2 months ago
What Is It Like to Be a Bot?
Blake Lemoine is – or was – a Google engineer who recently made a disturbing claim: the LaMDA chatbot he was working on had developed a child-like consciousness. The transcripts …
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7 months ago
Uncausal Determinism: Why the Future Cannot Be Otherwise
Some philosophical ideas have a bad reputation: until a few centuries ago, for example, in Christian Europe it was quite dangerous to profess atheism. Present-day forbidden ideas put you at …
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2 years ago
Giordano Bruno’s Eroico Furore
Whenever I endure injustice, I find relief in reading Giordano Bruno. His wrathful attitude makes him an excellent companion in anger, while his unfortunate example – he burned at the …
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2 years ago
A Letter to Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s “Muse”
Dear Lou Andreas Salomé:
I met you recently in “Freud”, a Netflix series about the founder of psychoanalysis (or, rather, a random namesake from Vienna), where you play the role …
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3 years ago
Artificial Intelligences: Eight Ethical Scenarios
If every apocalypse has its own imagery, the allegory of our time looks like two black swans. One is oil-soaked and stumbles in a dried-up lake; the other …
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4 years ago
Is Coming into Existence Always a Harm?
In his book Better Never to Have Been (recently translated in Italian by Carbonio Editore), David Benatar takes further the famous idea by Albert Camus that “there is but one …
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