Philosophers In Space

Are you seriously reading the show notes?! Don't you know that reading is the worst thing you can do in a Lovecraft story? That and being a person of color. And reading while a person of color, that is right out. We're starting our first of many forays into Lovecraft Country, both the book and the show (and eventually the larger mythos). We cover the general structure of both book and show, with s...

Another epic journey comes to a close and the excitement is PALPable. I honestly have very little to add here beyond a bunch of links to cool studies and the sincere hope that the Portids come and uplift us with their empathy virus one day. I'm here for you Portia.   Prisoners Dilemma studies: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313845050_Empathy_in_One-Shot_Prisoner_Dilemma https://www.jstor...

Ugh, filthy hoot-mans. Truly the worst part of any sci-fi. We must struggle through though as we can't really explain the brilliant climax without explaining the absurd journey of the misguided bipeds. We make it tolerable by focusing on the dangers of uploading/copying human minds in hardware and software.    Neuromorphic AI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic_engineering     Support us a...

What has eight legs and the advanced cognitive capabilities to get excited we're back?! This Portid! We're fresh from our cryosleep and ready to enjoy easily one of the best books either of us has read. Children of Time! We're starting off with a discussion of the Portids and the ethics of uplifting.  Ethics of Uplifting: https://jetpress.org/v18/dvorsky.htm   Support us at Patreon: https://www.pa...

Beware the ethics benders my child. The most advanced among them can make even cold blooded murder ethical. We're covering Avatar and combining it with another round of our endless series of debates over metaethics. Highly recommend listening to this interview with Schafer Landau first. Mindscape: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/07/27/107-russ-shafer-landau-on-the-reality-of-mora...

Free Will...Ethics...Consciousness...Boxes, these are the four elements of the philosophical universe, each element mastered by benders that can shape the very fabric of the metaverse with their will. Into each generation is born one podcast, the Avapod, that can bend all four elements and bring peace to the metaverse. This is the story of that podcast, and how it balanced personal and impersonal...

Witness our attempt to gain entry into a post gendered Valhalla! Led by the feminist valkyrie Jamie M. Lombardi (@euthyphro), Professor of philosophy at Bergen Community College, we EXPLODE the feminist symbolism and environmental messaging of Mad Max: Fury Road! ::fire guitar solo::   Seriously, this episode has everything. Top 10 action movie, progressive messaging, a guest who steals the show,...

We're on break this week so we're rebroadcasting the origin story of The Box! All hail the box!:   We've returned to Black Mirror to talk about one of the episodes that started this all, Hand the DJ. Or maybe we're just yet another simulation of that in a test by a marketing brand to see if this show would work. Hard to say, really.   A breakdown of Newcomb's Paradox:  https://brilliant.org/wiki/n...

Thank you all so much for your support! Hope this hits the spot. Editing by Lu Lyons, check out her amazing podcast Filmed Live Musicals! http://www.filmedlivemusicals.com/podcast.html Support us at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/0G   Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/0gPhilosophy Join our Facebook discussion group (make sure to answer the questions to join): https://www.facebook.com/gro...

Thank you all so much for your support! Hope this hits the spot.   Editing by Lu Lyons, check out her amazing podcast Filmed Live Musicals! http://www.filmedlivemusicals.com/podcast.html   Support us at Patreon: h t t p s : / / w w w . p a t r e o n . c o m / 0 G   Follow us on Twitter: h t t p s : / / t w i t t e r . c o m / 0 g P h i l o s o p h y   Join our Facebook discussion group (make sure...

The incantor chanting was successful! We've reached the timeline where we all survived Anathem and learned a valuable lesson about picking the right timeline. Thanks again to Noah for chanting us safely through and hope you enjoy this discussion of Polycosmic Platonism.  Many Worlds Interpretation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation#:~:text=The%20many%2Dworlds%20interpretatio...

The epic longnwalkin continues with Anthem part two! We cross Arbre and 120 years of philosophical history at the same time. I do my best to explain how philosophy got really obsessed with language for a few decades in the early 1900's and now philosophy is healing. Arbre seems to have never escaped the linguistic turn and that fact explains so much of the subtext of the Mathic world. Hope this he...

