Reddit reviews Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Wow, you really have been infected with some of the worst philosophical viruses out there. To uninstall these viruses I suggest you read Daniel Dennett's essays on philosophical zombies, qualia, and the so-called "hard problem". Actually all of these topics are in one book! Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

You might be interested in the work of John Basl, an important part of his work deals with the ethics of AI and sentiocentrism.

https://philpapers.org/rec/BASTEO-11

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-the-ethic-of-life-9780190923877?cc=us&lang=en&

On the question of brains being computers I'd check Daniel C. Dennett's *Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking." Several of his "intuition pumps" deal with this theme. In the book he usually mentions authors and works that oppose his ideas.

https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/1491518871

Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking gives a really good rundown of thinking tools and thought experiments.

You might want to check out Dennett's recent book on intuitions, thought experiments, and the like:

https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/1491518871

In a similar vein, if you're looking for scholarly essays on thought experiments, I remember that James R. Brown had some interesting ideas on the topic. I started accumulating a pretty thick binder in the 90s with essays on thought experiments, so there's definitely a robust literature out there.

I don't think aphorisms per se are a big part of modern philosophy, so my sense is that philosophers don't worry too much about them directly. But studying heuristics in psychology has been very very hot for a few decades now (see e.g. Heuristics and Biases and Kahneman's work) and a number of philosophers have discussed those. I think it would be uncontroversial to say that aphorisms are fundamentally a sort of heuristic, and the general analysis of heuristics is applicable to aphorisms:

• Some of them are quite useful in providing a 'first cut' or 'quick' answer, when such a thing is needed.
  
• Some of them are very bad and ought to be discarded altogether.
  
• Some of them are useful some of the time, but are generally inferior (epistemically) to some more thorough analysis, which is usually possible in philosophy.
  
  Not precisely the same thing, but possibly relevant: Dennett has written many times about intuition pumps (book, video). He is primarily interested in philosophical hypotheticals, thought experiments, and the like... but some of the analysis of good pumps vs. bad (a.k.a. "boom crutches") seems applicable to good aphorisms vs. bad ones.