Philosophy & Ethics

What is the soul and how does it work? Is your soul exploited by the State through the Noble Lie? Plato (429—327 BCE) serves as the backbone of Western civilization and philosophy–recounting and preserving the theories of his contemporaries, as well as his own. Socrates (469—399 BCE), having never written a surviving word himself, is captured by Plato and acts as his mouthpiece. Though the duo seem inseparable, Plato credits Socrates as the original source of thought and almost all the ph…

The greatest challenge to General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is human intelligence. We as humans would be the GAI’s creator and its dependency lies in our ability to first understand our own intelligence—a field of study that is improving, but has yet provided answers to the most glaring questions. Once, and if, the questions of thinking, consciousness, and intelligence are answered, we’d then need the technical skill of developing that through duplication or imitation. With that said…

Things are One and Being is truth. The pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who is thought to have been born between 540 and 515 BCE (dates are contested between Plato and Diogenes) is often dubbed “the father of metaphysics” and the first noted dualist. As the first a priori philosopher, Parmenides developed the modality of necessity, positing that true knowledge is obtained by reason alone, and largely rejecting a posteriori knowledge, or sense experience, due to the senses being misleadi…

Is our understanding of intelligence anthropomorphic? How can we simulate the human mind when we can't even define it? The Turing Test, as currently understood, is simply this: if a computer can perform in such a way that an expert cannot distinguish its performance from that of a human, then it is said that the computer also has that ability. So, the goal for programmers seeking to design intelligent computers is to design programs that will simulate human cognition in such a way as to pas…

Embrace change wholeheartedly, and accept contradiction. Knowing these words–and understanding them–are two entirely different things. Heraclitus preceded Parmenides, living from 535—475 BCE, and like Parmenides, none of his writing have survived in their complete form. Heraclitus’s philosophy on the surface is in direct contrast with Parmenides by positing a natural argument (I say “on the surface” as their ultimate conclusions, Parmenides’ “All Is One” and Heraclitus’ “World-Fire”, seem…

Parmenides, the Greek grandpappy of metaphysics, might be my favorite philosopher. In hindsight, he may have ruined the world in many ways… but that’s only because people exploited what it is that he was trying to say *cough cough canonization of The New Testament*. In truth, we may never know what he was ‘truly’ trying to say—for one, it’s complicated almost beyond belief; second, no fully intact account of his original work On Nature remains. Archeologists and scholars have yet to comp…