The Super Bowl went off as advertised again this year. The New England Patriots were back in the Big Game, after an absence and rebuilding efforts given the departure of Tom Brady after the 2019 season. Patriots fans will have to take what solace they can from the fact of their participation in their first Super Bowl since Brady's departure. They are back to the big stage, though not yet back to victorious form there. I will discuss the game itself tomorrow. Today, the spectacle. There were, as there always are. lots of expensively produced television ads. As usual, these ads mirror American obsessions, especially the obsession as of late with artificial intelligence and whether it is destined to replace the natural human sort. There were a couple of commercials plugging Anthropic's AI system, Claude, and Anthropic's promise to keep Claude ad free. These, for me, were the stand outs of the show. Good nerdy humor, right up my alley, and the humor was pertinent to the pro...
I recently came across a review that Luke Roelofs, a professor teaching at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote back in 2018 of a then new book on panpsychism. Roelefs' own comments on panpsychism here are not limited to evaluating the merits of the book, and in what follows I will avoid unnecessary explanations by omitting any naming of the book itself. Roelef says that there is a distinction, important but seldom made, between one sort of panpsychism, as old as philosophy itself, and another, specific to recent discussions that arise within the Anglophonic analytic tradition. One natural way to define panpsychism is to call it the view that the fundamental properties of the physical world are themselves conscious. This, as Roelef said, looks like a claim about the where, not the what or the how of consciousness. The proper rivals of panpsychism, were it limited to the view defined in italics above, would be other views about where. A "neologism-happy philosopher...