Who Do You Think You Are? Constructing Identity in a World of Difference

"People [...] they come to me and say things like 'Oh I can't tell uh... are you mixed, are you Black? Oh you must be from the Caribbean! Oh, are you Arab?' And I'm like 'I'm a socialist, baby'" - Dr. Robin Kelly Identity is one of the broadest topics in philosophy, important enough to …

Putting Notions in Motion: Epistemological Leaps in Model Building

“Tarski has stressed in his lecture (and I think justly) the great importance of the concept of Turing's computability. It seems to me that this importance is largely due to the fact that with this concept one has for the first time succeeded in giving an absolute notion to an interesting epistemological notion, i.e., one …

The Empirical Heart of Mathematics

Mathematics is often grouped together with the many other sciences, despite science supposedly being an empirical study of some domain; while math for centuries has been claimed by the rationalists. I argue however that math is indeed a kind of science, albeit a very strange one. While physics is the study of natural laws, chemistry …

Can we tell if we’re simulated, and why does it matter?

See part 1 here. So maybe we're living in a simulation, maybe we're not. Why does any of this matter? If we can't actually tell any way, we are just arguing over the likelihood one way or the other and why should any of us care? It doesn't change the taste of coffee; it doesn't …

The Superiority of Inferiority

In his paper The Singularity: a philosophical analysis, David Chalmers outlines four general futures for the human race when an artificial super-intelligence arises, those being: extinction, isolation, inferiority and integration (Chalmers p.33). While Chalmers laments over how un-preferable the first three are in favour of integration, I believe that Chalmers is making an important leap …