Past Present Future I’ve only just started listening to this program, which is hosted by English academic David Runciman, which explores the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. I’m not quite sure why, but I found myself listening to Live Film Special: Never Let Me Go with Adam Rutherford. The episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Regent Street Cinema in London where David talks to the geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about Mark Romanek’s 2010 film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. This is the second podcast I’ve heard about Never Let Me Go (the earlier one was in Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett’s The Book Club podcast) and it certainly seems that the book is standing the test of time well, given that it was written 20 years ago.
The History of Singapore Episode 4: A New Hope There were waves of decolonization. In the New World, starting with United States independence in the 1770s, the fall-out from the French revolution and the spread of independence through the Spanish colonies, especially in South America. Britain stood to benefit from this. In the Old World the rise of nationalism arose as ‘imagined communities’ because people believed in their sense of nation. After World War I empires collapsed, leading to ethnic diasporas. However, as P. J. Thum warns us (repeatedly) in this podcast, decolonization always leads to new repression.He suggests that new nations become oppressive themselves for those who do not fit into the new, independent nation, and that democracy is the only way to stop becoming an empire.
The Philosophers Zone I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about AI in preparation for a talk I’m giving at my Unitarian fellowship. Sentience (8 November 2024) features Jonathan Birch, Professor of Philosophy and Principal Investigator on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, London School of Economics. He distinguishes between sentience and consciousness. Sentience he sees as the capacity to have experiences with a positive or negative quality (e.g. pain, frustration, pleasure). Consciousness he defines more in terms of the immediate raw experience of the present moment, with more sophisticated reflection and conscious thoughts about experience; understanding oneself as a being that exists in time and has a future. He does not believe that AI is sentient yet, but he does not discount the possibility that it might be in the future. He pities AI if it does become sentient, because humans don’t have a good track record for treating sentient beings ell.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 