I think our first ethical priority is to stop doing harm, and right now in our factory farms billions of non-human animals are being treated in ways that if our victims were human, we would get the perpetrators locked up for life. And the sentience (and what it’s worth the sapience) of a pig…
The Antispeciesist Revolution [Original text found here] Speciesism. When is it ethically acceptable to harm another sentient being? On some fairly modest(1) assumptions, to harm or kill someone simply on the grounds they belong to a different gender, sexual orientation or ethnic group is unjustified. Such distinctions are real but ethically irrelevant. On the other…
While the world wakes up to the huge potential impacts of AI in the future, how will national worries about other nations gaining ‘AI Supremacy’ effect development? Especially development in AI Ethics & safety? Claire-AI is a new European confederation. Self described as Liking the ‘human-centered’ focus (albeit a bit vague), but where is their…
Magnus Vinding is the author of ‘Why We Should Go Vegan‘, Why “Happy Meat” Is Always Wrong, Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It, Reflections on Intelligence, You Are Them, and Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? The book on Effective Altruism can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CBMFF17/ Below is…
The topic of is controversial (and often misrepresented); it is considered by many to be repugnant – provocative questions arise like “who’s morals?”, “who are the ones to be morally enhanced?”, “will it be compulsory?”, “won’t taking a morality pill decrease the value of the intended morality if it skips the difficult process we normally…
I grew up wondering about the nature of alien life, what it might look like, what they might do, and whether we will discover any time soon. Though aside from a number of conspiracy theories, and conjecture on Tabby’s Star, so far we have not discovered any signs of life out there in the cosmos….
Magician James Randi (known as ‘The Amazing Randi’) has spent the bulk of his career debunking the claims of self-proclaimed psychics and paranormalists. Randi has an international reputation as a magician and escape artist, but he is perhaps best known as the world’s most tireless investigator and de-mystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. The Amazing…
A technology designed to preserve synapses across the whole brain of a large mammal is successful – covered in this interview with Keith Wiley, Fellow of the Brain Preservation Foundation. (see below) In an announcement from the Brain Preservation Foundation, it’s president Ken Hayworth writes: Using a combination of ultrafast glutaraldehyde fixation and very low…
Peter Singer discusses the new book ‘The Point Of View Of The Universe – Sidgwick & Contemporary Ethics’ (By Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer) He also discusses his reasons for changing his mind about preference utilitarianism. Buy the book here: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/97… Bart Schultz’s (University of Chicago) Review of the book: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/49215-he-poin… “Restoring Sidgwick…
Christof Koch (Allen Institute for Brain Science) discusses Shannon information and it’s theoretical limitations in explaining consciousness – Christof argues that we don’t need observers to have conscious experiences (other poeple, god, etc), the underlying assumptions behind traditional information theory assumes Shannon information – and that a big misconception about the structure of consciousness stems…
