Philosophical Reading

I’d characterize black mirror as half twilight zone, half drunk glaswegian in a room positing hypotheticals like “what if you had to charge your dog instead of walk it” while the netflix writers take notes.

Does draw some thematic elements from the genre, but it’s approaching parody in how those themes are handled.

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Acknowledged, you deserve a free beer.

“wot if facebook was in real life”

“wot if your computer knew your name”

“wot if your game character had a mind of its own”

“wot if there was uber reviews for everyfing”

“wot if VR made you kill people”

“wot if reality tv was a religion”

“wot if your gran came back as a mechanoid”

It’s like babie’s first consequences of tech thinkie time

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:fire:

Giving Language, Truth, and Logic a re-read since it’s been a while, highly recommended if you want to read the mistakes of a very smart man. Approx 50 years after he wrote this he denounced it, but it’s still a great read and it’s a good exercise to find what’s wrong with it.

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I wrote a philosophical rambling here today as well.

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Lots of psychological insights in this one.

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This book has been used to teach business ethics
“Seek mutually beneficial relationships”


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Examine what it means to be human as taught by an intelligent talking gorilla.


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This is my current read. I am taking my time, because it is such an important book.

The bad news from Sally Kohn: We all hate, and if we think we don’t, we’re lying to ourselves. Kohn’s good news: With fearless scrutiny of our personal histories, motives and prejudices, and by connecting with those who are different, we can hate less. To launch this growth, she insists, we must be willing to admit to the biases that fuel our hatred.

Washington Post book review

Learn to love your trolls, so one can understand them and then find one point of common ground.
Only then one can start to heal the hatred that pervades the internet.

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Seems like an interesting read. Should be included in my holocaust studies section of my library.

Not bad. Sort of sounds like MLK’s message about loving our enemies.

bell hooks (sic) has some great work on that subject as well. I’d recommend any of her work.

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I am not done reading the whole book yet but I learned a good method yesterday. If someone is arguing AT you try this:

“While I don’t agree with everything you said, point #17 makes sense. Tell me more about that.”

It shows you are listening and willing to learn and thus compromise.
Maybe the other person will be willing to listen, learn and compromise also.

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Sure, that might work in a respectful environment. In regards to political argumentation I always try to find an “out”. For example if a bully is just going on and on and pressuring everyone with his ‘brilliant’ opinions during a company outing or event, I will wait for the right moment to strike and expose a simple lapse in his logic and embarrass him in front of everyone. After that I simply announce to the audience that I am ordering a round of drinks to lighten the mood and get everyone on my side so I won’t be stuck talking to him for the rest of the night.

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
The Tell-Tale Brain by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius ripped and regrowed the roots of my being, not the pure philosophy, but the human context of it

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This thread is a treasure chest, awesome!
Here you go:
Guns, Germs, and Steel (text only version)
Also, I second this

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https://ibmandtheholocaust.com/

Has anyone read this one?

This one is good if you want an overview of modernity for greater context without trying to piece it all together yourself from dozens of dense, translated books.

The author is a Marxist, but the books is (I would say) an apolitical account of how modernity developed. I think it would be a good precursor to The Gulag Archipelago (mentioned earlier by @SesameStreetThug) since it provides some context for the Communist Manifesto.

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Interesting. Yeah, it seems to be the more work does that the more I want to put it down because I don’t have access to some of the obscure texts they reference.

I haven’t tackled political texts recently but this will be on the top of my list when I return to it.

The majority of books written by Greg Egan.
He is on the diamond end of the sci-fi hardness scale, his books feature transhumanism, mind uploading, acorporeality, generating minds from random noise, mind cloning and more.
Arguably his books are not philosophy, per se, but I would still recommend the vast majority of them, and they do prod you to think about philosophical questions.
Special recommendations for Diaspora, Schild’s Ladder, Permutation City and Distress. (not sure if they are still in print, if not you can grab an EPUB copy from Libgen (dot) io)

Also might add some novels from Peter Watts here, although I have my reservations about his works, they have been memorable.

PS: Amazon link for Diaspora

Even an anti philosophy stance is still a philosophy, it is the only true recursive discipline!

So he’s on the Hardness scale, I’ll have to check this out. I was thinking about picking up Dune the other day, do you like his scifi works?