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Here is my taxonomy, each item is a distinct and independent dimension where technological progress is possible: Transport matter Store, transport, and release energy Communicate Cooperate Process information Engineer materials Alter experiences Extend life / prevent or reverse biological harm Sensing / detection / metrology Simulate or make predictions Control or manage complex systems Identify,…
What does it mean to understand that something is a pattern? In a puzzle like this: A fairly reliable test is to ask someone to draw the shape that should replace the question mark. This implies that understanding a pattern has something to do with being able to generate more instances of the pattern in question. This in turn suggests a link between pattern recognition and imagination (in this…
I am trying to understand what role images play in a Kantian account of cognition, with a particular focus on his examples concerning judgements about mathematics. This is a topic I am still quite confused about, so I thought I would write a blog post which is just a series of open questions I have. Firstly, it's clear that Kant's notion of image 1 is not the same as the one I would naturally use…
I went to a talk by a wizard. Or a man who seemed like a wizard. I don't think he would call himself a wizard. But he spelt the word magick with a k. Which is a thing wizards do. The talk was a presentation about muses. He brought slides. I liked that he said that what he was about to tell me was not literally true. It made it easier for me to see it as a story. Just like what I am writing now is…
The comedian Rob Paravonian’s “Pachelbel rant” is one of the first YouTube videos I remember watching. He complains about how soul-numbingly boring it was to play the cello line in Canon in D: eight notes, over and over. He performs a whole comedy bit on the theme that modern pop songs keep reusing (essentially) that same chord progression so that he feels like he is being haunted by the…
I spent some time recently reading about community building, and noticed that a lot of frameworks are unidimensional: they describe a single spectrum of "engagement" and rank people by where they are on this spectrum. The analogy that is often used is a funnel (or, equivalently a series of concentric circles). At the top of the funnel you have people who are aware of the community, in the middle…
These are the final weeks of my sabbatical - which means I will soon have less time to write. All the same, I am going to try to resume my habit of publishing a post every day, even when it feels like I have nothing to say . If you want to keep up to date with these you can subscribe to receive emails every time I publish a new post . One way I might choose to keep this habit up once my work…
Imagine you press the following keys on an old-style calculator (the kind which only displays one input or output at a time on the display): 2 + 2 = You are using your calculator to compute the output of some function. Now imagine your calculator has a bug where sometimes, when you press the "+" button it reads that as a press of the "x" button instead. Your calculator is clearly malfunctioning,…
I've been re-reading David Allen's book "Getting Things Done" . I've used it to organise my to-do lists and personal projects for the last two years, which makes it the longest I've stuck to any system for organising tasks. I've noticed three things from going back to the original text: The book makes me strangely nostalgic for a kind of work-space set up I am too young to have actually…
When people ask me whether I think LLMs are phenomenally conscious I often prefer to start by answering a different question: "if they were phenomenally conscious, should we expect them to be phenomenally conscious in a way we could reliably conclude from our interactions with them?". I think that, if we are talking about the underlying neural networks, the answer to this second question is no.…
I intentionally wrote a post which was less than 500 words yesterday, in an attempt to get "kicked out" of the blogging residency which was ending anyway. I thought I was being clever. In the end I was out-smarted by much cleverer forces. Look - I thought it would be good for me to do something a little bit contrarian and silly. Especially when the stakes were so low. I also wrote some reflections…
Inkhaven is the name of the 30 day blogging retreat that I went on this month. The rules were: come meet your blogging heroes, post 500 words a day, online, by midnight or we kick you out. I made it to the final day, but, on purpose, this last post will be fewer than 500 words. My reasons for this are kind of silly, but mostly I think it would be more fun if at least one person failed the program.…
