Stop Talking Nonsense open.substack.com/pub/tedtilli...

Stegenga's epistemologically naive quest for value free science is littered with value judgments. His test for "good" science is that it's justified & informative. Both such tests are value judgments. Stegenga's every sentence breathes his belief in "objective truth." As a scientist, he should know

Here's one of the best illustrations of male/female biological and psychological sex differences you can find. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/m...

Peter Singer claims his incoherent utilitarian moral philosophy is objectively true “from the point of view of the universe.” His ideas are good for farm animals but would have dreadful authoritarian consequences for human beings. tedtillichfarris.substack.com/p/peter-sing...

Just as soon as he sobers up. www.cnbc.com/2026/04/19/k...

If Kash Patel is really MIA, let's all hope he is never found.

This a great talk with Pablo Calvo who is raising all the right questions about plant consciousness. I discuss his views and the ethical and other questions it raises for vegetarians in my latest substack here: tedtillichfarris.substack.com/p/something-...

Lovely talk with @susanamonso.com. There is no question that many animals know about death. Mourning behavior is commonly observed in dolphins, whales, elephants & apes. If herd animals didn't understand death & injury they would have no reason to run away from lions and tigers. Predators obviously

New Post today on the astounding obtuseness of philosophers and scientists on the ubiquitous nature of #consciousness in nonhuman animals.

Disappointing that @ericoliver.bsky.social does not seem up on current thinking on the self and asserts many outmoded ideas on the self as life force, or an entity inside a person like Dennett's "Homunculus". The self is just the biological organism you are. open.substack.com/pub/tedtilli...

My take on Eliezer Yudkowsky's response to the Sam Altman attacks and why he isn't responsible for them. The Spawn of Yudkowsky - Eliezer’s Interminable Tweet open.substack.com/pub/tedtilli...

Here's the Mean Old Meanie's argument why the concept of altruism is not only misunderstood but doesn't exist.

Good talk with Dr Morgan. He points out that women generally have less confidence than males, when delivering equal performance in tasks. Morgan doesn’t say so, but the reasons are obvious. Women are far more vulnerable than men & are judged socially by appearance. They face existential insecurity

Terence Deacon gets everything right here. Artificial intelligence isn't intelligence at all, it's simulated intelligence. AIs have no experience, bodies, interests or selves. Humans spend most of their time trying to navigate the world to achieve their own interests & desires. #AIs have no desires.

Thagard is a clear thinker who quickly and correctly disposes of the major theories of consciousness as bad theories. Global workspace theory can't explain experience, integrated information theory is computationally intractable, predictive processing is to narrow a theory. But Thagard then proposes

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I highly recommend this superb article by Jessica Riskin thoroughly debunking Robert Sapolsky's childish fairy tale theology of hard determinism.

A great talk with the brilliant and deeply thoughtful Jessica Riskin on the importance of several of Lamarck's often scorned but actually very useful ideas. For two great articles by Riskin, one refuting Pinker & the other shredding Robert Sapolsky's fairy tale determinism, see her contributor page.

Sloman naively overlooks the deep flaw in consequentialism. It tells you what the consequences are but absolutely does not tell you whether those consequences are "good" or "bad". To decide that you must make a value judgment, whether sacred or otherwise. Neither Deontology nor Consequentialism are

The poorly research article is linked here. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/a... It also refers to East Hampton as a "hamlet" something that has been rarely done since the 1960s & came from contemporaneous reports of Pollock's fatal car crash en route to patron Ossorio's cocktail party at The Creeks.

Art ignoramus? Amei Wallach's NY Times article suggesting that #LeeKrasner was "finally" getting equal billing with Pollock comes 45 years too late.The 1981 Krasner/Pollock exhibition at East Hampton's Guild Hall presumptuously organized by Krasner to give herself top billing over Pollock showed how

Understanding #Wittgenstein through a 3 page 1971 essay in the Village Voice. Thanks to @birchlse.bsky.social & @nigelwarburton.bsky.social for posting this remarkable Thomas Nagel piece on X. philpapers.org/archive/NAGW... I also recommend Anthony Gottlieb's superb 2025 short biography of LW.

#MichaelGraziano's reductionist view of humans as information processing machines is quasi-behaviorist, absurdly simplistic and wrong. Humans are not machines or computers. Nobody understands the mechanisms of animal consciousness. Humans do much more than process information. The brain doesn't even

Karlis means well but gets almost everything wrong. We help people because we value doing so. Those who don't won't except to gain praise for doing so. Capitalism doesn't cause lack of caring. It arises because people value their own interests. Everyone is different in how much they care for others.

Nice talk on how evolutionary theory has moved away from the narrow gene-centric theory to an extended evolutionary synthesis that accounts for development, epigenetic, environmental & cultural evolutionary factors. This is a topic @thedissenteryt.bsky.social knows well & he asks great questions!

There's only one problem with the predictive processing theory of consciousness that's taken over neuroscience. It's wrong. People don't go around predicting what will happen to them. When you go for a walk you don't "predict" there will be sidewalk under your feet. You just see that it's there.

