Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
you’ve always done them, stopping to ask yourself: why am I working this job? Why do grades matter? Why am I supposed to care about getting a nice car, or getting more Likes on Twitter, or getting a fancier job? What’s the point of it? And I think that mindset is crucial if we’re not going to be basically zombies, going around doing whatever we’ve been doing out of habit. Some of the best ways to do this, I think, often involve camping down on some really specific topics. It’s funny, I can talk about “the meaning of life” or “the value of reflection” in some abstract way and people are like, yeah, wha tever. But when I dig in – in my writing, in my classes – into specific topics, like “Why do we care about Twitter Likes?” or “What’s the purpose of having a clean beautiful car?” or “Are games meaningful or a waste of time?” people really listen and get e xcited – and it leads to the big questions.
Diotima: How did your interests in philosophy, if at all, change/develop while in graduate school?
Nguyen: I went into grad school interested in kind of traditional foundational questions: are our ethical beliefs objective or subjective? Is knowledge possible? And I kind of actually settled these questions to my satisfaction in grad school, and came out just much more interested in much more grounded and specific questions. Some of that is just also the experience of being a person in this world – like it’s hard to keep worrying if moral goodness and badness is “objective” when there’s crushing injustice in the world. But I also realized a bunch of those interests are still alive, just transfigured by an approac h that’s more buried in the real world. Like, my old interest was: how can we know anything for sure? Like, I was worried about the possibility that we might be dreaming, or that we might be in a simulation. My new interest is: how do we be sure of anything in a world where we have to trust experts and specialists, when there is too much scientific knowledge for a single person to manage for themselves? It’s kind of the same question, but instead of the possibility of there being an evil demon that’s fooling you about anything, there’s another, much more real possibility: that you might, for example, have been raised in a deceptive cult.
Diotima: What do you think are some of the most pertinent questions regarding AI art and AI art software? Does AI art demote/value human art?
Nguyen: I think the most crucial question is: is there value in the creative process? Because my major worry is that AI might make good art for us to enjoy, but then we
Volume VI (2023)
63
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