Earlier this month I built a replication of a classic psychology result: time taken to solve shape rotation puzzles scales with the angles between the shapes. I was also curious about some more recent studies linking performance on these tasks to aphantasia, which can be measured via "vividness of visual imagery" questionnaires, so I figured I'd throw one of those on the end of my design. I didn't…
A machine is a physical system that can perform actions in the real world. On this blog I've written a few posts about computing machines, which are physical systems for processing information. However there are many kinds of useful machine beyond this simple computer science definition. Bicycles, vacuum cleaners, cranes, escalators, and airplanes are just a handful of examples I encountered…
In yesterday's joint post with Adria he and I spoke about a surprisingly pernicious problem in the philosophy of computer science: we don't actually have a good account of what "implementation" is. Implementation is one of the most fundamental relations in the philosophy of computer science. In fact, much of the field is dedicated to trying to deploy or make use of it. To give a “computational”…
And it’s screwing up both functionalist theories of consciousness and mechanistic interpretability. Hello! Today's post is a collaboration with Adrià Garriga-Alonso . It is a work in progress but we are posting it in its current state and welcome feedback while we continue to flesh it out. Here are two ways to build a machine which adds two numbers. Machine 1: is a calculator embedded in the wall…
I’ve written a few blog posts lately discussing the aesthetic of cyberpunk media. In particular I’ve written about cyberpunk as an expression of late 20th century tensions between individual freedom of expression and progressive technological utopianism. But where did these tensions come from in the first place? This question was on my mind when I read a blog post about the Olympics by Signore…
Why do mirrors appear to swap our left hands for our right hands but not our heads for our toes? You probably have a preferred answer. If not I recommend you spend some time thinking about it before scrolling down. Lewis Carroll (the author of Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass) is reported to have enjoyed asking people this riddle. The challenge is to come up with a fully…
What have I been blogging about? A lot of my blog posts this year have been on relatively specific, object-level questions in the history and philosophy of computer science or the philosophy of mind. I try to write these so that they'll be of general interest and use to readers whether or not they agree with my overall tastes. Where possible I try to communicate one useful idea or approach for…
This post is a case study, applying ideas related to dynamic nominalism to the practice of giving and receiving feedback on teams with shared goals. Dynamic nominalism is a term I learnt from reading the writing of Ian Hacking, it is the view that: The properties and relations we use when we talk about people or groups of people are primarily constructions of language, they are not fixed and often…
In my post on hackers, wizards, and scientists I ended with the following tension: Fields where individuals can cheaply iterate on technical ideas with tight feedback loops tend to see explosions of innovation. These kinds of deep cycles of tinkering, scaffolded by quick validation, are often only made possible as a byproduct of existing commodity tooling. For example in computer science: early…
I first came across Perpetual Peace when reading about the London 1851 Great Exhibition. In particular I was curious what the main influences were for the strain of post-war cosmopolitan monumentalism that was on display at the crystal palace. Mary Campbell Smith, the translator of the 1903 English edition of Perpetual Peace seems to make a direct link between the text and this 19th century…
Agency The word "agency" can be used to mean many things. Here are two ways I'm especially interested in: Firstly, in contemporary AI research it is used to talk about systems that can take actions autonomously based on interactions with some external environment. This is what distinguishes, for example, LLM agents from LLM chatbots. It's interesting that, with a few exceptions, 1 the academic and…
The medieval debate regarding the problem of universals grew so fierce that it is said to have spilled out into fistfights on the streets of 1400s Paris. 1 This is a blog post about why that debate remains relevant to basic philosophical questions about perception and the possibility of inquiry. Say that you entertain some fact about elm trees and beech trees, for example that elm trees are, on…
Yesterday I wrote a blog post about Jaakko Hintikka's account of the analytic/synthetic distinction in mathematics and logic. This post is a direct follow up to that one, and refers to terms already defined there. I highly reccomend you read it first. Bonus content - computational tractability The authors of the "Depth-Bounded Natural Deduction" paper don't just define a notion for "analytic"…
