Tired of being told that philosophy was just opinions, one guy set about collecting all the “philosophical facts” he could find. He got 200

Philosophy has a reputation for discussing everything and the truth is that it is a reputation that has been hard-earned. However, it is not a matter of saying the first thing that comes to mind. It’s not even a matter of opinions, no matter how informed they may be. At least, that is the opinion of philosopher Bryan Frances. In fact, Frances is convinced that, in reality, philosophers only discuss details and minutiae: in substance, they agree on almost everything. But of course, it is not enough to say it: it must be defended. So he began to do something strange for a philosopher: instead of arguing it, he began to compile this enormous core of shared truths. That is, to make a list. But let’s start at the beginning. Frances’s thesis is that, as I say, there is great agreement among philosophers about the truth of many substantive claims. What’s more, he is convinced that, in philosophy, there is progress equivalent to that of any other science. That is, “based on facts.” The thing is that discipline — for better or worse — tends to revolve around the controversial. The curious thing is that he realized that not even the philosophers themselves were aware of this. And what a list… So, neither short nor lazy, he published ‘Philosophy as Fact-Based Discipline: 200 Philosophical Facts, published in Philosophical Studies‘: the list. A list of elementary truths pedagogically comparable to introductory science material. “It’s not the deepest,” but it’s (definitely) something cumulative and useful to understand. But, beyond that, it is also a way of reclaiming the discipline in a climate that repeatedly questions the role of the humanities in the body of knowledge. And what truths are those? Once we have made it clear that it is not about talking about deep truths (Does free will exist? Why being and not nothingness? etc…), the question becomes evident: what are they then? They are simpler things like, for example, what beliefs are (which come in many formats, they can be about almost anything or they can exist even if we are not aware of them), what evidence is (which are not just tests), what biases, emotions or faith are. It’s very interesting review the 200 facts because there are very interesting things about things that one had not asked: does believing in something make it true? Does the evidence have direction? Is suspending the trial a rational thing to do? Thought in action. But beyond the facts themselves, Frances’ idea is intelligent because it points to something singular: there is cognitive progress, an ultimate structure of reality to describe, a philosophical ‘holy grail’ to find. It’s not much, I admit. But the idea that the universe is not the horrible chaos it seems is (in its own way) comforting. Image | Alan Dela Cruz In Xataka | “A place of joy with pain”: the phrase that summarizes the Aztec philosophy to be happier in this life

Sam Altman is laying the foundations for post-humanism as the philosophical current of the AI ​​era. It’s not good news

“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life and all the food you consume during that time to become intelligent.” These two sentences were enough delivered at the India-AI Impact Summit 2026to set the networks on fire. But Sam Altman didn’t stop there. “Not only that, it took the widespread evolution of the 100 billion people who have lived and who learned not to be eaten by predators and to understand science and so on to create you,” continuous. Therefore, the criticism about “how much energy is needed to train an AI model” They are extremely unfair. And it’s curious. The most “unpopular” technology in history… Not because it is not understandable (or even because it is not reasonable). It’s funny because Altman and the rest of the AI ​​bigwigs don’t seem to realize that they are making every effort to make AI extremely successful. unpopular among the population. Maybe it’s nothing new. Maybe it’s something similar to what happened with fabric making machine salesmen in the midst of the industrial revolution. Maybe it’s something similar to what motivated movements like that of the Luddites and the reason why dozens of historians rewrote their history as that of poor technophobes. What has changed is that we are now broadcasting it to the entire world — and live and direct. And very insistently. Although the discourse they use to ‘sell’ their technology to investors, technical elites and politicians around the world can only be understood at a public level as a very sophisticated way of saying: ‘human things get in the way.’ Or not so sophisticated, of course. …that is finding its “public” Team Mirai Over the last few years, in fact, the process has become less and less subtle and more blatant. It is not something that is limited to AI companiesbut it is an increasingly clear phenomenon: people speaking to a convinced hyperminority while alienating the vast social majority. And artificial intelligence is the tip of the spear. And it wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t something else: the current great technological battle is not only technical, it is ideological, philosophical and of values. For the social changes they hope to be successful, it is necessary to move the ‘Overton window’ as quickly as possible. And it’s working. The best example is Japan: in the last election, Team Mirai ran. As Antonio Ortiz explainedis “a new Japanese party founded by engineers” with “a fairly accelerationist program: government chatbots and databases for transparency of donations and to make politics ‘faster’, reduce paperwork and achieve an increase in productivity to compensate for the labor shortage.” Well, those people just got 11 seats and 7% of the votes. In a way, two apparently contradictory processes are two legs of the same phenomenon: the discourse becomes more explicit as the population becomes more related. And changing the world is also (and above all) changing ideas. We tend to have a softened vision of social changes. However, there are several psychosocial processes that are usually key for these to be carried out: delegitimization (“what ruled until now no longer deserves obedience”), demonization (“those who hold these ideas are evil”) and dehumanization (“they are not human, moral norms do not apply”). You don’t always get to the last step, but some degree of moral disconnection it is necessary. And the artificial intelligence revolution (and all the tensions it brings) continues to show similar signs: for years, accelerationist and posthumanist groups have been ‘operating’ in the shadow of the great social and political discourses. Now, however, they face it: as the AGI approaches, everything we thought we knew (on a social, economic or institutional level) is useless. Or so they try to make us believe. And the best example is that of Altman: the CEO of OpenAI does not have to declare himself a posthumanist to lay the rhetorical tiles through which these discourses will travel: when you convert the human into energy cost comparable to an AI model, you are lowering the bar to justify “anything” in the name of efficiency But what exactly is all this talk about posthumanisms and accelerationists? Although they are two different philosophical traditions (posthumanism questions classical humanism and lays the foundations for its improvement, while accelerationism is a family of ideologies that propose accelerating certain dynamics – technological or capitalist to provoke radical social change), the truth is that in recent years they have ended up coming together. And, beyond that, they are providing the mental framework that allows certain decisions to be made that, in other scenarios, would not be socially acceptable. When the human being ceases to be the ideological ‘center’ of the system, acceleration becomes the great political principle and the AGI becomes the utopian destiny of a post-scarcity society (the modern equivalent of the Christian heaven or the Marxist classless society), everything that opposes this — rightly or wrongly — will become old, outdated or outdated. Altman’s statements in India are not an accident: they are part of the delegitimization of the current system of values ​​that the next revolution needs and, as we see, is already underway. Image | Xataka In Xataka | “A place of joy with pain”: the phrase that summarizes the Aztec philosophy to be happier in this life

