From left to right: Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard University, Elizabeth Magill, former president of the University of Pennsylvania, Pamela Nadell, a professor at American University, and Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at a fateful hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on 5 December 2023 in … [continue reading]
Monthly Archives: February 2024
The Limits of Philosophy: Its Disenchantment and A Case for Epistemic Humility, #3.
(Philosophy Talk, 2016) TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 2. Example 1: Analytic Philosophy 3. Example 2: Materialism or Physicalism and Naturalism 4. Example 3: Skepticism and the Limits of Philosophy 5. Conclusion: Where To Now, Philosophy? The essay that follows will be published in five installments, one per section; this is the third installment. But … [continue reading]
How Reading Shines a Bright Light on Consciousness: The Science of Reading.
You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab. How Reading Shines a Bright Light on Consciousness: The Science of Reading You, the reader of this very sentence, are consciously reading this … [continue reading]
The Limits of Philosophy: Its Disenchantment and A Case for Epistemic Humility, #2.
(Philosophy Talk, 2016) TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 2. Example 1: Analytic Philosophy 3. Example 2: Materialism or Physicalism and Naturalism 4. Example 3: Skepticism and the Limits of Philosophy 5. Conclusion: Where To Now, Philosophy? The essay that follows will be published in five installments, one per section; this is the second installment. But … [continue reading]
OpenAI, The Superalignment Problem, and Human Values.
A simple analogy for superalignment: In traditional machine learning (ML), humans supervise AI systems weaker than themselves (left). To align superintelligence, humans will instead need to supervise AI systems smarter than them (center). We cannot directly study this problem today, but we can study a simple analogy: can small models supervise larger models (right)? (Open … [continue reading]
The Limits of Philosophy: Its Disenchantment and A Case for Epistemic Humility, #1.
(Philosophy Talk, 2016) TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 2. Example 1: Analytic Philosophy 3. Example 2: Materialism or Physicalism and Naturalism 4. Example 3: Skepticism and the Limits of Philosophy 5. Conclusion: Where To Now, Philosophy? The essay that follows will be published in five installments, one per section; this is the first installment. But … [continue reading]
The Refutation of Digital Idealism: A Micro-Study in Kantian Futurism.
An enantiomorph of sentence 1 (Author’s photograph, 2023) You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab. The Refutation of Digital Idealism: A Micro-Study in Kantian Futurism 1. Introduction As any Kantian … [continue reading]
The Limits of Reason: Cognitive Psychology, The Epistemological Crisis, and Epistemic Humility, #6.
(Palazzi, 2023) TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction 2. Background: The Cognitive Limits of Rationality 3. Cognitive Blindspots 4. The Myth of the All-Seeing Eye: The Limits of Perception 5. The Epistemological Crises 6. Conclusion The essay that follows is being published in six installments, one per section; this is the sixth and final installment. But … [continue reading]