Philosophers In Space

This episode is about Eugenics in much the same way that Firefly is about the civil war. That is to say, it's okay that we're the baddies here cause we're loveable scamps. We discuss whether it is moral to make people better, which is clearly a separate question from whether it is technically possible, which it totally is. Recent resurgence in Eugenics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Moder...

Picture in your head the "I'm not saying it was aliens..." guy, but that's the whole series. Boom, you're now caught up on Stargate and can fully enjoy this episode of lighthearted banter between archetypal humans as they toy with the lives of other humans in ways they can't begin to understand. We're watching season 3 episode 15 of Stargate: Atlantis. The episode is called "the game" so we though...

Okay, I'm finally ready. I've said my goodbyes. Our analysis here is complete, we can walk through the podcast arch and transcend to the next level of podhood. I want to thank you all for your loving patience and I leave you with this parting gift of a final wrap up of The Good Place and the ways it incorporated both Christian Universalism and Buddhism/Taoism into the final resolution. Now I'm gon...

Why do all the good things gotta end ::Janet wailing gif:: Our wonderful journey has reached its natural conclusion and I'm still not ready. In part one of our goodbye to the good place we explain some of the repeated references to Scanlon's book What We Owe to Each Other, and the strengths and weakness of their setting up of the problem. Part two will discuss the solutions they reach and the role...

This episode feels like a genuine culmination. After Wonkapiercer, I felt a little like Lindelof. Kind of lost, wondering if we could ever wrap something up in a fully satisfying way again. This feels pretty close. We've talked a lot of Watchmen on this show, and a lot of Thomas Nagel, and this week we bring it all together in one big blue climax. Nagel's Mortal Questions: https://www.amazon.com/d...

I know it's a bit ironically absurd to act like this particular podcast episode really matters, but I still feel like it genuinely does. We're taking HBO's epic one season masterpiece, Watchmen, and combining it with Nagel's epic chapter on The Absurd from the masterpiece book Mortal Questions. I've been thinking about some version of this episode and the next one probably since we started Philoso...

::Totally out of place spur clinking noise:: Well, pardner, looks like it's just you and me. We can't both walk away from this cliche off and I've got a whole bag full of triple crosses so I can go all day. Wait...sorry, what was I saying? I got JJ Abrams brain for a second there. Here, let me just get back to something that makes any sense. We're discussing the Mandalorian and the philosophical a...

Young podawan, your training is incomplete! You must go back, to the natural state of episode one of the show and then listen back through, all while trying to retain the mind of a child. Definitely the only way to get trained, and also a great way to celebrate the new year! We're talking Empire Strikes back and how it's a great way to indoctrinate small children into Taoism.  Taoism: https://en.w...

And so it was that a young man was born in the desert and grew up to liberate his people from an oppressive empire and absolve them of their past sins. No, not JC, or Paul Muad'dib, this time his name is Luke Foreshadowing (imagine if Jesus's last name was Crosswalker). Yes, we're celebrating the end of Star Wars by going back to the beginning. We're covering A New Hope and using its heavy handed...

Hi all! Welcome to the 12th iteration of our Listener Thank You Q and As. Thank you all for supporting the show and if you like what you're hearing and have questions you want answered, you know what to do for next time. 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...

Hi all! Welcome to the 11th iteration of our Listener Thank You Q and As. Thank you all for supporting the show and if you like what you're hearing and have questions you want answered, you know what to do for next time. 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...

Another journey of epic proportions bringing us to a topic of epic proportions. Lurking in the back of Blindsight's narrative like a zombie space vampire robot are fundamental questions about who counts for moral consideration and whether morality even matters when dealing with beings like Rorschach. I feel like we're really getting to the heart of how screwed we are trying to answer these questio...

Well, we're really in the philosophical soup of it now. Out here at the edge of the universe, doing B&Es on a Chinese Room filled with scramblers, not knowing if our sentience is the only thing worth saving our a sad joke that should be shuffled offstage in the gentlest way possible. Or maybe it already has been and we're too zombie to even notice. We're into the middle section of Blindsight, whic...

