue Us From Boltzmann Brains?

Can you trust the world to be consistent? Scientists don’t have much choice. They need to assume that objective observations of the universe can be trusted.

Philosophical intuition: just what is ‘a priori’ justification?

Philosophers use the term ‘intuition’ in a slightly different sense than it is used in everyday discourse. Generally speaking, the difference is that philosophical intuitions are based solely on understanding a proposition, while non-philosophical intuitions are not. If a proposition seems true to you simply on the basis of your understanding of it, and not on the basis of empirical evidence, testimony, memory or reasoning, then you are having an intuition in a philosophical sense that it is true.

Here’s Why Our Postwar “Long Peace” Is Fragile

Have mechanisms like democratization really fostered an enduring trend of peaceful co-existence, or is this just a statistical fluke—a normal interlude of relative calm before another global-scale conflagration?

Slow Thought: a manifesto

The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on, you better speed up.

Can AI Ever Learn To Follow Its Gut?

Academics, economists, and AI researchers often undervalue the role of intuition in science. Here’s why they’re wrong.