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Richard Nisbett compares the way of thinking of the Chinese and the Northamerican Cultures. Chinese value harmony, not only freedom. Their cultural foundations are Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism and “all three orientations share a concern about harmony, holism and the mutual influence of everything on almost everything else”
Fang Zhaohui, one of my professors at Tsinghua University,
strong confrontation with my father. He had the opinion they should kill all the protesters, they had no sense of respect for tradition.
Gini Index (a synthetic metric that measures inequality, higher meaning more unequal)
because Cultures organized the world into countries and nations, it is also the hardest one to be aware of in our daily lives.
moral values are not grounded in rationality.
Moral values are not right or wrong in an absolute sense; they are only relative notions.
‘naturalistic fallacy’ or the ‘is-ought problem’,
Citing Harari, animals “have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans, or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.”
it was the fostering of individual freedom in the Western world sustained in the steady development of technology that slowly and painfully has taken us to a state where, for the first time in very long (since the times of the hunter-gatherers), the majority of humans are not spending their lives carrying buckets and ploughing, and the agenda of humanity no longer consists of war, famine and plagues
the progress of technology can either augment or r...
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What do we actually know about the algorithms that conform our minds? Can we build them?
El Che
he was completely in favor of dropping the atomic bombs over the US during the Missile Crisis
Gandhi also did some things that are quite questionable.
“If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.”[Dostoevsky, 1879]
What should be the objective in one’s life? To these questions Confucius replied: harmony with the social. Nietzsche said the opposite: independence and freedom from the social.
a moral system that, as is usual with Chinese philosophy, is more practical than analytical.
Confucianism, like Taoism, is less concerned with finding the truth than with finding the Tao – the Way – to live in the world.”
transgressing
People are happy because they are committed to what they think is good, not because what they think is good is in fact good
people are all being happy by following their social nomos.
Confucianism, unlike other religions, provides utilitarian arguments with no shame, in favor of its moral. In the absence of a God, it might be the only guidance.
For Nietzsche, cultures are the way of maintaining a regime of oppression, often through religion.
Nietzsche’s philosophy indeed seems to be quite in agreement with Dostoevsky’s quote above. His writings are very influential, if not the origin of nihilism, which asserts that there is no profound meaning to life, that there is no purpose and no ethics. Nietzsche would perhaps point to aesthetics as a guiding direction.
the meaning of a concept arises only in relation to other concepts, together forming a mental theory.
For a long time people thought that Smallpox was a disease generated by evil spirits and ignored crucial mechanisms of miniature agents acting on the body; they were mistaken, but they were still talking about the same disease as us.
our concepts have both a ‘conceptual role’ and a statistical covariational relation to the world. The
notion of grammar, syntax or linguistics. Another domain which has been important throughout the history of AI has been that of games.
posit
- Self Driving Cars In October 2018 Waymo, a company originating from Google, obtained a
a quantum qubit is simultaneously in many states.
Quantum Supremacy,
“Neural Dust”
“Molecular Recording”
www.stateoftheart.ai
David Chalmers
‘hard problem of consciousness’
Why did consciousness evolve and does it have a function? Is it a feature or a bug?
‘philosophical zombie’
subjective experience, or ‘qualia’
While life under water was dominated by stimulus-evoked behavior and short-range vision, the new terrestrial life allowed for serial decision making which was especially important to enable “complex deliberative strategies with respect to the most unpredictable features of our environment:
“prospective cognition or mental time travel are dependent on the hippocampus.
Daniel Dennett,
Stanislas Dehaene
Consciousnesses - unlike Genes, Cultures and other computational systems - represent their goals and try to achieve them by making decisions.
Chalmers points to the similarity of the situation to 18th century physics regarding electromagnetism. It turns out that electric charge cannot be explained in terms of any other known principles,
every two electrons generate an electromagnetic force between them (along with gravity and the two nuclear forces, these four fundamentally regulate all of physics).
Christof Koch
Giulio Tononi
