Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Risking human extinction
by Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member John Leslie, 1999. Abstract Of all humans so far, roughly ten per cent are alive with you and me. If human extinction occurred soon, our position in population history would have been fairly ordinary. Paper What chance has the human race of surviving the coming century, and perhaps further centuries? Before continuing this catalogue of possible disasters, let me mention that my recent book in the area [1], although it bears the potentially alarming title The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, is actually fairly optimistic. If intelligent life will span the universe living for trillions of years, what are the odds that we would be part of the 0.00000000001 per cent of intelligent life that is stuck living on just one rock instead of being part of an interstellar civilization?
50 Things You Need To Give Up Today
When you stop chasing the wrong things, you give the right things a chance to catch you. So starting today… Give up trying to be perfect. – The real world doesn’t reward perfectionists, it rewards people who get things done. Read Getting Things Done.Give up comparing yourself to others. – The only person you are competing against is yourself.Give up dwelling on the past or worrying too much about the future. – Right now is the only moment guaranteed to you. And remember, mistakes make us human, failures help us grow, hope keeps us going and love is the reason we’re alive. Photo by: Ai-lueh Chen Related 60 Empowering Quotes to Help You Get Things Done Here are 60 quotes gathered from our sister site, Everyday Life Lessons, to empower you to take action, navigate through life’s challenges, and get things done. July 27, 2012 In "Aspirations" 10 Things You Must Give Up to Be Successful “Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” June 4, 2012
Logical Paradoxes
9 Ways Humanity Could Bring About Its Own Destruction
It all started with David Chalmer's various thought experiments concerning qualia and something called philosophical zombies: A p-zombie is essentially a creature that in all ways appears to be conscious, but isn't really conscious. Chalmers proposed a thought experiment where the inputs an outputs of a growing number of neurons in a person's skull are gradually routed into a growing collection of artificial neurons. The person can then try switching back and forth at any level of replacement. Chalmers asks will the person at any point notice any change in their experience of sensations as they keep pressing this switch? If this would happen, if a person's qualia change, then Chalmers says we've overlooked something and consciousness is not being copied or duplicated. The key is that it only depends on a person's subjective experiences. I'm a mechanist and physicalist.
Fred Guterl: 8 Ways Humans Could Cause Our Own Extinction
Doomsayers come, and they go. In the 18th century, Thomas Malthus predicted that the human population would outpace its ability to feed itself. Paul Erlich picked up that theme in the 1960s, but since then the world population has doubled. So what has changed? Our own success as a species has created new a terrifying risks that didn't exist a few decades ago. No single one of these issues is necessarily a world ender. In the book The Fate of the Species [Bloombury, $25.99] I delve into what these risks are. The meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago shows how dramatic an extinction event can be. One of the biggest cyber-warfare successes of the past few years was Stuxnet, the computer virus, thought to have been conceived by Israeli and U.S. intelligence, that damaged Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment facilities in 2010. Cyber attacks
Robert Gibbs attacks the fringe losers of the left - Glenn Greenwald
But Robert Gibbs — in one of the most petulant, self-pitying outbursts seen from a top political official in recent memory, half derived from a paranoid Richard Nixon rant and the other half from a Sean Hannity/Sarah Palin caricature of The Far Left — is here to tell you that the real reason you’re dissatisfied with the President is because you’re a fringe, ideological, Leftist extremist ingrate who needs drug counseling: The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity. During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough. So, to recap: (1) The Professional Left are totally irrelevant losers who speak for absolutely nobody, and certainly nobody in Real America who matters; but (2) they’re ruining everything for the White House!!! The Hill:
Logical Fallacies
