New on The PEL Blog: Forget the walking dead. Philosophical zombies are much harder to kill off. This Halloween, prepare yourself for one of philosophy's strangest intuition pumps. partiallyexaminedlife.com/20…

Cormac McCarthy's killer keeps a promise he made to a dead man — and explains why. "Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact." On No Country for Old Men. The Partially Examined Life · PREVIEW-Episode 63: Existentialist Heroes in…

Wes worried it might be unethical to keep using Claude. So he asked it. The Partially Examined Life · Ep. 403: Are LLMs Actually Intelligent? (Part One)

Mark Twain thought you were a machine. Here's the test: where exactly do the words you're about to say come from? "There's a sense in which I'm learning at the same time you are what I'm going to say. I'm here for the ride." The Partially Examined Life · Ep. 284: Mark Twain’s…

Are LLMs actually intelligent? Could they become so, given current architecture? We read Raphaël Millière (@raphaelmilliere) and Cameron Buckner's(@cameronjbuckner) "A Philosophical Introduction to Language Models, Part I: Continuity With Classic Debates" (2023). partiallyexaminedlife.com/20…

New episode — Ep. 403: Are LLMs Actually Intelligent? (Part One) Are large language models just autocomplete? New episode: what LLMs mean for old debates about thought.

Nietzsche asks you to say yes to living your life over and over, forever. Dylan has a list of things he would rather not repeat — and the examples get grim fast. The Partially Examined Life · Ep. 214: More Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

Plato argues the better man is the one who does wrong on purpose. The steps get sillier as they go. The Partially Examined Life · Ep. 402: Plato Talks Homer: Hippias Minor and Ion (Part Two)

Wonder Woman 1984 as a thought experiment in personal identity: her dead lover returns in another man's body, and all she sees is 'the you that I love.' Which raises a question the movie does not ask. The Partially Examined Life · Ep. 261: Derek Parfit on Personal Identity…

Better to teach people to choose their own culture than to control it from above. But isn't teaching itself top down? The Partially Examined Life · Ep. 402: Plato Talks Homer: Hippias Minor and Ion (Part Two)