What is the point of philosophy? It is not to get rich (clearly). It is not about truth (how do you define truth anyway?), it is not about wielding power, or sharpening the axe, or impressing people, or making a difference. The point of philosophy is to escape. The personal dialogue you have with yourself … Read more
The Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master Robin Sharma The David Foster Wallace graduation speech comes to mind when I read this quote. The message is that your mind represents your automatic, default setting, your mind does whatever it is biologically wired to do, and part of this wiring requires to be … Read more
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom is about the inevitability of a technological dystopia unless serious action is taken. Imagining a technological dystopia is not original.Huxley and Orwell, have been able to write about the end of the world we love in novels, that people to this day refer to, they even have debates about who was … Read more
Pleasure and Rationality In trying to understand human nature more deeply, I have read what some philosophers and psychologists have had to say, to get a starting point. To understand what man is, it is first necessary to understand what he wants, and more crucially, what he does not want. One of the first ideas … Read more
The idea of deception is easy for most people to understand. It is not a puzzle that some people are able to deceive others. It is not difficult to think of many reasons why they would do so. But why self-deception? It appears paradoxical, that a person would harm themselves. Why would you, an intelligent … Read more
The perception of mental illness has changed across time. According to Foucault in Madness and Civilization, this change has more to do with social and economic needs, than any humanitarian feelings towards the mentally ill. From the discovery of that necessity which inevitably reduces man to nothing, we have shifted to the scornful contemplation of … Read more
On September 14, 2019, a drone hit two oil facilities in Aramco. The Houthis in Yemen claimed responsibility, proclaiming that the strike was revenge for the hostilities they are facing on their own soil, in a civil war against a Saudi backed government. The strikes cut Saudi Arabia’s oil production by half. I was reminded … Read more
Thomas Szasz was a physician who later became a psychologist. The Myth of Mental Illness is a controversial book, and it is famous for having changed the way people have viewed psychiatry for decades. For some, the arguments give them more confidence in accepting themselves as they are, by seeing the social stigmatization does not … Read more
This is a graduation speech by David Foster Wallace that was made into a book. In this speech, Wallace relates to us to what we need to me aware of throughout our lives. What to Think The purpose of a liberal arts education is to teach you what to think about. It has nothing to … Read more
Human Incompetence In The Glass Cage, Carr warns about a near future that is dominated by artificial intelligence – he argues that the problems that come with advanced artificial intelligence go beyond the loss of jobs for some people the way technology always had. He thinks that at some point, because of the ease with … Read more