Jay Gupta

ExcerptRecent advances in the functional power of artificial intelligence (AI) have prompted an urgent warning from industry leaders and researchers concerning its “profound risks to society and humanity.”1 Their open letter is admirable not only for its succinct identification of said risks, which include the mass dissemination of misinformation, loss of jobs, and even the possible extinction of our species, but also for its clear normative framing of the problem: “Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”2.

Does truth matter to ethics? Ethical truth is a highly vexed notion. In addition to a virtual chaos of views concerning right versus wrong courses of action in applied issues, philosophers have encountered perennial difficulties in the attempt to theoretically specify what ethical truth could be. Recent arguments emphasize "ethical imagination" over ethical truth. I argue that ethical imagination is an important notion, but that an understanding of ethical truth is crucial to its growth. It is, however, important to be clear about what sort of truth we mean. I will argue that ethical truth is existential truth, and following Kierkegaard and others in the Existentialist tradition, I will argue that it has a subjective character. It will therefore be important to anticipate and answer worries about "mere subjectivity".

Occasionally you will hear it said that the violence perpetrated by organizations such as Al Qaeda is “nihilistic.” The senses of the term as thus employed seem to be largely intuitive, and involve a cluster of notions. The journalist and pundit Christopher Hitchens, for example, offers up such descriptions as “sinister grandiosity,” “pointless nastiness,” and “the tactic of demanding the impossible and demanding it at gun- point.”1 The idea is that contrary to the revolutionary, idealist rhetoric of those enacting the violence, there is something hollow, cruel, and irratio- nal at the center of such actions. This intuitive application of the term “nihilistic” to organizations such as Al Qaeda has substantial merit, and it is in fact possible to specify a more detailed philosophical and psycholog- ical basis to the concept.2 A properly elaborated concept of nihilism is of considerable interpretive utility where some of the familiar socio-political concepts like “colonialism,” “globalization,” and the like have demon- strable shortcomings. Hegel and Nietzsche have, in separate ways, devel- oped the sort of philosophical and psychological basis to the notion of nihilism as discussed here.

This study develops a particular interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and extends it to contemporary philosophical concerns. I claim that the Phenomenology is a critique of an epistemic concept, 'consciousness', and that the Phenomenology should therefore be viewed generally as a critique of mentalism. 'Mentalism' refers to both a body of beliefs and certain habits of thought that presuppose the subjectivity of mind, and that picture mind and mental items as standing in a problematic relation to what is taken to be the objectivity of reality. I claim that the interpretation of Hegel as a critic of mentalism clarifies Hegel's overall systematic intentions, and therefore clarifies the relation of the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic. ;I argue that the reading of Hegel that is developed here is relevant to contemporary philosophy. I examine works by John McDowell, Robert Brandom, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I draw analogies between Hegel and the later Wittgenstein, who I claim was also a critic of mentalism. I argue that insofar as Hegel and Wittgenstein are critics of mentalism, it is a significant error to read either of them as espousing any form of idealism