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Articles by Oliver Waters
On Retributive Punishment
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Escape from Simulation Island
The Matrix films depict a future dystopia in which oppressive super-intelligent machines have imprisoned human beings inside an entirely simulated world in order to exploit them as a power source. The human protagonists of the films - Neo and Trinity - lead a thrilling rebellion to free as many people as possible. It's rather obvious why they are the 'good guys' and the machines are evil: imprisoning people in a virtual cage is wrong.
Western Metaphysics is Imploding. Will We Raise a Phoenix from The Ashes? [Catalytic AI]
I read a great deal of Bertrand Russell when I was in my teens. I read various collections of essays, such as Why I Am Not A Christian, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, and Marriage and Morals, some of which my father had stored in a box in the basement, along with Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, a book or two by this guy named Freud, though I forget which one, and some others. I also Russell's - dare I say it?
Isn't there more than enough wealth to go around?
In last month's column I criticised the ' degrowth ' movement, which essentially proposes that we should produce and consume less stuff. This notion has some merit of course - we should always strive to 'do more with less' - if that simply means making our technologies more efficient.
The techno-optimist case for unlimited economic growth
In the final moments of the film Don't Look Up (2021), a group of family and friends sit around a dinner table laughing together while enjoying some delicious organic produce. Leonardo DeCaprio looks up from his heirloom tomatoes with nostalgic despair. 'We really did have everything, didn't we?' he laments, just before the meteor hits Earth, killing billions of its ungrateful, arrogant human guests.
Sapolsky vs Mitchell on Free Will
Two popular books released this year have breathed new life into the ancient debate over whether we have free will. In Free Agents, Kevin Mitchell argues that we do, and in Determined, Robert Sapolsky argues that we don't. To be blunt, on the big issue at hand - Mitchell is right and Sapolsky is wrong. Despite this, Sapolsky does make a compelling case however for not excessively condemning or praising people for their decisions.
What does it mean to have a 'right to life'?
If you were a medieval peasant in the year 1323 AD, would you have believed that slavery was morally permissible? The odds are that you would have. After all, most people at the time saw slavery as a permanent fact of life, not an abomination that ought to be abolished. But it's very tempting to assume that you, as a rational, thoughtful individual, could have transcended your historical setting to grasp its transcendent wrongness.
Escape From Brain Prison Part IV: A Universe of Possible Minds
In Part I, we explored some immediate benefits of transitioning from our organic brains to synthetic ones, perhaps the most attractive being effective immortality via 'backing up' our digital minds. But now I'd like to venture off into much more speculative territory: how artificial brains may enable us to meet aliens. People have been scratching their heads about where all the aliens are for a long time. Perhaps the bleakest theory is that we are truly alone in the vast darkness of spacetime.
Ulcerative Colitis in Adults: A Review
Ulcerative Colitis in Adults: A Review Preliminary Communication Effect of Fecal Microbiota Transplantation on 8-Week Remission in Patients With Ulcerative Colitis Samuel P. Costello, MBBS; Patrick A. Hughes, PhD; Oliver Waters, MBBS; Robert V. Bryant, MScR; Andrew D. Vincent, PhD; Paul Blatchford, PhD; Rosa Katsikeros, BSc; Jesica Makanyanga, MBChB; Melissa A. Campaniello, BSc; Chris Mavrangelos, BSc; Carly P. Rosewarne, PhD; Chelsea Bickley, BSc; Cian Peters, MS; Mark N. Schoeman, PhD; Michael A.
Escape From Brain Prison III: Could Artificial Brains be Conscious?
Part I of this series argued that transferring your personal identity to an artificial brain should be possible. It's one thing however to preserve the informational content of your identity, and quite another for that content to be conscious. It would be a real shame if your new artificial self was getting about town as a zombified version of you: spending your wages, high fiving your friends - all with no inner subjective awareness.
Escape From Brain Prison II: The Threat of Superintelligence
The first article of this series argued that in principle we should expect our personal identities to survive a transition to artificial brains. Obviously there remains the minor technical problem of how to actually build such brains. The most popular conception of how to approach this is known as ' whole brain emulation', which entails replicating the precise functional architecture of our current brains with synthetic components.
Escape from Brain Prison
Panic about runaway artificial super-intelligence spiked recently, with doomsayers like Eliezer Yudkowsy prophesising that, if current progress continues, literally everyone on Earth will die. In a way, he's right. Humanity will probably die out as technology progresses, but not quite in the depressing way he imagines. 'Humanity' after all, refers to two distinct things. The first is our biological species - homo sapiens.
