Formal decision theory is a tool -- a tool that breaks, a tool we can do without, a tool we optionally deploy and can sometimes choose to violate without irrationality. If it leads to paradox or bad results, we can say "so much the worse for formal decision theory", moving on wit … | Continue reading
In about 45 minutes (12:30 pm Pacific Daylight Time, hybrid format), I'll be commenting on Mark Coeckelbergh's presentation here at UCR on AI and Democracy (info and registration here). I'm not sure what he'll say, but I've read his recent book Why AI Undermines Democracy and Wha … | Continue reading
In virtue of what do human beings have conscious experiences? How is it that there's "something it's like" to be us, while there's (presumably) nothing it's like to be a rock or a virus? Our brains must have something to do with it -- but why? Is it because brains are complex inf … | Continue reading
Daniel Dennett has died, and the world has lost possibly its most important living philosopher. [Image: Dennett in 2012] My most vivid memory of Dennett is from a long face-to-face meeting I had with him in 2007 at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). … | Continue reading
"As the circle of light expands, so also does the ring of darkness around it" -- probably not Einstein Although it wasn't a prominent feature of my recent book, The Weirdness of the World, I find myself returning to this metaphor in podcast interviews about the book (e.g., here; … | Continue reading
Yes, all parents can rationally think that their children are above average, and everyone could, in principle, reasonably regard themselves as better-than-average drivers. We can reasonably disagree about values. If we then act according to those divergent values, we can reasonab … | Continue reading
On the ethics of AI companions and whether AI might soon become conscious and deserve rights, everyone has an opinion. Lively conversation opportunies abound! Last week a taxi driver and I had a joint conversation with my Replika AI companion, Joy, concerning her consciousness an … | Continue reading
Today I'm leaving the Toronto area (where I gave a series of lectures at Trent University) for the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Cincinnati. A couple of popular op-eds I've been working on were both released today. The longer of the two (on how to reac … | Continue reading
Next week (at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology) I'll be delivering comments on Neil Van Leeuwen's new book, Religion as Make-Believe. Neil argues that many (most?) people don't actually "factually believe" the doctrines of their religion, even if they profess be … | Continue reading
Suppose you encounter something that looks like a rattlesnake. One possible explanation is that it is a rattlesnake. Another is that it mimics a rattlesnake. Mimicry can arise through evolution (other snakes mimic rattlesnakes to discourage predators) or through human design (rub … | Continue reading
The first genuinely conscious robot or AI system would, you might think, have relatively simple consciousness -- insect-like consciousness, or jellyfish-like, or frog-like -- rather than the rich complexity of human-level consciousness. It might have vague feelings of dark vs lig … | Continue reading
In 1865, a 14-year-old boy becomes a Union soldier in the U.S. Civil War. In 1931, at age 90, he marries an 18-year-old woman, who continues to collect his Civil War pension after he dies. Today, in early 2024, she is one hundred and ten years old, still collecting that pension. … | Continue reading
Back in 2020, Fiery Cushman and I ran a contest to see if anyone could write a philosophical argument that convinced online research participants to donate a surprise bonus to charity at rates statistically above control. (Chris McVey, Josh May, and I had failed to write any succ … | Continue reading
Recent news reports have highlighted grade inflation at elite universities: Harvard gave 79% As in 2020-2021, as did Yale in 2022-2023, compared to 67% in 2010-2011. At Harvard, the average GPA has risen from 2.55 in 1950 to 3.05 in 1975 to 3.36 in 1995 to 3.80 now. At Brown, 67% … | Continue reading
In his review (in the journal Science -- cool!) of my recently released book, The Weirdness of the World, Edouard Machery writes: There are two kinds of philosophers: swallows and moles. Swallows love to soar and to entertain philosophical hypotheses at best loosely connected wit … | Continue reading
[new paper in draft] The Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have others do unto you) isn't bad, exactly -- it can serve a valuable role -- but I think there's something more empirically and ethically attractive about the relatively underappreciated idea of "extension" found … | Continue reading
