Global Arc

The evolution of linguistic conventions is a kind of cultural evolution, and the evolution of the capacity for language must have been tangled up with the evolution of a capacity for having a human kind of culture. Lewis' Convention will be used as a point of departure for a tour through some of the more recent philosophical and scientific literature on the relationship between these two processes, including Skyrms Signals, Sterelnys Evolved Apprentice, Daniel Dennetts The evolution of language and music, and works by Goodman, Grice, Chomsky, Call and Tomasello, Enquist and Ghirlanda, Gergely and Csibra, etc.

Are we living at the hinge of history? Is the best future for humanity one in which we become a vast interstellar civilization? Can we positively influence the long-term trajectory of our species? This course will examine both motivations and difficulties for longtermism, a novel position in ethics which says that ensuring a flourishing future for humanity should be our top moral priority. Topics will include population ethics,decision theory, the size of the future,cluelessness about the long-run effects of our actions, moral uncertainty, advanced artificial intelligence, and what to do if you are interested in existential risk mitigation.