The Philosophical Implications of a Right to Abortion
The US abortion debate has recently been reignited, following a leaked Supreme Court draft decision in which most justices supported overturning Roe v. Wade. The fact that it matters what judges think on this issue is peculiar (though not unique) to the US, where certain constitutional rights are deemed to supersede the will of legislators. In the UK or Australia by contrast, it is ultimately up to elected politicians what the law on abortion should be, not the courts.
Aleksandr Dugin and the Perils of Postmodern Ethnonationalism
Millions of ordinary Germans believed in the compelling narrative that Hitler was unifying the true German Volk under one national umbrella. From Austria to Poland, his land-grabs were justified by the idea that national borders ought to carve out distinct ethnic and cultural groups. Since the end of World War II, this all-too-common way of thinking has fortunately declined. State citizenship has largely re-formed into a more secular, ethnically neutral affair.
The Strange Necessity of Infinite Economic Growth
Despite intuitive claims to the contrary, infinite economic growth is not just possible — it’s essential for human flourishing. In an article for Foreign Policy, the anthropologist Jason Hickel has recently called for an end to global economic growth, as the only way to avoid total ecological destruction. He argues that so called ‘green growth’ — the idea that we can decouple intensive resource use from economic growth — is a myth.
Get ‘Em While They’re Young
A review of: Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak, 2017, MIT Press and Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young, by Helen Razer, 2017, Allen & Unwin. A century after the Bolshevik Revolution, and a quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, somehow the Marxist dream is still alive and kicking. There are some who see the fading embers of communism not as a dark reminder of past horrors, but as an opportunity to usher in a new blaze.
A review of Ben Shapiro’s ‘The Right Side of History’
The popular conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has written a best-selling book arguing that Western Civilisation is in severe decline. This sad trend, on his account, is the result of our waning belief in Judeo-Christian values. The only way to reverse this degeneration is therefore to revive these values, by rediscovering their ancient roots.
Untangling the Patriarchy Paradox: A Review of Kate Manne’s Down Girl
Untangling the Patriarchy Paradox: A Review of Kate Manne’s Down Girl byOliver Waters Posted on February 6, 2019 In her increasingly influential book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, philosophy professor Kate Manne offers a radical new way to think about sexism and misogyny. Unfortunately, her account is methodologically flawed, scientifically ill-informed and counterproductive to the feminist cause. Are we living in a misogynistic society?
Was Robert Wright correct to accuse Sam Harris of cognitive bias?
Was Robert Wright correct to accuse Sam Harris of cognitive bias? In an article published in Wired earlier this year, the author Robert Wright accused Sam Harris of carelessly allowing several ‘cognitive biases’ to distort his thinking and conclusions. Now that the dust has settled a little, I thought it might be instructive to unpack these allegations, in the interests of clarifying what cognitive biases actually are, as well as the dangers of misusing and abusing them.
The Imagined Humanism of Yuval Noah Harari – Oliver Waters – Medium
A review of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), by Yuval Noah Harari. In the film 12 Monkeys, Bruce Willis plays a prisoner who travels back in time to gather information about the outbreak of a virus that has since decimated the human population. In doing so, however, he (spoiler alert!) inadvertently sets off the very chain of events that leads to that horrific outcome. In his 2016 book Homo Deus, Israeli historian Yuval Harari finds himself on a similarly tragic quest.
Campus Speech Debate: The Nightmare of the Nineties is Alive
On Tuesday night I was lucky enough to attend a very engaging debate at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Organized by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and moderated by Kmele Foster, it featured Jonathan Haidt and Andrew Sullivan answering in the affirmative, and Suzanne Nossel and Jeffrey A.
In Search of Utopia for Lobsters Like Us
A review of 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B Peterson, Random House Canada (January 23, 2018) 409 pages, and Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari, Bloomsbury USA (January 23, 2018) 336 pages. Two recent and highly influential books have both addressed a puzzling question: despite unprecedented levels of material wealth, why are so many people in the modern world still so anxious and depressed?
Start-up Wisdom: words of advice from Fintech veterans to newcomers - FintechAge
Founding a startup is pretty easy in the UK: it doesn’t take a huge starting capital, the regulatory environment is friendly, there’s a large pool of talents to fish in…But the UK market is also incredibly competitive and the number of startups that actually make it is really low. So what does it take to hit a home run in the Fintech world? We’ve asked some very experienced Fintech professionals to tell us what advice they would have linked to hear when they were creating their company.
Review: Islam and the Future of Tolerance
In Islam and the Future of Tolerance, ex-jihadist and Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz teams up with Sam Harris in an open dialogue to prevent radicalisation and to promote reasonable interpretations of the Islamic faith. An essential question Nawaz seeks to answer is how to converge on interpretations of Islamic theology that are consistent with modern political liberalism.
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