Hannah Arendt on a bad hair day. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/b... Hannah Arendt was excoriated for pointing out the obvious fact that Nazis created a corporate bureaucracy of genocidal mass murder in which thoughtless middle class German bureaucrats could mindlessly participate while feeling nothing.

Excellent talk on animal consciousness with the forward thinking #KristinAndrews. Progress on animal consciousness was poisoned by behaviorist biases against animal consciousness. We know that consciousness is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. The very idea of "unconscious animals" is preposterous.

Nice talk. So far we have no examples of nonbiological consciousness. While Physicalism requires that consciousness has a mechanism,we have no remotely credible theory of such a mechanism. Thus any assertion that machine #consciousness can exist is either pure speculation or quasi-religious faith.

Thus spake Zarathustra: "Meow."

Epistemically naive Toronto philosopher Jennifer (no relation to Thomas) Nagel believes we only know what's true. She doesn't understand the word "knowledge". Many basic beliefs that people are certain they know are manifestly false & evidence free. There are no gods, panpsychism is nonsense,

Jennifer Nagel (no relation to Thomas) starts off on the wrong foot here by assuming that knowledge means knowledge of a fact that is true. This begs the question of how we know what is true by assuming it away. Nagel thinks anything we know is true. In fact "knowledge" includes untrue beliefs. For

Merry Christmas from the magnificent #Zarathustra Lord of all #cats and #kitties!

Great talk with Lucy's discoverer #DonaldJohanson. Among the tidbits: vegetariarian animals are dumb. It was the ability to eat meat that caused the evolution of humans from their vegetarian small brained antecedents. You have to be smart to catch animal prey. Per Johanson, humans emerged around

Unable to find a convenient window to fall from, Russian Lt. General Sarvarov had to resort to blowing himself up in his #Kia Sorrento. Sarvarov was apparently unhappy that as one of Russia's top generals he could only afford to drive a Kia Sorrento. Another Moscow case of justifiable suicide.

Religion is a social delusion used to promote cooperative communitarian bonds through rituals & a fictional utopian vision. #Religion, is thus a useful tool for authoritarian dictators seeking to muster group support for their rule. The one thing all religions have in common is that they are false.

Bringing wisdom to sex work. Great conversation with queer sex positive feminist Nina Hartley on men, women, philosophy and getting it on. And I've never seen Ricardo @thedissenteryt.bsky.social so giddy with happiness in any previous interview.

Peter Turchin, a Russian academic who wrote his thesis on beetles, was an NYU college student in 1980 when Reagan replaced Carter. 1980 marked the beginning of the greatest global economic expansion in the history of the world, leading to vast economic globalization and the emergence of Wall Street

This talk with Dan Hoyer is a perfect example of the kind of nonsense tossed around in leftist academia about the "evils of inequality". There are no examples of truly egalitarian civilizations anywhere in recorded history. The one thing societies and groups absolutely do not want is "equality".

#ElenaZiliotti's idea of meritocratic democracy is self contradictory and ultimately nonsensical. Democracies elect leaders that people like the most and the leaders they like are charismatic. A charismatic lear can be easily elected even if they are criminal narcissistic sociopaths. You can't merge

Clark’s use of the terms ‘prediction’ & ‘controlled hallucination’ have become non-explanatory buzz words in cognitive neuroscience. When we reach for our coffee we aren’t making any predictions, we’re just seeing where it is to grab it. No predictions are involved.

Trolley problems don’t present useful moral dilemmas. All trolley problems are unrealistic & leave out the main drivers of human behavior namely self-interest & the legal consequences of any actions taken. In the classic problem you have a choice between letting the trolley

One has to question whether the cognitive science of religion is a legitimate field at all.There is nothing special that distinguishes religion from other utopian belief systems or ideologies except that the utopia is reached after death. Longtermism is similarly a post death utopian philosophy.

Correct but the authors should also explain why the terms "AGI" and super-intelligence are simply utopian science fiction fantasy speculation and not actual things. People uncritically accept those TESCREAL buzzwords as if they actually existed or could exist and therefore require policy responses.

Social psychologist and neuroscientist Kristen Lindquist points out that the idea that the brain is "modular" is simply "untenable. " Brain modularity is one of those superficial conceptual buzzwords that come into fashion for awhile and then disappear as they lack a physical scientific basis.

Dick Cheney before he dicks you was always good advice. But now it's too late.

Perspectival realism discussed here by @michelamassimi.bsky.social is an interesting but complex approach that tries to deal with the problem of subjectivity by acknowledging that all knowledge comes from a perspective. Massimi though believes that communities offer a pluralistic perspectives of

Why would wealthy and privileged people ever value equality more than their own money? That's the stark question that lies behind @walterscheidel.bsky.social's thesis that it generally takes violence to reduce social inequality. Human beings are after all self-interested.

Excellent and thoughtful conversation w/ @hakwan.bsky.social on the neuroscientific approach to consciousness. Dr Lau emphasizes that we have no good theories of consciousness. Where he goes wrong is in assuming that consciousness must be computational. That's an assumption there's no evidence for.