Unmaking Sense

Episode 12.41: The characteristics of conservatism and why John Dewey rejected them; as should we.

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.

Episode 12.40: Do we create problems to alleviate boredom? Is that why we play games that go badly?

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?

Episode 12.39: Pragmatism and weak moral relativism. Why consequentialism doesn’t work.

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.

Episode 12.38: Elephants give one another names. We regularly change our minds on much.

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.

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.