What kind of judgement is required to establish an arithmetic truth like 2+2=4 or 5+7=12? One way to divide up kinds of judgment is into two kinds: analytic and synthetic . Broadly, analytic judgements are true in virtue of their definitions, while synthetic judgements are true in virtue of their application to the empirical world. Frege, and many 20th century logical positivists defended a view…
In a previous blog post I wrote about Nietzsche's genealogy of guilt in book 2 of the "Genealogy of Morality". In particular I spoke about how, at the end of book 2, Nietzsche urges that, rather than trying to do away with "bad conscience" we instead try to repurpose it towards higher ends. Immediately after that discussion I write: And speaking of moral genealogy, and of modern technology…
In a couple of previous blog posts I talked about functionalist accounts of phenomenal consciousness. This blog post also looks at computational functionalism, but is about mental causation and semantic content rather than about phenomenal consciousness. Functionalist accounts have been used for both of these purposes, that is: on the one hand to explain mental phenomena like beliefs, desires, and…
I didn’t want to write this blog post. But desperate times… When you sign yourself up to a 30 day writing workshop where they kick you out if you don’t publish 500 words every day you go through a series of complex feelings. Couldn’t I just write 500 words a day anyway? I guess they have cool coaches there too, it’ll be nice to meet them and learn from what they have to say. But sometimes…
Read my original blog post about this letter here . Note this is not my transcription. It was graciously provided by hackernews user quuxplusone with permission to reproduce here. I have not checked it for accuracy, and am working on my own transcription on much slower time. Letter from Robert Hooke to Gottfried Leibnitz. Reference number: EL/H3/64. Date: 15 May 1681. Original source: The Royal…
The word "agent" can be applied at a range of scales. You might use it to describe individual biological cells, human beings (made up of cells), or corporations (made up of human beings). If you think there might be a theory of agency that can apply at all these scales, you might describe that theory as hierarchical or scale-free . This blog post is not directly about those approaches, which are…
This is a blog post about the nomological claim that: in this universe, phenomenal consciousness supervenes on functional organisation. I don't think its conclusion has a strong bearing either way on the metaphysical or logical possibility of p-zombies or the question of the explanatory gap. Separately, I think the absent qualia argument provides reasonable evidence that p-zombies are…
This is a blog post about the logical and metaphysical possibility of p-zombies. I don't think its conclusion has a strong bearing either way on the nomological possibility of p-zombies. In fact I think the fading qualia argument provides strong evidence that p-zombies are not nomologically possible. I write about these terms for describing different kinds of possibility in the philosophy of mind…
..instead of saying, the animals play because they are young, we must say, the animals have a youth in order that they may play - Karl Groos — but I do not, therefore, want my life to stop being a game. That's why I subscribe whole-heartedly to Schiller's phrase: ‘Man is fully a man only when he plays.’ - Jean-Paul Sartre S: Still, Grasshopper, I find that I have a serious reservation about the…
In some previous blog posts I spoke about two definitions of the word "function". Loosely, the first definition described functions as descriptions of why you might need to use a thing. The second definition described functions purely as descriptions of what the thing does. Both posts conclude by reflecting that there is another way we use the word "function" - namely to describe how a thing is…
I went to a workshop this week about replicating scientific studies, organised by Slime Mold Time Mold at Inkhaven . Slime Mold Time Mold run a blog which I admire a lot, and if you enjoy this topic you probably will enjoy their blogpost about replication even more. The idea was for a bunch of us to get together and to pick an interesting psychology study and then run a replication of the results.…
You can read more about this speech and my own encounter with it in my full blog post on the topic . Document citation: Churchill Archives Centre, Papers of Ove Arup, ARUP 5/62 SPEECH AT CHRISTENING OF COMPUTER. 11 MAY 1967. Our old computer has been discarded - a new one, bigger, better, more powerful, more gleamingly efficient - has taken its place. This is life - this is progress. 'Progress' is…
Skip to the text of the original speech here . In 2018 I moved to Copenhagen for work. It was a period of my life where I was working very hard to build software to make people better at their jobs. Sometimes people were worried the software would lead to them losing their jobs. We would tell them that they had no need to be worried, the software would only replace the boring parts of their jobs,…
