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The Man in the Arena Razor
It's easy to throw rocks from the sidelines—it's hard to step into the arena.
It's lonely and vulnerable, but it's where growth happens.
When faced with two paths, choose the path that puts you in the arena—choose the path with real skin in the game.
“Razors” Are Rules of Th...
@SahilBloom on Twitter
If you were at a cocktail party and there were both “normal” humans and zombies, how would you tell the difference? Perhaps this sounds like a cocktail party you have attended. Many people answer this question by saying they would interrogate individuals they wished to assess about their emotional reactions to events and ideas. A zombie, they believe, would betray its lack of subjective experience through a deficiency in certain types of emotional responses. But an answer along these lines simply fails to appreciate the assumptions of the thought experiment. If we encountered an unemotional person (such as an individual with certain emotional deficits, as is common in certain types of autism) or an avatar or a robot that was not convincing as an emotional human being, then that entity is not a zombie. Remember: According to Chalmers’s assumption, a zombie is completely normal in his ability to respond, including the ability to react emotionally; he is just lacking subjective experience. The bottom line is that there is no way to identify a zombie, because by definition there is no apparent indication of his zombie nature in his behavior. So is this a distinction without a difference?
How to Create a Mind
Ray Kurzweil
If a person lives a long, healthy, pleasurable, and stimulating life, then how much money the Joneses earn, how big their house is, and how many cars they drive are morally irrelevant. Frankfurt writes, “From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”
Enlightenment Now
Steven Pinker
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