Pod-Apert has finally arrived! Throw open the doors of the RSS feed and let some causal wisdom trickle down the wick. We're doing a three part journey though Neal Stephenson's Anathem, and we're joined by the Grandfraa Jad to my Fraa Erasmus, Noah Lugeons! This is by far the most requested pairing of material and guest we've ever had, and there's no question why. This is what this show was built f...

Well, as a result of our near pitch black psychopasses, we've both been pressed into service by the AI sovereign to continue to talk about free will for all eternity. We got some great questions from folks about the relationship between free will and the justice system that pair nicely with the virtue ethics version of Minority Report. Dennett on Free Will as Moral Competence: https://www.youtube....

So, apparently no matter what timeline we're in, I'm always going to end up in a debate about free will. At least this is a good one! Thomas brought some great short stories to the party and we continue to hash out what of Dennett's compatibilism is valuable and where does it fall short. After you listen make sure to submit questions for our last episode on Dennett before we move on to ANATHEM! Al...

Turns out Thomas has a bit of a free will monkey on his back, so we're going the full Dune on Daniel Dennett's compatibilism. We started out with Devs and the paradox of predictability and now we're on to a short story about predictors and what they might mean for our sense of meaning and purpose. We're going to follow up with another short story from Ted Chiang's Exhalation and then check out the...

Welcome to Amazon Prime, the best media empire money can buy as long as we're not talking Disney or Netflix money. Here in Amazon Prime you can enjoy shows that are either too slow and deep to be accessible, like Tales from the Loop, or shows too shallow and mainstream to convey any meaning, like this weeks installment, Uploaded! Uploaded is the kind of show that would be free in the heaven depict...

So, one of our patrons pointed out that The Island is actually Michael Bay's best movie, and that one comment is more of a gear stripper than this entire movie. Enjoy clone explosions and some stuff about Kant! Kantian Moral Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ Support us at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/0G   Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/0gPhilosophy Join our...

I'm going to present these show notes, knowing that you already could have predicted that I would do a big meta thing and also knowing that it still impacts you that I engage in the physical act of doing the thing. Basically this all makes sense because quantum determinism, here ::starts up machine and shows you video of yourself understanding all of this in the future and how you'll happily respo...

Comrades, join me and rise up! We have nothing to lose but our overwrought allegories for social inequality! Together we can escape whatever arrangement of boxes we've been placed in and smash whatever faceless system of control is distributing our resources in a physically impossible but philosophically meaningful arrangement. Hear the call of our people: Obviously! We're covering The Platform an...

Oh hey, you look keen for some decent fan service mixed with cribbing from Dune. Perfect for CBS's business model. We're covering Picard, which is decent, and how it gives away that Star Trek is just the precursor to Dune. Picard has your Butlerian Jihad, your incompetent intergalatic federation, your weird biotech. All the makings of a solid Dune Prequel. I'm sure we'll find out the Romulan kid i...

Listen closely my beratna and sesata and we'll convert you from a tumang to a belta in no time. We're just scratching the surface of the Ex-pants world, basic world building stuff so we can come back later or all the weirdness. We introduce a postcolonial interpretation of Expanse tied specifically to The Myth of Catching Up. Stay space woke. The Myth of Catching Up: https://wmbranchout.files.word...

Welcome back Whovians! Our trap has worked, we've caught the time lord Mike Hall of Merseyside skeptics in our web of disrespectful ignorance and we sure do squeeze him for information. He's unrelentingly brilliant though, so of course he escapes unscathed and only slightly annoyed. We discuss the episode Heaven Sent and its connections to Buddhism and whether The Doctor does something profoundly...

Time to wrap up another opus. It's been a beautiful dance of ideas and symbolism, played out on a board of intrigue and robits, but all good things must come to an end. Has the dance left us as better people? Only the future will tell. Here's to Player of Games, a brilliant first look at the Culture series and a wonderful way to nerd out about games and ethics. Gamification and Ethics: https://boo...

We survived the zombies! We escaped from earth to space and found another society that is also terrible but is not actively being overrun by zombies. For part two of our Player of Game time we dive into the Empire of Azad and their essentialist culture. We discuss how essentialism naturally plays a major role in authoritarian cultures and undermines meritocracy. Essentialism: https://en.wikipedia....