I have spent some time to answer my own questions. But I have neither the motivation nor the time and maybe not even the intelligence to learn and to understand the ideas most philosophers.
Answering what is philosphy is philosophy. And thus, IMO, I am right.
> Philosophy is what academics who work in philosophy departments do.
IMO this is too restrictive. You reduce philosophy to a job title or diploma title. I guess, many philosophers would not agree with this definition.
> I make a strong counterclaim: all progress in philosophy comes from progress in the hard sciences.
I agree that new knowledge and new abilities lead to new ideas and questions and concerns.
But philosophy is not limited to physics or chemistry; IMO the only hard sciences.
Physics and chemistry are hard sections within an open ended spectrum:
- The begin (1D view) or lower level layer (3D view) are unknown. Is string theory correct ? What are strings made of ? Is mental conscious the lower layer ? Is all a simulation ?
- The end (1D view) or upper layer (3D view) are soft science. Like biology, sociology, psychology, economics.
IMO, progress in philosophy leads to science. First you think and imagine (philosophy) then you try and know and have made progress (science).
From the article: Yes (with qualification) and yes. Already in Republic (Plato again!) we have an argument—a clear and compelling rational argument—that even the highest political office should be open to women. The argument? List what it takes to be a good leader of the state, then note the conditions that distinguish the sexes. There just is zero overlap between the two lists.
IMO there is not much of interest in philosophy regarding AI (except for the thinking and imagination of AI engineers). AI is still just computations as far as we know.
From the article: Almost all believe in consciousness and most don’t have a clue how to explain it, which is wisdom.
First: I had missed the part of your previous reply where you wrote that you too had downvoted my comment because of "my hubris". Unfortunately I read and replied too quickly because I had to leave. Now it is too late to correct my reply.
Second: Fortunately only few people need to introduce or enforce change to make big changes for all. Modern societies would have never happened if change was not imposed by a few on all.
Unfortunately climate change is a bad problem because it is also a political problem because appropriate technology might not be available and imposed soon enough. Politics are determined by the stupid ignorant democratic majority. Even in dictatorships like China because a dictatorship must be tolerated by the democratic majority.
Fortunately, the stupid ignorant democratic majority could die and leave the surviving elite (not a money based elite of billionaires) with a better society. Natural evolution.
IMO, relatively few humans will die because of climate change but many more other species will die out.
> "Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology."
> "If you look at current geopolitics, I don't think we're going to be getting an exponential improvement in human behavior any time soon."
> "That's why we need a quantum leap in technology like AI."
Again: I welcome a reduction of farm animals by 50% or 75%.
> because of lack resources
What resources of and on Earth are scarce in your opinion ?
Depending on skills and technology, they are not scarce for a world population of 10 billion humans or they are scarce with a world population of 1 human.
> and because of our mind-boggling stupidity, sheer arrogance and our inability to deal with our tribal instincts.
Yes, most societies worldwide are very insane. Obvious proofs: Wars and military and poverty in 2018. All elected and re-elected US presidents being evil mass murdering war criminals.
IMO, humanity is not so insane that humanity will die out. If people became vegan and current morality and practices and technology improved we could live in a biological paradise even with 10 billion people.
Improvements like cooperation instead of competition, waste treatment, recycling, no fossil fuel, no insane individual commuting every day because of flexibility, no insane transport of products, less waste of time and energy for needless production,...
I live in Belgium.
Do Belgians need butter from Ireland ? No.
Do Belgians need milk products transported around Europe ? No.
I studied agriculture at university so I know a little more than the average arrogant angry downvoter.
And I am in favor of transhumanism (e.g. machine body parts) in case somebody might read my previous comment in the future.
Good point, java-devel sounds like C++ headers and libraries and not like Java.
I do not contribute to the OpenJDK project or to the JVM either.
There are standard packages in the Java world: JRE (users) and JDK (java programmers).
The JDK is a standard set of tools and libraries related to using Java as program language. It is not a Linux distro or JDK distro specific set of libraries.
But as a Java developer I know and I care about the terms JRE and JDK that are used officially and on Windows and many Linux systems and MacOS. I was not aware of the Fedora package conventions.
And as I already wrote, I had most likely installed jdk-devel because, I guess, it is listed in yum and DNF-dragora. Maybe it was a bug in some Fedora related package tool. DNF-dragora had double entries for Java. Unfortunately I do not remember anymore the details.
Someone replied this to me:
"This is a fairly trivial problem to work around, although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for."
I guess that is way I tried "alternatives --config java" at the time.
In Ubuntu it is called openjdk-11-jre and openjdk-11-jdk.
With headless variants.
I am no system admin and the -dev or -devel convention suits the Unix and C world but maybe not the JVM or .net or nodejs worlds with their own standards and package managers.
Thanks. AFAIR I installed everything related to Java; maybe I made a mistake somewhere. I also tried to fix the problem with "alternatives --config java".
It is a problem if the default JDK is useless and the solution requires research on the internet. I had even enough patience to search for more than 15 minutes AFAIR.
I have been using Windows and other Linux distributions including Arch Linux for years and never had problems with the JDK.
I switched from Fedora 28 to Ubuntu because I could not make my IDE (IntelliJ, Netbeans, maybe Eclipse too) recognize the installed Fedora JDK (no valid JDK found). It seems that this has been a common problem for years.
Yes, there is evidence that psychedelics can be useful. I agree that they can be useful to give a different perspective to quit a rut, as you wrote.
Still, according to experts and many anecdotes on reddit, psychedelics are very risky (unwanted bad effects) and not safe drugs and not miracle drugs.
The risk of bad short term and long term effects depends highly on the dosage and the personal mindset and the current environment. Nobody knows in advance how your brain will react.
I am no friend of drugs in general and psychedelics in particular.
It might work to get out of a rut but, IMO, the risks (what dosage?) are not worth it. Certainly not without professional assistance (not a shaman). The new rut might be much worse than the old rut.
This might be useful for interventions by medical experts. Like narcotics are useful for surgical interventions or antibiotics are useful against bacteria infections.
https://machineperson.org/existence.html#self-awareness
I have spent some time to answer my own questions. But I have neither the motivation nor the time and maybe not even the intelligence to learn and to understand the ideas most philosophers.