Earlier this week I wrote a post about disambiguating the word function. This is not part 2 of that post - which is something I am still working on. The post ended by taking two examples of C programs which print a 12x12 multiplication table. The first works by iterating over every required entry in the table, and carrying out the appropriate multiplication. int main(void) { int i, j, n = 12; for…
I wanted to share an interesting passage I came across when doing research for an upcoming blog post that mentions Kant's philosophy of arithmetic 1 . I'll start by sharing a bit of background context. The core question at stake is whether you can defend arithmetical judgements like 2 + 2 = 4 purely with an appeal to basic logical laws, or whether some other faculty is required. In Kant's case…
In his 2024 Black Hat talk , Moxie Marlinspike (the cryptographer and founder of Signal) spoke about some ways our world is different to the ones portrayed in fantasy stories like JK Rowling's Harry Potter books. Moxie starts by noting that these books ask us to imagine how exciting life would be if only we lived in a world where all one needed to do magical things was a magic wand and access to a…
Sometimes when people talk about "functions" they are talking about abstract processes that can be instantiated in the real world, other times they are talking about the properties of things that make them fit for some purpose. Other times they mean something else entirely - for example mathematical structure for mapping inputs to unique outputs. In general, many words in natural language are…
Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction about high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture. It’s usually associated with the early days of computer hackers and AI. This is the first in a series of blog posts about how high tech, urban sprawl, and do-it-yourself counterculture were just as much a part of the rapid progress of 17th century natural science as they were of the rapid…
By using the term evaluative philosophy of mind , I am trying to draw attention to philosophical work which studies the value judgements we make about mental phenomena like experiences, desires, and actions. There is already work which does this, but it is often split amongst moral philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics. A natural question to ask is whether this is…
This post is a letter to my 19-year old self, sitting in a "Philosophy of Logic and Language" lecture, and wondering whether I've made a terrible mistake. "I would give the doctrine of this word" writes Bertrand Russell "if I were dead from the waist down and not merely in a prison." You begin to wonder if being in prison (and so having nothing better to do) is a pre-requisite for caring this much…
Alternate title: You can't just keep going up one level of abstraction as a substitute for learning anything difficult In 2017 I had the embarrassing revelation that for most of that year I had been making only one intellectual “move”, which was to make things more abstract and/or recursive and then stepping back to see what happens. This was mainly affecting my academic work, but was also showing…
I ran some games of General Knowledge Poker recently and several people asked me where they could find the rules online, so I wrote them out here. General Knowledge Poker keeps the fun parts of Texas Hold-em but replaces a deck of playing cards with a list of general knowledge questions. I’m pretty sure Texas Hold-em is the most popular poker variant in the English speaking world. I think part of…
Recently I've been thinking 1 about a philosophical movement called logical empiricism 2 and its relationship to the philosophy of mind. This has reminded me that the "empiricism" part of "logical empiricism" is ambiguous in an interesting way. When I was a Computer Science & Philosophy undergrad, at the start of many lectures and discussions on Empiricism with Peter Millican , he would note a…
This is a non exhaustive list of things that I learnt doing a 2-year part-time Philosophy MA that I thought were interesting enough to share. There is a mix of very basic and relatively advanced topics and, in each case, I've tried to include both a brief summary and at least one link where you can read more. The summaries are attempts to describe what I took away from studying these topics in a…
If you know anything about me you might be wondering how I ended up studying more philosophy . (“…wait” you might be thinking, “why would I know anything about you? a random author of some blog I found online?” to which the answer is that at the time of writing the only people reading this are a handful of my university friends and my mum - hi mum!) Anyway, if you’re one of that handful of…