philosophy

My undrugged mind, to borrow a witticism from J. L. Austin, delivers to me a world of “medium-sized dry goods” and little else. My drugged mind delivers to…

I wish I came to veganism through an epiphany about the right to personhood of animals, or recognition of the environmental harm that animal farming causes.…

Since then, the quest to proliferate larger and larger language models has accelerated, and many of the dangers we warned about, such as outputting hateful…

We’re often told to “be here now.” Yet the mind is rarely tethered in place. We take mental trips to our past, revisiting what happened yesterday or when we…

TikTok's ascent to becoming the most popular site on the internet has sparked endless discussions about its stickiness—as if it were capable of hacking our…

When I tell Facebook I want to see more or less of something, does that mean I’m telling it, for instance, that I don’t want to see politics?For now, the…

But today there is a third city affecting the other two. Silicon Valley, this third city, is not governed primarily by reason (it is practically the mark of…

The rise of powerful new technology means that humanity must confront the risk of its own demise. The invention of nuclear weaponry, for example, has already…

One way of embracing this uncertainty is to adopt a stance of axiological open-mindedness toward the future. We can get a sense of what this might entail by…

In Aeon magazine, Hales wrote, “Luck might not be a genuine quality of the world at all.” Fine. But neither is beauty or justice. At the same time, the…