Portrait of Derek Parfit

Derek Parfit

Philosopher
December 11, 1942 – January 2, 2017

Derek Antony Parfit FBA was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Parfit rose to prominence in 1971 with the publication of his first paper, Personal Identity. His first book, Reasons and Persons, has been described as the most significant work of moral philosophy since the 1800s. His second book, On What Matters, was widely circulated and discussed for many years before its publication.

For his entire academic career, Parfit worked at Oxford University, where he was an Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College at the time of his death. He was also a visiting professor of philosophy at Harvard University, New York University, and Rutgers University. He was awarded the 2014 Rolf Schock Prize “for his groundbreaking contributions concerning personal identity, regard for future generations, and analysis of the structure of moral theories.”

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John Danaher and Stephen Petersen

In Defence of the Hivemind Society

The idea that humans should abandon their individuality and use technology to bind themselves together into hivemind societies seems both farfetched and frightening—something that is redolent of the worst dystopias from science fiction. In this article, we argue that these common reactions to the ideal of a hivemind society are mistaken. The idea that humans could form hiveminds is sufficiently plausible for its axiological consequences to be taken seriously. Furthermore, far from being a dystopian nightmare, the hivemind society could be desirable and could enable a form of sentient flourishing. Consequently, we should not be so quick to deny it. We provide two arguments in support of this claim—the axiological openness argument and the desirability argument—and then defend it against three major objections.

Murray Shanahan

Satori Before Singularity

What if future AIs achieved enlightenment before world domination? Shanahan suggests a truly advanced AI might transcend the human ego, dropping our obsession with the “self.” Instead of triggering a runaway intelligence explosion, such a being could attain satori: a Zen-like peace that halts the singularity in its tracks.