Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

[…] we can legitimately tell others that, unless they are going to make an adequate effort to be safe, they can’t be around us. Insofar as the government is supposed to protect individuals’ rights to their lives and […]

In reply to Roderick T. Long. I must say, concerning extraterrestrial intelligence, I do find it hard to conceive without at least supposing it coming from cellular life, gone to multicellular, gone to excitable cellular systems such as muscle and neur…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. I like the film “Shape of Water” a lot. Not only does it have another endlessly appealing rendition of ‘beauty and the beast’ but it has one ponder the leaving of one’s whole human world for l…

I have a good sense of all of those sci-fi works you mention, Roderick, through a set of assiduous readings done on Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. Though I couldn’t pretend to tell you anything of substance about their contents, my sense is that they’…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. But the prospect of meeting actual extraterrestrial intelligence is also important for our self-understanding. How much of rational agency is universal across rational agents, and how much is specific to our biology and e…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. Think, for example, of three novels by H. G. Wells : The War of the Worlds, The Wonderful Visit, and The Sea-Lady. They detail human encounters with Martian invaders, an angel, and a mermaid, respectively. But they&#8217…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. Likewise, although stories about meeting extraterrestrials ARE in part about the possibility of meeting extraterrestrials in real life (which after all is a genuine possibility), they’re not JUST about that. They&#8…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of w…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. I count with that same defectiveness any stories engaging beyond-nature intelligence, like from heaven. It’s cheap. People’s routine talk, in stories or not, of a quest to find extraterrestrial intelligence &#8…

In reply to Roderick T. Long. Re Mengele, there’s a related dispute among scholars of Plato and Aristotle as to whether they conceive of medicine as a value-neutral skill that becomes valuable only when used wisely (“the physician who is be…