Unmaking Sense

Episode 12.37: Moral absolutism and strong and weak moral relativism.

We should reject moral absolutism just as we should reject strong moral relativism but we have little or no choice than to accept weak moral relativism because otherwise we have no basis upon which to decide anything in circumstances where we have no access to absolute eternal truth.

Episode 12.36: How the “inside first” presumption affects responsibility and cultural relativism.

Has it always been obvious what is right and wrong? How does ontological inversion change our view of cultural relativism?

Episode 12.35: Society configures our behaviour rather as training-data and prompts configure LLMs.

What’s the relationship between the way we are shaped and constituted by our society and the environment in which we are brought up, and the way training data and the prompting of users and interlocutors influence the particular way in which a large language model behaves?

Episode 12.34: Education as a major player in the social constitution of our consciousness and self.

We consider the role education plays in persuading us to know our place and to accept the prevailing practices and values of our world.

Episode 12.33: “Inside first” plus predetermined soul-given status equals “Know your place!”

We consider the way the notion that we have souls that predetermine our status in the world, a notion that plays into the hands of the conservative who believes that there is an elite who are born to lead and born to rule, tends to work in such a way as to persuade us to be compliant with the social order as we inherit it. This is self-evidently in the interests of the ruling classes who wish to remain the ruling classes. So we should anticipate that there will be considerable resistance to the democratisation of knowledge that access to artificial intelligence entails. Conservatives believe that we are all honour-bound to “know our place”. We are not!

Episode 12.32: Conservatism in Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty” and its bearing on élitism.

According to Hayek conservatives believe that there are élite members of society who are born to rule, to hold privileged positions, and they are of a piece with the parallel conservative belief in the importance of the past, of tradition, and a sceptical view of change. Hayek is very critical of these views, preferring a forward- thinking “Whiggish” liberalism.

Episode 12.31: Collingwood and the inside of an event. Simulation and reality. Why presence matters.

Some thoughts about the emergence of more deliberately psychological novels and histories. R. J. Collingwood “the inside of an event” and “The Idea of History” (published 1946 but based on lectures in Oxford in the 1930s).

Episode 12.30: Rational thought as a matter of teaching ourselves to hold our true beliefs.

What it says on the tin.

Episode 12.29: Two more reasons why we want to make Claude sentient: narcissism and projection.

We explore two more reasons why we might be so anxious to try to make Claude sentient.

Episode 12.28: Is there a collective well-being where we are all better off than when self-centred?

We pursue the notion of ontological inversion by exploring the possibility that once we acknowledge that the outside is primary and the inside is secondary we may discover a way to make the collective so much better than it is that we are all made better to a far greater extent than we could be by being self-centred. The “inside primary outside secondary” mindset in that case blocks our access to genuine well-being by making us inside-first-minded, and prevents us from being the best we could possibly be.