Okay, well, lets see if I can convey some information to you through this absurd thing we call sentience, using this even more absurd thing called language. I'll never know if any of this is getting through, or even if there is a through to get to. If you're a zombie (and there's no reason to assume you're not) this should still work out just as well as if you're conscious. So you'll respond with...

Well, the level of meta connections involved in these show notes has gotten so interconnected it has formed a singularity of infinite metaness. If you're reading this you're sadly trapped in the meta and will not be able to escape until things get a bit more straightforward around here. We read A Subway named Mobius and Jeremiah Traeger joined us to discuss emergent properties and how absurd they...

::blows the conch shell of fan service:: In the spirt of social cohesion, we provide you with a triple dose of fan service. We present The Society, a much requested A- tweets in a bottle series, and we explain how it perfectly encapsulates the war of bro against bro that would arise in the absence of the social contract. To sweeten the deal, we even throw in some prisoners dilemmas and stag hunts...

My usual urge to be snarky here is tempered by concern that we're already about to get teabagged into some hot water for our treatment of the good Dr. Who. Please forgive us our Yankness, and maybe consider a more moderate position for your media output, somewhere between 6 episodes a show and 6,000. Feels like there's room for some middle ground there. Oh right, enough meta banter, we watched Dr....

An excerpt from Rorschach's rebooted journal: Viewers are afraid of HBO, for it has seen their true faces. The shows are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and boobies and when the drains finally scab over, all the bingers will drown. The accumulated filth of high budget, high concept sex and murder will foam up about their waists, and all the millennials and the boomers who's log...

Here's what's going to happen, I'm going to do a matrix like voiceover and you're going to listen, and when that's over, you're going to have even less of a clue what's going on. It all started with a box... We're doing primer! Y'all asked, and we finally looped enough times to find the timeline where we deliver! You get to hear Thomas explain the 60% of the plot he was able to follow and then we...

Now imagine an even greater and glorious afrofuturist podcast, where everyone gets equitable access to boxes. What price would you be willing to pay for that podcast?! Could you truly enjoy such a podcast knowing that those who challenge the podcast are summarily executed? What if we call their objections a disease that must be cut out at the root? Better or worse? This week we're doing the N.K. J...

Imagine a great and glorious golden podcast, filled with as many or as few boxes as your heart could desire. What price would you be willing to pay for that podcast? I don't mean on patreon, I'm talking cost in human suffering. Could you truly enjoy such a podcast knowing that it relied on the constant pain of one poor co-host at the hands of the other cohost? Would you continue to partake of the...

Hey friends, show notes guy here. This one's a feels show so I'm gonna play it straight. Aron Eisenberg, the actor who played Nog on DS9, passed away recently. He was a beloved member of the Star Trek community and we wanted to do a tribute episode to pay our respects. So, we brought on the perfect person to guide us through, Callie Wright. Besides being an amazing podcaster, Callie is very active...

And lo, Philip K Dick descended from the mountaintop, perspiring heavily, to convey to the world that there were super hot wicked smart mutant Ubermensches coming for their wimmins, and only by acting like total nazis can humans avoid being holocausted by the mutant nazis Ubermensches. If you're not impressed by a half hour podcast that makes the previous sentence comprehensible, I got nothing. Bi...

REEEEEEPPPPPOOOOO MEEEENNNNN!!! Sorry, still got those killer tunes stuck in my head from our NASA9 coverage of Repo! The Genetic Opera. Highly recommend for the original improvised music by Thomas. For this week we have the non-musical version, Repo Men starring Jude Law and Forest Whittaker. It's a much more banal kind of bad, but it's a great basis for discussing the ethics of buying and sellin...

Those who can't accept the state of reality are doomed to dissatisfaction. Those who can accept the state of reality are doomed to things being as they are. We're reading N.K. Jemisin's short story Cloud Dragon Skies, which I highly recommend you read carefully before the ep isode and then reread after the episode because we have a very interesting difference of experiences on how we read it that...