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At the Fifth Kaoting Forum in Nanping on 17–18 October, scholars applied Zhu Xi's distinction between heavenly principle and disordered appetite to AI: using AI is neutral, Fang Xudong argued, but surrendering your judgement to the algorithm is a moral failure — an idea now doing work in debates about override, education and governance.
A Southampton philosopher's October essay asks why we assume matter starts out unconscious at all. Panpsychism — consciousness as a fundamental property of matter — dissolves one mystery by creating others, and its critics and defenders now agree on at least one thing: the easy answers have run out.
A new paper argues that even a safe, free and universally accepted technology for making people behave morally would cost too much: the free will that makes a good act a choice at all.
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