Every week, 22,000 people visit a Reddit forum called r/replika, a place where users can talk about their experiences with Replika, an AI chatbot designed specifically to portray close interpersonal relationships. Users of Replika want AI to ask about their day, want to have something to talk to,... READ MORE
In the last century, the term "human rights" has taken a strong foothold in international policy. The phrase became especially prominent after World War II, when the United Nations published its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, defining what every individual ought to have a right to, in 30... READ MORE
Introduction Though far from the philosophical and scientific orthodoxy, the theory of panpsychism has a very storied history among the philosophical community and should be considered a far more serious proposal than it previously has been. Despite panpsychists often being described offhandedly as... READ MORE
Searching the Self: A Successfully Failed Attempt Self as a concept is everywhere in day-to-day life. "I" think that this shirt looks good; "his" heart is broken; "my" childhood was happy, so on. When we use "self" as a folk concept, it seems to be a substantial entity with agency (I can perform... READ MORE
The day the first A.I. man was murdered was an odd day. It wasn't even violent. The electric-blue eyes in his skin-colored, silicon face went dull and he slumped forward in his chair. Not even a wild beep or strangled death-rattle. A group called First Skin had broken into MachineWorks'... READ MORE
Rationality as the Basis for Ethics Deontology is dying. Most deontological systems of ethics, which assert that actions are right or wrong by their own nature rather than by their consequences, rely on the view that humans possess a certain kind of rationality, from which we can derive ethical... READ MORE
The God that is described in Abrahamic religions (such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), can be approached from a mathematical lens to reveal new insights. The main way I will do this is by using Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem to show how perfect omniscience is impossible. I will also explain... READ MORE
Defining and Defending the Welfare State Welfare state liberalism, following from liberalism as a whole, is the greatest form of civil society that humanity has produced. While it is often subjected to criticism in the modern era, anything said against liberalism fails to come up with a preferable... READ MORE
Karl Marx first engaged with philosophy as a "Young Hegelian", part of a group of left-wing thinkers who took themselves as successors to Hegel. Young Marx both defended Hegel's importance1 and criticized his ideas. In 1843, he wrote Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which criticized Hegel's... READ MORE
PART I At first, I fought. The current swept my feet out from under me and I went flying downriver. I couldn't see anything. I clawed at the water but I couldn't find purchase. I remember thinking that I would get out. I would surface. Then I took in my first gulp of water. I tried to cough it out,... READ MORE
INTRO Following The Path of Buddhism is the intellectual equivalent of scaling Everest with no clothes on. If you make it, you achieve total naked freedom. But you probably won't make it. Trying to find nirvana terrifies me. But actually finding it scares me even more because nirvana is supposed to... READ MORE