Unmaking Sense

How can “Living the Present” be the best way to prepare for the future; indeed, the only way to prepare for the future? We explore John Dewey’s notion that only by extracting as much as we can from the present can we prepare for the future, because to do anything else is self-contradictory. 

As a UK General Election looms we look not at conservative economics but at the political, sociological and metaphysical assumptions that characterise them; at why John Dewey rejected them all, and why we should too.

As general elections loom in the UK and France, as the Euros start in Germany, we consider the question of self-inflicted stress and trauma and why, when things seem to be going swimmingly well, we seem to have a propensity to indulge a kind of death-wish. This is a First World problem, of course: are we simply bored?

If pragmatism is a better name for weak moral relativism then what does it tell us about the way we should view our decisions? Should we look to evaluate what we do now in terms of consequences? And how do we deal with uncertainty in the face of the fact that the way we act may have the very opposite consequences to those that we intend and hope for? Why consequentialism fails and what we can do instead.

The example of elephants using names illustrates how we change our minds in the face of new evidence, as we should. So moral certainty is unwise at best.

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.

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

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?

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

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!