Can we create a human-like artificial intelligence? It is a profoundly philosophical question before being a purely technical one. If it was just a matter of technological possibility, I suspect we would have done it already. However powerful and advanced, disembodied computation is not the sort of ‘human-like’ intelligence that we - actual living embodied people - … Continue reading Spreading the Word: Human Search for Meaning and Artificial Intelligence
Avicenna’s Flying Man and Disembodied Artificial Intelligence
Latest advancements in artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, naturally lead many of us to wonder - can AI think? Not merely compute in increasingly complex ways and astounding volumes but actually understand what it is doing. Can AI have an experience? And how can a thought experiment devised by Avicenna, an 11th-century philosopher, help us here? These … Continue reading Avicenna’s Flying Man and Disembodied Artificial Intelligence
Spreading the Word: What Is Continental Philosophy?
During the 20th century, many things happened. It was a busy century. Among all that busyness, disenchantment with long-lasting traditions, and rapid technological advancement, one divide emerged that still holds strong today - the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Why did it happen, and what does it mean? Today I share a video by … Continue reading Spreading the Word: What Is Continental Philosophy?
John Stuart Mill on Truth and Meaning in Philosophy
What do we want to know when we ask why someone does something? For example, if you asked me, ‘Why are you writing this article?’ what answer would satisfy your expectations? I can respond in at least two ways. One would describe my writing as an act of the body, a certain physiological functionality manifesting … Continue reading John Stuart Mill on Truth and Meaning in Philosophy
Spreading the Word: What Is Bibliotherapy?
Can books help us heal? The author of this recent article on Psyche shares his experience of bibliotherapy: "Reading books is not just a pleasure: it helps our minds to heal". Here is the link to the article: Reading Books as a Therapy. Enjoy! Keeping up the "Spreading the Word" tradition, I hope to share … Continue reading Spreading the Word: What Is Bibliotherapy?
Heraclitus Meets Derrida and Saunders: Misunderstanding and Oversimplification
Misunderstandings are one of the typical features of being human. We can be confident in declaring that every person who has ever lived has misunderstood others and was misunderstood by others at least once in life. This reveals the interpretive structure of our thinking and the fundamental role understanding plays in our lives. Understanding is … Continue reading Heraclitus Meets Derrida and Saunders: Misunderstanding and Oversimplification
Spreading the Word: What Is Lived Experience?
People use the expression 'lived experience' with increasing frequency. We usually mean it as the first-person privileged access to a particular way of experiencing something. Usually, this particular way is intertwined with and expressed in various social identity terms. My lived experience as a woman, as a migrant, as an Eastern European, and so on. … Continue reading Spreading the Word: What Is Lived Experience?
Measuring and Living an Experience
What's the weather like where you are now? How would you check it - glance out the window, open it to get a feel, step outside, consult your preferred weather app? From this follows a more intriguing question - which would you trust more, your lived experience or a measurement? I'm from a generation that … Continue reading Measuring and Living an Experience
Spreading the Word: Being Ashamed Of Your Accent
Immigrants are often ashamed of their accents or feel uncomfortable because of how they sound. Why? Because language is not just a tool, it contains a world of implied social and cultural norms, values, beliefs, and presuppositions. In many languages, there is one way of speaking it that is considered 'proper'. I have read and … Continue reading Spreading the Word: Being Ashamed Of Your Accent
To Speak A Language Is To Participate In A World
In his book, "Black Skin, White Masks", Frantz Fanon argues that language, far from just a tool for conveying information, expresses a world implied by it. In other words, words matter in shaping who I am in your eyes, as does my tone of voice, accent, dialect, and so on. If I am a foreigner speaking your … Continue reading To Speak A Language Is To Participate In A World
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