Ideas and Resources

Week 1 - The Meaning of Life

  • We find it/it comes to us, or…

  • We make it


Week 2 - Humour

  • Crowdsourced humour:

  • And a list of types of comedy - might be interesting to think of additions to:

    • slapstick

    • irony

    • gallows

    • hubris (Emperor's new clothes)

    • dry humour/deadpan

    • chucklesome

    • lol

    • scapegoat/bully


Week 3 - Free will vs. Determinism

Week 4 - Altruism

  • What is it?

  • How should we evaluate an act?

    • What are the intentions?

    • What are the consequences? What is the impact?

  • Is the most extreme form of altruism/the only form of pure altruism self sacrifice?

  • The do-er and the receiver - two different experiences of an act

  • Ego and altruism - why do people do ‘good’ things to boost their egos?

  • Social rewards/capital

  • Put your hand in the bowl (covered with a cloth), then in your pocket, then in the bowl again - take if you need to take, give if you can give

  • Effective altruism & quality adjusted life years - ‘QUAL’s

  • Religion - give a 10th of your salary; serve the community' (etc)

  • Humankind: A Hopeful History

  • Sacrifice for future generations (e.g. in response to climate change/to save the environment)

  • Mary Portas on "The Kindness Economy" - putting planet and people before profit

  • Altruism and kindness as acts of love (in the sense of agape love, rather than romantic or sexual love) - could we use the positive feelings of someone being altruistic as a lever to encourage them to do more? Does doing something altruistic have benefits to the individual practising it?

Week 5 - Consciousness

  • What state of consciousness are you in? healthy/ill; awake/sleepy/(alseep?!); mood? (etc)

  • What is consciousness?

    • Awareness? Self awareness?

    • Emotion? Feeling?

      • Empathy

    • Different levels of consciousness?

      • Hierarchy of states - hypervigilant, relaxed, fatigued, asleep, anesthetized, intoxicated (etc.)

        • What is a ‘higher state’ of consciousness (i.e. in religion/meditation)?

      • Hierarchy of animals/life forms?

        • Do animals have consciousness? Do they have emotions? (see Jaak Panksepp’s Ted Talk)

        • Do trees?

        • Can computers (artificial intelligence) have consciousness? Will they be able to? Is that good?

    • Why do we have consciousness?

    • Where is our ownership of our consciousness? E.g. in ‘mindfulness’, which part of us is ‘conscious’? The part trying to observe our thoughts, or the thoughts that we have involuntarily?

      • What are thoughts?

  • Will we come to a conclusive answer?

    • ‘What is consciousness?’ is an age old question in philosophy. Now neuroscientists are exploring the same question. Will they work it out? Or will it always come back to only being able to know that you exist (i.e. ‘I think therefore I am’)

  • Embodiment & Cartesian dualism

    • Would we experience a different consciousness/reality if our brains were transplanted into different bodies? Or if they were disembodied?

    • Is the mind separate from matter?

    • What is the ‘soul’?

  • Ideas for future groups:

    • Artificial Intelligence

    • Empathy and embodiment - sociopolitical divisions (e.g. in the context of racism in America)

    • Fairness - how do people perceive it? Is there a universal understanding of fairness or not? If there is, how do we enforce it? Should we enforce it? Justice - what is acceptable and what is not?

Week 6 - Artificial Intelligence

  • What is it?

    • Learning element - mirroring the way neural networks learn

    • ‘Artificial’

  • Computer games

  • Transhumanism/technology as an extension of our selves

    • Outsourcing our thinking - to calculators, to our phones

  • Continuum: Sci-Fi, futuristic, Homo Deus view of AI vs. AI that already exists all around us (e.g. advertising algorithms)

  • Job displacement

    • Which jobs will be replaced?

      • Why is it so important that caring roles are done by humans?

    • How will we spend our time if our jobs are replaced by computers/robots?

    • 6-10% of jobs replaced by computers this year?!

  • What makes AI creepy sometimes and not creepy other times?

    • Uncanny Valley

  • Morality

    • Can we agree on a moral code to teach computers?

      • MIT Moral Machine Study

    • Can you programme compassion?

    • What would your driverless car do if it was making decisions based on your google history?

  • Haibo’s excellent research and resources:

    • + The MIT Moral Machine that we talked about - well worth doing! You'll note that it's the trolley problem (interesting history and neuroscience research on it here) that you talked about before. There's also a related one that reveals your preferences for charitable giving, which I found very interesting too

    • + This reminds me of the Michael Sandel Harvard Justice course that features this problem (and other philosophical and moral dilemmas)

    • + The best research I've found on whether AI will take our jobs - this research used a really clever way of measuring it based on analysing noun verb pairs in patents for AI and machine learning. The famous figure of 47% of jobs are at risk from AI (Frey & Osbourne) has been widely criticised because it relies on a subjective hand-labelling of 70 occupations by some computer scientists and then extrapolating that across all jobs

    • + The Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford takes a long term view of what AI means for us - it was founded by Nick Bostrom who wrote the book on AGI being the biggest threat to humanity. One of the smartest philosophers I've ever come across - Toby Ord - is also there.

    • + The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence takes a mid-term view on AI and Society/People, which has some interesting resources and research and ideas - the stuff on the types of intelligence is also quite interesting

    • + The Ada Lovelace Institute has a more near-term lens on AI, which then is more about data, privacy, algorithmic decision making (whether it's AI or not - much of the criminal justice and AI debacle is actually not even true machine learning, but just statistical regressions)

Week 7 - Dreams

  • What are they?

    • thoughts being processed - brain massage

    • inner wisdom

    • random neurons firing? probably not

    • altered states

    • types

      • recurring dreams

      • dreams that lots of people have (e.g. losing your teeth; flying; falling)

      • lucid dreams - when you can make decisions in your dreams/decide what you want to dream about

        • grey area? when you are aware that you are dreaming, but can’t influence the dream

  • What is the meaning?

    • do we make meaning of our dreams?

  • How do we know we’re not dreaming now?

    • Matrix

    • Inception

  • If you could decide what your dreams were to be about, would you?

    • Getting what you want is not the same as getting what you need

  • What about the dreams we don’t remember? Do they influence us in the same way as the ones we do remember?

  • Dogs dream - presumably other animals do too

    • does that mean that dreams serve a purpose?