Tuesday, July 24, 2018

The Best My New Book in Draft Update

Working title:
Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures
[former working title: How to Be a Crazy Philosopher]
The book is composed of several dozen blog posts and popular articles, on philosophy, psychology, culture, and technology, updated and revised, selected from eleven hundred I published between 2006 and 2018.
The full draft is available here.
I will be revising it for the rest of the summer and into the fall, so feedback is appreciated! In addition to the usual content-level feedback, I also welcome feedback on: (a) alternative possible titles, (b) posts or articles that I should have included but didn't, (c) posts or articles that aren't up to the quality of the others and should be cut.
The book is divided into 61 chapters in 5 parts. Every chapter is free standing. No need to read them in order.
[a haphazard sample of the stacks of books in my office, consulted during revision]
Table of Contents:
Part One: Moral Psychology
1. A Theory of Jerks2. Forgetting as an Unwitting Confession of Your Values3. The Happy Coincidence Defense and The-Most-I-Can-Do Sweet Spot4. Cheeseburger Ethics (or How Often Do Ethicists Call Their Mothers?)5. On Not Seeking Pleasure Much6. How Much Should You Care about How You Feel in Your Dreams?7. Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Love8. Aiming for Moral Mediocrity9. A Theory of Hypocrisy10. On Not Distinguishing Too Finely Among Your Motivations11. The Mush of Normativity12. A Moral Dunning-Kruger Effect?13. The Moral Compass and the Liberal Ideal in Moral Education Part Two: Technology
14. Should Your Driverless Car Kill You So Others May Live?15. Cute AI and the ASIMO Problem16. My Daughter’s Rented Eyes17. Someday, Your Employer Will Technologically Control Your Moods18. Cheerfully Suicidal AI Slaves19. We Have Greater Moral Obligations to Robots Than to (Otherwise Similar) Humans20. Our Moral Duties to Monsters21. Our Possible Imminent Divinity22. Skepticism, Godzilla, and the Artificial Computerized Many-Branching You23. How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot Part Three: Culture
24. Dreidel: A Seemingly Foolish Game That Contains the Moral World in Miniature25. Does It Matter If the Passover Story Is Literally True?26. Memories of My Father27. Flying Free of the Deathbed, with Technological Help28. Thoughts on Conjugal Love29. Knowing What You Love30. The Epistemic Status of Deathbed Regrets31. Competing Perspectives on One’s Final, Dying Thought32. Profanity Inflation, Profanity Migration, and the Paradox of Prohibition (or I Love You, “Fuck”)33. The Legend of the Leaning Behaviorist34. What Happens to Democracy When the Experts Can’t Be Both Factual and Balanced?35. On the Morality of Hypotenuse Walking36. Birthday Cake and a Chapel Part Four: Consciousness and Cosmology
37. Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain38. A Two-Seater Homunculus39. Is the United States Literally Conscious?40. Might You Be a Cosmic Freak?41. Penelope’s Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation42. Choosing to Be That Fellow Back Then: Voluntarism about Personal Identity43. How Everything You Do Might Have Huge Cosmic Significance44. Goldfish-Pool Immortality45. How Big the Moon Is, According to One Three-Year-Old46. Tononi’s Exclusion Postulate Would Make Consciousness (Nearly) Irrelevant47. What’s in People’s Stream of Experience During Philosophy Talks?48. The Paranoid Jeweler and the Sphere-Eye God49. The Tyrant’s Headache Part Five: The Psychology and Sociology of Philosophy
50. Truth, Dare, and Wonder51. Trusting Your Sense of Fun52. Why Metaphysics Is Always Bizarre53. The Philosopher of Hair54. Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants55. Obfuscatory Philosophy as Intellectual Authoritarianism and Cowardice56. Nazi Philosophers, World War I, and the Grand Wisdom Hypothesis57. Against Charity in the History of Philosophy58. Invisible Revisions59. On Being Good at Seeming Smart60. Blogging and Philosophical Cognition, or Why Blogging Is the Ideal Form of Philosophy!!! :-)61. Will Future Generations Find Us Morally Loathsome?












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