The Philosophers' Cocoon

How Can I Be a Philosopher in a Non-Academic Career? (APA Blog Interview)

The Blog of the APA has a great interview up today with Gina Helfrich, who received her PhD at Emory and "is now program officer for global technology at Internews, an international nonprofit dedicated to empowering local media worldwide." A couple of choice passages:

Q: Tell me about the twists and turns.

....

There were a lot of unexpected moments. Sometimes, it seemed as if a perfect job fell from the sky with the job description written just for me. Other times, I had to work very hard to find a position.

My first full-time job, as assistant director of the Harvard College Women’s Center, fell from the sky. I saw it come across a mailing list I was on as a result of my graduate fellowship working in the Center for Women at Emory University, and it was a great fit with my scholarly focus in women’s and gender studies.

After a promotion to director and four years at the women’s center, I felt restless. So I read books like What Color Is Your Parachute? I did informational interviews. And eventually, I networked myself into a tech job at a startup—but I got laid off after a year, and I then was stuck with this bizarre resume.

So I did what you do: I put myself out there, chased a lot of opportunities that didn’t pan out, and eventually landed a communications position with NumFOCUS, a nonprofit that supports open-source scientific research. Around the same time, I cofounded a staffing and consulting business to support better diversity and inclusion in technology. We started getting a lot of attention, and even got some venture capital, so at a certain point I was basically forced to leave my full-time/regular job. But the business didn’t work out, and after seven months of “funemployment,” I found my way back to NumFOCUS for few more years.

Then, something else fell from the sky. When I heard about my current position, I thought it was perfect—the candidate needed to understand open source software communities and be conversant in issues of diversity and inclusion. I submitted my resume and cover letter, and got the job.

Honestly, even that summary of my career feels a little too neat; it was very messy and unexpected. So that’s the non-academic path—terrifying, but beautiful!

.....

Q: What can philosophy faculty do to help their students pursue non-academic careers?

The most important thing is to be supportive. Graduate school can really undermine one’s self-confidence. But you need self-confidence to get a job—and faculty support helps.

Another thing faculty can do is get familiar with some basic resources to help graduate students find careers—things like the book Designing Your Life by Stanford University professors Bill Burnett and David Evans.

Faculty have to reckon with the fact that PhD students fund their lifestyles, but there are not enough academic jobs for every PhD student. So faculty really owe it to PhDs to support them in the search for all types of work. Our community should also do more to encourage and support hybrid careers for PhDs—you work in tech, for example, but also teach a course or write philosophical articles.

P2P Hypothesis interview at Borealism

The other week, the blog Borealism published a brief interview with David Kyle Johnson (Kings College) on how our lives would change if we discovered we are living in a computer simulation. Dr. Johnson kindly mentioned some of my work on The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Simulation Hypothesis (see here, here, and here), which led in turn to the blog owner to send me a few follow-up questions. Borealism published my answers in part here, but here they are in full (I hope some of you find them interesting!):

1. Your theory maintains anchored in the idea that time flows subjectively and that the physical universe is a timelessly existing array of information which our consciousness is able to perceive as it chooses to perceive. In other words, that each person’s consciousness can read the physical information, akin to the laser of a CD player reading the information on the compact disc and playing it back to the observer. In your observations and experiences, how does the quantum world of collapsing wave functions and the observer effect work to support this hypothesis? 

Great question, and many thanks for taking an interest in my work and sharing it with your readers!

Let me begin by suggesting this video to any of your viewers who may be (understandably) unfamiliar with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is an incredibly well-confirmed theory of fundamental physics. Indeed, every bizarre prediction it makes has so far been observed to be correct. Yet quantum mechanics paints a very strange picture of reality. Among other things, it entails that every particle in the universe is simultaneously in many places at once (quantum superposition), but that whenever we observe a particle, we will always find it in some particular place in space-time (wave-function collapse). As I note in my 2013 article, ‘A New Theory of Free Will’, Einstein thought this to be so absurd that he once scoffed, “Do you really think the moon isn’t there if you aren’t looking at it?” Perhaps the weirdest thing here is that according to the dominant interpretation of the equations of quantum mechanics—the Copenhagen interpretation—the superposition every particle is in never actually goes away or ‘collapses’. Rather, every particle is always in a superposition (many places at once), but observation makes the particle appear to ‘collapse’ to a single particular state.

My theory provides an elegant explanation of these phenomena. In a peer-to-peer networked computer simulation, each computer on the network is running its own unique simulation. So, for example, if we are playing a peer-to-peer networked internet game on 2,000 game consoles, there are in a sense ‘2,000 simulations’ running, each with its own ‘reality’. But at the same time, insofar as all of the computers on the network are interacting with each other—updating what they are simulating based on the data the other computers on the network give them—there is also in a sense just one simulation: the entire network.

This is how the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Hypothesis explains quantum superposition and wave-function collapse. Insofar as each simulation on the network has its own unique representation of where objects in the simulated environment are, unless there is absolutely perfect error-correction in real time (a computational impossibility), different computers on the network will have slightly different representations of where things in the environment are. Thus, at the level of the network as a whole, it is right to say that everything in the environment is always in a superposition: each particle in a 2,000-computer network will be represented in the network as being at something like 2,000 different places simultaneously. Yet, whenever any particular individual playing their game looks at the simulated world (on their computer), they will always observe things in one particular place or another: since their computer is one of the 2,000 computers running the simulation. So, in a P2P network, objects really are in a sense always in multiple places at once, but will always be observed by any observer to be at one particular place or other—exactly as the equations of quantum mechanics entail.

Virtue and Meaning: an Interview with David McPherson

Ethical Theory Review, Bradford Cokelet's (University of Kansas) new podcast interviewing authors of recent and forthcoming books in moral and practical philosophy, has its first interview up here, which you can listen to online or on Spotify. The interview is with David McPherson (Creighton). Here's a quick description of the interview:

We discuss [McPherson's] new book, Virtue and Meaning, which develops and defends a new theory of human nature – the human being as the meaning seeking creature – and explores its implications for ethical theory.  We discuss David's criticism of Aristotelian Naturalists such as Foot, Hursthouse, and MacIntyre, his alternative account of moral virtue and the good life, and his view that Aristotelian moral philosophers need to develop accounts of the cosmic meaning of human life and of human spirituality.

Ethical Theory Review (new interview series)

This is just a quick note that Bradford Cokelet (University of Kansas) is launching a podcast interview series on new and forthcoming books in moral and practical philosophy. The series, Ethical Theory Review, is scheduled to begin this month with an interview of David McPherson (Creighton) on his new book Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press). The series' current tentative schedule can be viewed here. Anyone interested in being interviewed or proposing an interview can find relevant contact information here!