philosophy – News For Wombats

How quickly it fades

I am teaching Philosophy and Cover Songs as a first-year seminar this semester, and I worry that I don’t have any contemporary examples.

It’s weird, because I had lots of contemporary examples when I taught Philosophy and Popular Music a year and a half ago. New covers of Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck Babe” (itself just a year old) provided vivid examples of the way gender and meaning interact. Kendrick Lamar played the Superbowl halftime show, providing a vivid example of beefs in hip-hop. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter won the Grammy for best Country album, providing a great hook for thinking about genre and authenticity.

Now those are the recent past rather than now, and I don’t have anything current to replace them. It might not matter, since I had a student drop by office hours wanting to talk about 1970s classic rock.

But it’s strange to lose the sense of currency so quickly. That doesn’t happen when I teach 17th and 18th Century Philosophy.

Covers and collapse

Two small updates recently:

Posted a slightly revised version of my paper on covers for a contemporary debates volume.
My paper with Ron McClamrock on collapse phenomena in musical experience has been accepted at the Journal of Aesthetic Education. We’re told that it won’t appear in an issue until probably 2028 or ’29, but the draft is available now.

AI alignment

AI alignment is the project of making AI so that it won’t kill us or sell us out. A naïve conception adds a constitution or statement of principles, basically one more document to start the prompt for an LLM’s linguistic riffing. That makes the mistake of thinking that the danger is superintelligent or rogue AI, as if the AI are people who need to be raised to know the difference between right and wrong. The real danger is systems people don’t understand (used carelessly) or systems that people do understand (used maliciously). Like all problems of technology, it is a social problem that is simultaneously about people and about machines.

But really this post is just an excuse for the meme.

An AI alignment chart. Arranged in a 3x3 grid, after the fashion of the D&D Alignment meme.
Lawful Good: Commander Data (from Star Trek, played by Brent Spiner)
Lawful Neutral: Gort (from The Day The Earth Stood Still)
Lawful Evil: HAL 9000 (from 2001)
Neutral Good: K9 (from Doctor Who)
Neutral: the robot bartender (from Passengers, played by Michael Sheen)
Neutral Evil: Caine (from The Amazing Digital Circus)
Chaotic Good: Poe (from Altered Carbon, played by Chris Conner)
Chaotic Neutral: Bender (from Futurama)
Chaotic Evil: Lore (from Star Trek, played by Brent Spiner) — AI Alignment chart

On AI at the APA

Over at the blog of the American Philosophical Association, I rant a bit about how using chatbots shirks the work of philosophical writing and reading. You can read it over there (by clicking the link) or here (below the fold).

It’s part of the APA’s AI and Teaching series. Thanks to Will Fraker, who edits the series, for some helpful pushback on bits here and there.

Back on track

In contemporary music, the recorded track is the musical object that listeners encounter the most. Some philosophers, like Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, have taken this to mean that the track is the work of art in contemporary music. Evidence for this is the importance that many musicians put on production of the track. So much so that producers become important contributors to the musical product.

Other philosophers, like Dan Burkett, Chris Bartel, and myself, have argued that song and performance are also works worthy of aesthetic attention. So there’s a plurality of works associated with every particular record.

In a recent interview with Rick Beato, the pioneering producer Todd Rundgren reflected on the importance of the track.¹ He doesn’t side either with the track-centric view or with open-ended pluralism.

Always a good idea

I am teaching 17th&18th Century Philosophy this semester for the first time in a while. This week was my favorite bit of the course: Berkeley’s argument for idealism.

It’s a short, deductively valid argument from tempting premises, to the conclusion that the whole sensible world is just ideas. It invites a kind of wonder at how thoughts can fit together.

Turing cycles

In a short article at Nature, Eddy Keming Chen, Mikhail Belkin, Leon Bergen, and Dave Danks argue that current AI has general intelligence.² I think that their argument goes wrong in some of the details, but they deal with some issues very quickly.³ On reflection, I think my bigger problem is not with their argument but with their question itself.

Citing “Injustice”

My paper with Emmie Malone, Popular Music and Art-interpretive Injustice, has appeared in a recent issue of Inquiry. Here’s a sentence from the conclusion, which can serve as a pull quote:

We hope the examples we have given make an initial case for adding to the already crowded field of philosophical terms that take the form ‘some adjective injustice.’

A draft and a fragment

Today I posted a new draft, coauthored with Ron McClamrock: Reflections on popular music and collapse phenomena

Norms of science in present times

Last week I taught an essay by sociologist Robert Merton which I first read almost 30 years ago. Originally published in 1942, the essay is about the institutional norms of science in the context of broader society. He identifies several norms of science and suggests that they fit with the norms democracy.⁴

Although I have taught it something like 20 times before, when reading it through this semester, the opening paragraph hit me with a currency that it has never had before.