philosophy
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There has been an acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) in the past year, especially in chatbot AIs. OpenAI’s ChatGPT became the fastest app to reach 100 million monthly active users within a short span of two months. For reference, the runner-up TikTok took nine months — more than four times — to reach those numbers.…
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Writer’s note: this is part three of a three-part essay. Click here for part two. In the previous two parts of the essay, I’ve discussed how our senses and mind could limit our ability to understand the world. I will be concluding this three-part essay by turning my focus to culture. First, a working definition of…
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In 1758, the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus gave the name “Homo Sapiens” to our species. The term means “wise man” in Latin. We mostly stuck with the name, although there have been competing ones offered by various people in the years since. Linnaeus purportedly christened us with “wise” because of our ability to…
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In a previous essay, I discussed an individual’s capacity for change. In summary, I posited that while certain aspects of our identity are resistant to change, meaningful change can be enacted through reflection and attention. Within the previous essay, there were also references made to society, with a specific claim that personal changes are often…
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Writer’s note: this was a difficult one to write, I scrapped an earlier draft completely because the more I wrote, the more I found myself having to account for too many considerations, which led to me feeling like I knew nothing about anything. That feeling prompted me to start over and adopt a structure that…
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This essay was written for an undergraduate philosophy class called “Philosophy of Death” in the fall of 2013. The lecturer was Prof. Donald Keefer. In everyday situations, human beings are forced to make decisions based on a set of non-conscious beliefs and value systems. These form part of one’s intuition in dealing with immediate, urgent…