The Right Method of Philosophy

The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly ...

 Why Kids Break the Rules in RPG Play

Why do kids act like that? I have noticed that one of the first things that many new players do is try to break the world by being anti-social in a way they never could in real life. They do naughty things like slap guards in the face, flirt with the mayor's husband, or tell off the sheriff. After all, it can be good fun to discover the boundaries of the new playspace, work through learning how to play a character, and stick it to the man at the same time. During gameplay people behave in a ...

 Breaking out of Symbology

A monk asked Ts'ui-wei, "For what reason did the First Patriarch come from the West?" Ts'ui-wei answered, "Pass me that chin-rest." As soon as the monk passed it, Ts'ui-wei hit him with it. Another master was having tea with two of his students when he suddenly tossed his fan to one of them, saying, "What's this?" The student opened it and fanned himself. "Not bad," was his comment. "Now you," he went on, passing it to the other student, who at once closed the fan and scratched his neck w...

 We Make Life Short by Dissipating It

Seneca observed that “we do not receive a life that is short, but rather we make it so,” by dissipating it in “extravagance and carelessness.” How better to describe the contemporary leisure experience? Americans spend, on average, more than three hours per day—more than 60 percent of their “leisure” time—watching TV and scrolling through social media (often at the same time). “All boats are rising here,” boasts entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. “More people are wa...

 Evaluating ChatGPT as a Bullshit Machine

The structure of the paper is as follows: in the first section, we outline how ChatGPT and similar LLMs operate. Next, we consider the view that when they make factual errors, they are lying or hallucinating: that is, deliberately uttering falsehoods, or blamelessly uttering them on the basis of misleading input information. We argue that neither of these ways of thinking are accurate, insofar as both lying and hallucinating require some concern with the truth of their statements, whereas LLM...

 The Information Age has Increased Abstract Intelligence

Most dramatically, an increase in one kind of abstract intelligence is visible all over the world: mastery of digital technology. Cyberspace is the ultimate abstract realm, in which goals are achieved not by pushing matter around in space but by manipulating intangible symbols and patterns. When people were first confronted with digital interfaces in the 1970s, like videocassette recorders and ticket machines in new subway systems, they were baffled. It was a running joke of the 1980s that mo...

 The Thermian Argument

So there's a bad habit people have gotten into. It's nothing new, but it's become more and more common. It goes like this: Critic: Hello. This is Folding Ideas. I recently watched the anime Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs and was, you know, disturbed by the seeming perverse glee the way the show takes the frequent and excessive dismemberment of its female cast members. In fact, the entire purpose of the show seems to be little more than showing women being brutally violated by orcs. Mino...

 Game Play Informs Real World Play

For Molly, computer play in a simulated world connected strongly with off-line play. It reinforced her desire to create fictional worlds of her own. And it helped sharpen her understanding of that creative endeavor. In evaluating the imaginative and creafive worth of childhood activities, of course, this is the gold standard: that reading or watching television, that trips to the theater, to art and science ce museuns, an and id yyes, that play with computer games should stimulate personal en...

 How Utopian Stories Can Encourage Work in Reality

"I do a lot of public speaking, often debating public figures on television or other high profile settings, or giving speeches to large audiences," one Fellow, an immigration rights lobbyist, wrote in her query response. "I am constantly, almost involuntarily, honing my skills by debating adversaries or giving speeches when I'm alone (in the car or walking to the metro). They're not exactly imaginary worlds, but rather imagined versions of real-life settings in which I find myself" Equally ...

 Imaginative Play Creates Ownership

Ultimately, the child as creator exercises a whole range of capacities that set the Stage for original thinking. We find the imprint of creative practice in the blending of experiences and ideas, the classifications of real and imagined things, the organization of systemic patterns and narrative sequences, the modeling of worlds, the generation of artifacts, and the synthesizing of all that is known and felt into one grand design. The creating self "owns" the processes and products of make-...