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POPSCan You Become a Creature of New Habits? “The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
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POPSI am a transhumanist, thanks I say, fear not. If you have clearly transhumanist beliefs, like the notion that human enhancement is coming in the next few decades and will be a big deal, then don’t be afraid to call yourself one. As Dr. Wittgenstein, one of my favorite philosophers ever, used to argue, words are just labels we fill with our own content. To think that a word has any inherent meaning aside from its use in language is absurd.
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POPSThe Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You Despite its many flaws, I’m a big fan of human civilization. I marvel at our capacity to organize matter and information, at our ability to learn from mistakes and pass that learning down to subsequent generations. Civilization—writing, cities, trade, the whole lot of it—makes us unique on this planet and, as far as we can tell so far, in our part of the universe.
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POPSWhen Language Can Hold the Answer The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too.
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POPSDo we want a truly liberal society? A liberal society embraces pluralism, in the sense that it does not seek to impose any one vision of what it means to be virtuous or to lead a good life. Within such a society, approval is commonly expressed for John Stuart Mill’s view that “experiments in living” should not be merely tolerated, but actually welcomed and celebrated (Mill 1974: 120). As Max Charlesworth writes, “In a liberal society personal autonomy, the right to choose one’s own way of life for oneself, is the supreme value.” He adds that this includes what he calls ethical pluralism: members of the society are free to hold a wide range of moral, religious, and non-religious positions, with no core values or public morality that it is the law’s business to enforce (Charlesworth 1993: 1). Accordingly, a liberal society makes a sharp distinction between the sphere of personal moral views and that of the law; no one can use the law to impose their beliefs on others (16-20).
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POPSArtificial Intelligence and Society We act like our tiny little corner of mindspace is the whole universe. We think of the scale of intelligence as if it ran from a village idiot to Einstein, rather than running from an amoeba up to humans. On the scale of interspecies differences of intelligence–if you are comparing yourself to a mouse–then the distance between a village idiot and Einstein fits onto a small dot. You might be able to tell the difference between a village idiot and an Einstein, but a chimpanzee would have a bit of trouble administering the IQ test.
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POPSThe Bottom is Not Enough I call myself an editor first, and author second. I think the top-down function of editors -- to select, prune, guide, solicit, shape, and guide the results from the crowd -- is essential to excellence... It's taken a while but I think we've learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don't need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.
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POPSThe Pharmacy of the Future and You Solox, the emotional independence pill, enables patients to have a wide and emotionally satisfying circle of friends but liberates them from the tedium of having only one intimate partner. Owens then posits that the price of Credon is about as much as for a candy bar, while Libermine and Solox costs as much as good bottle of wine. So on what grounds do you choose among these options? Owens suggests that one response might be that it's "normal" to want to be in relationship. The pharmacist reminds you that people born with extra Solox in their brains are just as "natural" as people without it. Surely you would agree that such free spirits should not be regarded as somehow inadequate. Another response is that taking Libermine would so change you that you wouldn't be you anymore. Of course, the whole point of taking Credon is to change you so that you, in some respects, aren't you anymore.
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POPS Self models There is no such thing as a substantial self (as a distinct ontological entity, which could in principle exist by itself), but only a dynamic, ongoing process creating very specific representational and functional properties. Self-consciousness is a form of physically realized representational content
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POPSThe Nature of Nature How nature gained its positive connotation is a mystery. This unnatural understanding of nature likely developed during the 20th century, when human interventions — vaccines, food fortification, water chlorination — led people to forget how much nature sucked.
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POPSOvercoming Gender Similarly, my gender plays an integral role in determining who I am, what my preferences are, and ultimately what I’m capable of. And that bothers me. Gender is a disease
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