reflections in philosophy of psychology, broadly construed
AI and Consciousness, hot off the press at Cambridge University Press and free online until Aug 26! Summary: Our most advanced AI systems might soon – within the next five to thirty years – be as richly and meaningfully conscious as ordinary humans, or even more so, capable of genuine feeling, real self-knowledge, and a wide range of sensory, emotional, and cognitive experiences. In some arguably…
Aloha from Kauai! Here's another snail for your enjoyment. Since I'm still on vacation, here’s a repost with edits from 2011 and from my 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures . [giant African land snail, seen in southern Kauai] I've been told that Kant and Hegel were poor writers whose impenetrable prose style is incidental to their philosophy. I've also been told that…
Aloha from Honolulu! I have vacation brain, so I'll do a summer-themed repost. [Photo from the Bishop Museum malacology exhibit] ************************************* Every spring I suffer the Summer Illusion . The following three incompatible propositions all seem to me, in the spring, to be true: (1.) When summer arrives, I'll finally get a bunch of that research done which has been crowded out…
I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. [from Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird ] The literature on superintelligence and AI alignment tends to assume that an intelligent AI will have one set of values, one reward function, and consistent, determinate preferences. But speaking for myself, I'm not as consistent as that. You aren't either, I…
I don't want to read your AI-generated email. Lots of reasons why, but here's the core of it: I want the text to reflect your thoughts. I want to know that you, the human, actually had those ideas and had them authentically enough to express them in exactly the form I see on the page. For personal emails, I want this for personal reasons. For philosophically substantive emails, I want this for…
Here . Comments welcomed, hoped for, treasured. Over the past couple years I've been working on a pair of books, AI and Consciousness and Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights . I began circulating AI and Consciousness last fall, and it should appear with Cambridge Elements soon. Both experts' and non-experts' comments were extremely helpful in revising. Thanks so much! I'd like to similarly begin…
In philosophy of mind, people sometimes say things like the following: If functionalism is true about consciousness, then digital computers could be conscious; all it requires is that they instantiate the right programs. And yes, most functionalists about consciousness do think that. But the claim about digital computer programs does not straightforwardly follow from functionalism alone. Today I…
Available here . Abstract: Future AI persons might both (1.) deserve moral consideration and rights fully equal with natural human persons, and (2.) have lifeways so radically different from ours as to break familiar patterns of moral thinking by violating our ordinary background assumptions. This article presents a series of thought experiments about strange AI persons, centering on a two-pronged…
Biological naturalists (e.g., Godfrey-Smith , Block , Searle , Seth ) suggest that computers aren't made of the right kind of stuff to be conscious. Consciousness, they suggest, requires a biological substrate that computers lack. It's not always clear, however, exactly what property animal biologies have that computers lack or why that property matters. It helps, I think, to sort biological…
... but collectively, we haven't yet figured out how. Yet! Helen De Cruz and the 2+1 Experiment The inspired advocacy of the late (dearly missed) Helen De Cruz convinced the American Philosophical Association to try out what they called the "2+1" model for their three annual conferences: two in-person, one remote, with the remote conference rotating among the three divisions (Eastern, Central,…
Liberals about AI consciousness hold that we might soon (if we haven't already) create genuinely conscious AI systems. Conservatives about AI consciousness hold that AI consciousness remains in the distant future if it's possible at all. According to the Leapfrog Hypothesis , the first conscious AI will not have merely a dim glow of animal-like consciousness, but rich consciousness, similar to a…
Given the surge of interest in AI consciousness, the issue of "substrate independence" or "substrate flexibility" is now a hot topic in the metaphysics of mind. That is, does being conscious require having a particular material composition? Or can anything with the right type of functional structure and behavioral sophistication be conscious, regardless of what it's made of? Biologicists say that…
