I'm just about to finish Susan Schneider's excellent new anthology "Science Fiction and Philosophy" (2009), skipping some articles on ethics and poli-sci in science-fiction that just aren't my cup of tea right now. There's much to say, but I think I'll investigate two areas further.
One is "patternism," not in the biblical sense but rather within philosophy of mind. Schneider tries to reject a version of patternism held by Kurzweil, Bostrom and other transhumanists: that the human mind is definable in terms of a pattern through time, a semi-materialist, emergentist solution to David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness. I'm finding her rebuttal unconvincing, though so are most transhumanist theses from a philosophical standpoint. I'm afraid this might turn out to be a very superficial and hollow (shallow?) debate and I should just write it off to "this is not their field" and go back to Stephen Stich and Jaegwon Kim.
The other interesting area is the doomsday argument, suggested by Brandon Carter and laid out by John Leslie and (among others) Paul Davies and again Nick Bostrom. It claims that the extinction of human kind is likely to happen sooner rather than later merely on a statistical basis. Like all of cosmology, it is far too speculative for me to find interesting for more than a few hours... but the anthropic principle was my "first love," the argument that first led me to philosophy in college, then framed in a discussion of the (f)utility of SETI and the Drake equation... so I might just pursue this line of thinking a bit more. I'm just not sure what to make of Nick Bostrom. At times he sounds like a perfect idiot, but at others he's quite remarkable. That he holds a teaching post at Oxford sure does weigh in his favor, but... yeah. Suspending judgment. I do that (too) well.
More coming soon. Meanwhile, a picture for your enjoyment. This is SO me. Scarily.
(credit: http://graphjam.com/upcoming/?pid=17613)
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