There are people using AI to “invent” their own memories from photographs. And that has opened a philosophical debate

In the photo the kid smiles, abholly happy. His mother, also smiling, hugs him while looking at the camera. The photo could be that of any of us with our mother, but with this happens one thing: that an AI has made it a video. One that immediately has the potential to become a memory. A memory of lie. That photo shared it in x Alexis Ohanian, co -founder of Reddit, millionaire and entrepreneur. Ohanian – caught with Serena Williams since 2017 – told in that message how when he created that video innocently “I was not prepared for how I would make me feel this.” In his family they had no video camera, so he never had a video with his mother. So almost without thinking he used that photo in the newly released Midjourney video generator so that from it generated a video for AI. The result left him astonished. “This is how she hugged me,” he explained. “I have seen it 50 times again.” But with that message A great moral and philosophical debate was unleashed. One about how something like this can impact us individually and as a society. While Ohanian himself He defended himself Before those who criticized the idea (“I really don’t understand why you wouldn’t use AI for this”) others They explained to him that those memories were not real: “Creating a video for someone loved is not to create a memory of them. You are putting words they never said in their mouth.” As said Another user named Erich Thilow, “is (a memory). But seeing it will make it real in your memory. I am not a fan of something like that.” Other users took advantage of cinema as the center of the debate. A user named Vanillaelle shared A Harry Potter photogram revealing with a false memory of his parents in the mirror (which has inspired the image of this theme). Another user called Andro toward The analogy with ‘Matrix‘. In that movie, he explained, one to see her wondered why people would want to face reality. “Now he doesn’t have to ask him,” said said user. The era of false memories That new capacity of the generative AI Generate false memories It is disturbing, and it could well be part of that concept already studied in psychology. These lies memories did not happen or are the distortion of a real event, and according to experts, such as the American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, it is possible to induce them such as hypnosis or with techniques such as the essay: repetitions of an event that was confirmed as fantastic. Upon listening or visualizing the same event, the person can begin to remember as if it had really happened. That idea thrown by this psychologist also collects it Francisco Taberneroclinical psychologist in Puertollano (Ciudad Real). According to him “memories are usually quite distorted”, but for him there is no special risk in that type of process that converts a photo into a souvenir of lie: “The general experience of memory will be subjective and more or less the same we had. I do not think that a few seconds of movement change the memory that you already had. At the emotional level the memory is all emotion, what causes you remains the same as what you have told to the AI.” Loftus – criticized by the pseudoscientific concept he created, the “false memory syndrome” – published A study In this regard, together with Ira E. Hyman Jr., and both explained how “memory is always constructive. People create the past based on the information that remains in memory, in general knowledge, and on social demand to recall situations.” Ethical and moral issues are definitely huge, and to talk about them we wanted to contact more experts. Santiago Sánchez-Migallón (The von Neumann machine) It is defined as a “philosopher of AI” and is usual collaborator of Xataka. For him, “we must understand the emergence of a technology as an opportunity and no, a priori, as something perverse only because of the fact that he treats a delicate issue as, in this case, the death or authenticity of memories.” Sánchez-Migallón makes it clear that the first thing is to make technology safe and that the user “can differentiate true and false memories”, but assured this, this expert thinks that with this technology it would be possible to help “erase traumas” and even imagine a not very distant future in which it was possible to gain procedural memories or skills: “Could we record in our brain the ability to play the piano or talk?” Darío Benítezpsychologist and co -founder of PSYCHOFLIX and of the podcast Validlyit is optimistic with AI, but you see “few or no advantage” to this type of application because “if you are reliving an image of a loved one you expose yourself to an emotion that you did not expect and that can rekindle a type of duel that you had already prosecuted.” Something like that, he indicates, can change the perception of your values ​​because this type of lies memories “can make you feel that you lived them and that that effectively happened.” It is like Ohanian’s own example. For Benítez it could happen that in the video generated the mother looked at the child with a subtle disdain and generated a reaction of the type “yes, it is true that my mother did not treat me at all well”, thus generating a hallucination that connects with another idea that perhaps had of her past, which in that case would be of the type “my childhood was not so good.” All that “would even more entangle things,” says this psychologist. The danger of being able to mold memory An technology also has another danger that we have already perceived in many other technological areas. Especially in mobile phones and social networks, which tend to isolate us and catch us in the doomscrolling. With these videos created by generative, “it could be … Read more