Part Two of a two-part series by Grace Helton (guest blogger) [Joan Miro, The Garden, 1925; image source ] In the first part of this 2-part series, I argued that relationships between humans and large language models (LLMs) do not qualify as friendships, even when the humans in those relationships are passionately attached to their LLMs. This is because LLMs cannot receive care for their own sake…
Part One of a two-part series by Grace Helton (guest blogger) [Paul Klee, Angel Applicant, 1939; source ] Some people have come to interact with ChatGPT as though it were a kind of friend or romantic partner . For instance, a 2025 New York Times article describes the case of Ayrin, a human who fell in love with her ChatGPT “boyfriend.” Ayrin is far from alone. Twenty percent of high school…
Human beings matter morally. We have moral standing. Our interests deserve consideration -- for our own sakes, and not just as means to ends. Good ethical decision-making requires valuing human lives. Most philosophers hold that humans have the highest moral standing. No entity matters more, and many matter less. It’s worse to kill a human than a dog or a frog or bacteria or a tree. That humans…
Way back in April 2006, I launched The Splintered Mind. Happy 20th birthday, blog of mine! In 2006, academic blogs were cool. After the rise of Facebook and Twitter, most died. Recently, there's been something of a revival on Substack (where I now mirror this blog), but it's nothing like the old days, when checking the blogs was a favorite procrastination technique of graduate students everywhere.…
I offer for your consideration the following ethical motto: Do your thing. I admit: This motto doesn't sound very ethical. What if "your thing" is murdering babies for fun? Even ignoring extreme cases, what if your thing is just watching reruns of I Love Lucy ? That also doesn't seem ethically good (though I've argued elsewhere that privately appreciating good TV can slightly improve the world ).…
I've just started reading Kim Stanley Robinson 's acclaimed climate-science utopia, The Ministry for the Future . How might society plausibly get it right and avert the climate disaster toward which we seem to be headed? (So far in the novel things aren't looking good, but I gather that will change.) I was struck by a few of Robinson's comments about the value of science fiction in a recent…
Last week I submitted my latest book manuscript to Cambridge University Press (for their "Element" series of books about 100 pages long): AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview -- because you haven't heard nearly enough about AI and consciousness recently, of course! [winky face] Maybe you'll appreciate my skeptical stance, at odds both with the boosters who anticipate imminent AI…
It's confusing. You applied to a PhD program in philosophy in the U.S. You haven't been admitted. You haven't been rejected. You're in limbo. Let me explain and offer some advice. Yield-Based vs. Seats-Based Admissions Yield-based. Some departments -- the ones with wise high-level administrators -- aim for a target entering class size and admit students expeditiously to fill it. Suppose a…
It's a philosophical truism that human conscious experience is unified: If you're at a bar, hearing music, tasting beer, and feeling pleasantly relaxed, those experiences don't occur merely side by side. They are joined together into an integrated whole , an experience of music-with-beer-with-relaxation. I'm not sure this truism is correct. As I suggested in an earlier post , experiential unity…
Most AI systems can be precisely copied. Suppose this is also true of future conscious AI persons, if any exist. Backup and fissioning should then be possible, transforming the significance of identity and death in ways our cultural and conceptual tools can't currently handle. Suppose that two humanlike AI neighbors move in next door to you, Shriya and Alaleh.[1] Shriya and Alaleh are (let's…
A philosophical discussion arc is a curve displaying how frequently a term appears in philosophical journal abstracts, titles, and keywords (compared to a representative universe of common philosophy words). A couple of weeks ago, I posted discussion arcs from the 1940s-2020s for several topics and historical philosophers. Today, I want to use them to explore my age and fame hypothesis : that…
Philosophy should be among the most diverse of the academic disciplines. Instead, it is among the least diverse. Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, social groups, and body types. Who doesn’t care whether we have immaterial souls that might continue to exist after we have died, about ethical issues such as war…
Let's define a discussion arc in philosophy as a curve displaying how frequently a term appears in philosophical journal abstracts, titles, and keywords. Discussion arcs can reveal trends over time, as they come and go. For example, "ordinary language" was a popular topic of discussion in the 1960s: [click to enlarge and clarify] My method: I searched for the term in the abstract, title, or…