David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

In The Extended Mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers discuss the possibility of extended minds; coupled systems in which a human organism produces cognition, beliefs, and thoughts with the aid of external entities. Clark and Chalmers give the example of Otto, a man suffering from Alzheimer’s who uses a notebook to record his thoughts and [...]

In an article entitled Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing describes the Turing test, his famous criterion for machine intelligence: a computer can be considered a thinking machine if a human interlocutor, after asking the computer a series of questions, cannot tell whether he is conversing with a machine or with another human. After describing [...]

In The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer offers an encyclopedic vision of a dichotomized world; half of the world is mere appearance or representation, while the other half consists of things-in-themselves, inner natures, Will. Schopenhauer borrows the language and concepts from his general system of metaphysical duality, most notably the concept [...]

For Thomas Hobbes, a person living in a pre-legal state, or state of nature, has a natural right to anything one deems useful for survival, including things to which other people have similar rights (L 80). Hobbes calls this set of natural rights “the Right of Nature” (L 79), and argues that as long as [...]

Pursuant of a psychology, a moral science, and ultimately a civil science, all grounded in a materialist worldview, Thomas Hobbes defines “good” and “evil” in terms of the individual subject’s particular appetites and aversions. These appetites and aversions correspond to pleasures and pains arising within the body in reaction to external matter in motion. Hobbes [...]

After my last post regarding most people’s immediate reaction to the proposition of using free software, entitled I Don’t Know What Linux is but I Don’t Like It, I got many interesting comments and put the issue to rest for the time being. However, I take every occasion I can to promote free software—when I [...]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, deliver jeremiads on the ways in which social life can corrupt the individual. Rousseau argues that a once healthy desire to be recognized socially becomes a runaway fetish, enslaving all who pursue it in vice-ridden competition. Mill warns of [...]

In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke enumerates circumstances under which a ruler violates the trust of his people. Under those circumstances, it is the responsibility of the people to judge whether their trust has been violated, and, if they judge it has been, it is the people’s right to dissolve and reform the [...]

Theistic arguments from Big Bang cosmology abound, including William Lane Craig’s Kalam argument and L. Stafford Betty and Bruce Cordell’s anthropic teleological argument. Quentin Smith gives an argument which he hopes will fill the lacuna left by non-theistic interpretations of Big Bang cosmology. Smith explains the inherently unpredictable nature of the Big Bang singularity—the lawless [...]

John Hick responds to the problem of evil by offering an interpretation of God’s plan for humanity in which natural evils are person-building obstacles, and moral evils are moralizing vicissitudes, in a developmental process aimed at moral perfection. Hick argues that only by arriving at a state of moral perfection from an initial state of [...]