The philosophical reason why Ed Sheeran put his mobile in a drawer and forgot about him

One of the main objectives of social networks and infinity scroll It is to ensure that users remain as much time as possible on their platforms, and they have really succeeded. The attention we dedicate To slide the screen already rivals the time we spend looking beyond 40 cm that, most likely, separate you from your smartphone at this time. The singer Ed Sheeran He went Yesterday as guest at ‘The revolt ‘ of RTVE. During the interview he surprised Broncano himself revealing that I had no mobile. Confession could sound as an extravagance more than one superstar of music that can allow an assistant to manage his calls and social profiles. However, their arguments were much more philosophical and consistent with the Hyperconnection times That we have to live. It is not being disconnected, it is to reconnect again During his interview, the British singer acknowledged that he has no smartphone, but he remains communicated by responding, attending to Instagram and even making voice calls Through facetime. However, instead of using a smartphone that can always carry in your pocket, Sheeran Use an iPad. “That way, people do not expect an instant response, but if they really need you, they can call you for facetime. With the iPad you can do everything,” said the singer. However, the tablet format It does not allow you to always carry it on topas the smartphone allows. In this way, he prevents his hands instinctively from instinctively getting his pocket every time a dead time space arises. “I realized that when I went out with my wife and got up to the bathroom, I took her mobile instantly. But I think getting bored is good for the brain because you start thinking about things,” Sheeran said. The superstar of music recognized that, most likely, I would not have written many of his songs If he had had a mobile because, he simply got bored and his brain found enough space to launch his creative capacity. Sheeran concluded by ensuring that “being boring is the best for your creativity, because your brain starts thinking. If you are always with something, you can’t create.” With this simple explanation, the singer materialized on stage the arguments of the book ‘The society of fatigue’from the South Korean philosopher and writer by-Chul Han, recently prize with the Princess of Asturias of Communication and Humanities. Doing nothing is very complicated In ‘The society of fatigue’They have claimed contemplative life as a way to reconnect with the essence of what makes us humans, pointing to the Constant demand for attention that smartphones claim as the main enemy of mental calmhappiness and creativity. In his book, the philosopher ensures that the constant bombardment of stimuli To which we submit to our brains, it prevents it from stopping to unite the points that connect abstract ideas and knowledge, limiting our ability to create and solve problems. Beyond the philosophical approaches on the overexposure to dopamine that provide the social networks and the use of smartphonescience is also put on the side of Ed Sheeran and Byung-Chul Han: boring awakens creativity of the brain. An investigation from the Northwestern University in the US, simply do nothing or perform monotonous and repetitive tasks that induce a mental state similar to trance, How to scrub dishes or fold socks, allow the brain to enter “diffuse thought” mode. This state allows the connections between ideas to be carried out without the pressure of attending external stimuli. The scientific evidence has recorded that boredom is perceived as a negative sensationas if doing nothing outside of being an unproductive person or without ambition to improve. The researchers They detected that these negative emotions generate states of mental anxiety when the first glimpses of inactivity appear, inciting us to fill that void With content. The mobile is always at hand to fulfill that mission. Assume that Boring is not negative and limit overestimulation are the first steps to allow the brain Take a small vacation and begin to “play” at the subconscious level. The results do not take to appear in the form of Bright ideas while showering or simply when You allow the brain to wander With the losing gaze in infinity. Paradoxically, the best way to be productive and reduce stress will be get nothing. In Xataka | “Doing nothing” is a great technique to improve your productivity. Neuroscience is clear Image | RTVE, Unspash (Ben Collins, Vitolda Klein)

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.