Recommendations from our site
“This book imagines a far future in which the world is populated with a diverse range of what I will call ‘persons’, rather than ‘humans’. This is a society without significant scarcity. In this society, people have immense freedom to consider what kind of life they want to live because they don’t need to hold down a job to draw an income. Furthermore, you can control your own values, especially if you’re one of the AI systems. You can just tinker with your settings, saying, ‘Okay, I think I’m going to really love math for a little while’, or you can change your values in many other ways. You can voluntarily adopt a new worldview for a while, then shed it. It gives us the existentialists’ question in its purest form.” Read more...
Science Fiction and Philosophy
Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher
“It is a masterwork of science fiction, and the deepest account I’ve seen of how much the human condition could change. The book opens almost 1,000 years into the future. But at some point, much closer to the present day, humanity had worked out how to create digital minds, living in virtual worlds. And the book is primarily an exploration of how profoundly such a development would change things. Many age-old challenges of social arrangement would become moot. For instance, the people of this future are effectively immortal and cannot come to any bodily harm unless they will it. So in these virtual worlds, violent crime is not against the law, but against the laws of physics.” Read more...
Toby Ord, Philosopher
“Diaspora opened my eyes to the wealth of philosophical thought that has been playing out in science fiction over the past thirty years, which we professional philosophers almost entirely ignore, to our great loss and discredit.” Read more...
The best books on Philosophical Wonder
Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher
