Dr. Markus Gabriel

Moral Progress in Dark Times - For a New Enlightenment!

The Corona pandemic at the latest has shown that the challenges of the 21st century are all global in
their essence and can thus only be met through new formats of cosmopolitan cooperation.

This lecture shows what the discipline of ethics is all about and how a new kind of ethics, which assumes that moral questions have real answers, is able to substitute cooperation for unleashed competition.

Audience takeaway:

• Introduction to ethics and shows that ethics in the 21st
  century answers concrete questions of humanity and does not hinder us socially and economically, but
  moves us forward.

Why do we need an ethics of A.I.?

Artificial intelligence has recently penetrated our everyday lives and workplaces, unleashing unimagined disruptive potential.
For this reason, governments, companies and technology experts are calling for the development of ethical guidelines for a humane and trustworthy use of A.I..

Audience takeaways:

• Markus Gabriel develops the basic ideas of a new ethics of A.I., which allows not only dangers and risks, but above all positive prospects for a desirable A.I. to be developed.

What is that actually, an A.I.?

● The increasing use of A.I. systems are also driving the ever more rapid digitalization of all social conditions. For many people, this raises the question of how we recognize A.I. systems and whether they will possibly even surpass humans in all important questions of fact, knowledge and life in the same way
that they have long since beaten us in chess or Go.

Audience takeaway:

• A.I. systems are in reality not intelligent in themselves, but only in the context of human-machine interaction. In this way, they have the potential to make us more intelligent, but this requires that we get a more accurate picture, comprehensible to all, of what our, biologically-based existence consists of.

The Virologic Imperative

What measures to contain the pandemic are ethically justified? – Moral progress in the Corona crisis – The post-coronial future.

Audience takeaway:

• Why now is the time to start a new global enlightenment Ethics and morality in society and the economy Digitalisation Artificial Intelligence Can robots think or be conscious? Philosophical foundations of ethics Consciousness research

Why the world does not exist

Markus Gabriel developed the principles of a radical new philosophy, New Realism.

These are based on a demonstration that there is no such thing as the one, all-encompassing world in which all things are interconnected. Therefore, it is never possible to know and make controllable nature, reality, the universe as a whole; a world formula will not be found.

Instead, we have to recognize that reality is manifold in itself, that there is always more complexity than
we take into account.

Audience takeaway:

• On the basis of this new philosophy, Gabriel shows with wit and concrete examples how we can lead a
  liberated life in the face of this insight.

I is not brain - Man as a spiritual living being

There is often the view that our consciousness, our spirit, is ultimately nothing more than a kind of neuron storm that can at some point be fully explored and explained with the methods of the natural sciences.

Markus Gabriel, on the other hand, shows in his lecture that we are spiritual living beings whose spirit reaches far beyond our own organism.

In his view, consciousness does not sit under the top of our skulls, but extends into reality.

Audience takeaway:

• In Dr. Gabriel’s view, consciousness does not sit under the top of our skulls, but extends into reality, that is why we can actually recognize it more or less as it is and are not prisoners of our own brain, as some neuroscientists keep claiming.

Why free will really exists and we are not machines

In modern times, it has been repeatedly denied that we humans have free will, first by physics, then by neuroscience and most recently by A.I. research, which assumes that we are ultimately completely transparent and controllable by algorithms.

In contrast, Markus Gabriel shows on the basis of his international bestsellers that we do indeed have free will, which is fully  compatible with the fact that natural laws apply wherever we can act.

Audience takeaway:

• The universe as a physically describable system is a necessary prerequisite of free will, but is in no way opposed to it, because as free spiritual living beings we are not machines that could be understood without free will.