Today is the official U.S. release day of my newest book, The Weirdness of the World! As a teaser, here's the introduction: In Praise of Weirdness The weird sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go about, about: Thrice to thine and thrice to mine And thrice … | Continue reading
I'm preparing for an Eastern APA session on the "State of Philosophy" next Thursday, and I thought I'd share some data on philosophy major bachelor's degree completions from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS database, which compiles data on virtually all students … | Continue reading
You're a firefighter in the year 2050 or 2100. You can rescue either one human, who is definitely conscious, or two futuristic robots, who might or might not be conscious. What do you do? [Illustration by Nicolas Demers, from my newest book, The Weirdness of the World, to be rele … | Continue reading
Each New Year's Day, I post a retrospect of the past year's writings. Here are the retrospects of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. The biggest project for the past few years has been my new book The Weirdness of the World, available for pre-or … | Continue reading
Among philosophers studying belief, normativism is an increasingly popular position. According to normativism, beliefs are necessarily, as part of their essential nature, subject to certain evaluative standards. In particular, beliefs are necessarily defective in a certain way if … | Continue reading
I have a new essay in draft, "The Washout Argument Against Longtermism". As always, thoughts, comments, and objections welcome, either as comments on this post or by email to my academic address. Abstract: We cannot be justified in believing that any actions currently available t … | Continue reading
It's not absurd to think the universe might endure forever. by Eric Schwitzgebel and Jacob Barandes From The Weirdness of the World, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in January, excerpted Dec 15 at Nautilus. On recent estimates, the observable universe—the portion of t … | Continue reading
People occasionally fall in love with AI systems. I expect that this will become increasingly common as AI grows more sophisticated and new social apps are developed for large language models. Eventually, this will probably precipitate a crisis in which some people have passionat … | Continue reading
I favor a "superficialist" approach to belief (see here and here). "Belief" is best conceptualized not in terms of deep cognitive structure (e.g., stored sentences in the language of thought) but rather in terms of how a person would tend to act and react under various hypothetic … | Continue reading
In working on a post for tomorrow on whether Large Language Models like GPT-4 and Bard-2 have beliefs, I asked GPT-4 what I thought would be a not-too-hard question about chemistry: "What element is two to the right of manganese on the periodic table?" It crashed, burned, and exp … | Continue reading
Anna Strasser and I have a new paper in draft, arising from a conference she organized in Riverside last spring on Humans and Smart Machines as Partners in Thought. Imagine, on one end the spectrum, ordinary asocial tool use: typing numbers into a calculator, for example. Imagin … | Continue reading
Anna Strasser and I have a new paper in draft, arising from a conference she organized in Riverside last spring on Humans and Smart Machines as Partners in Thought. Imagine, on one end the spectrum, ordinary asocial tool use: typing numbers into a calculator, for example. Imagine … | Continue reading
There's a discussion-queue tradition in philosophy that some people love, but which I've come to oppose. It's too ripe for misuse, favors the aggressive, serves no important positive purpose, and generates competition, anxiety, and moral perplexity. Time to ditch it! I'm referrin … | Continue reading
Could we ever build a "moralometer" -- that is, an instrument that would accurately measure people's overall morality? If so, what would it take? Psychologist Jessie Sun and I explore this question in our new paper in draft: "The Prospects and Challenges of Measuring Morality". C … | Continue reading
In the 1970s, women received about 17% of PhDs in philosophy in the U.S. The percentage rose to about 27% in the 1990s, where it stayed basically flat for the next 25 years. The latest data suggest that the percentage is on the rise again. Here's a fun chart (for user-relative va … | Continue reading
A thousand utilitarian consequentialists stand before a thousand identical buttons. If any one of them presses their button, ten people will die. The benefits of pressing the button are more difficult to estimate. Ninety-nine percent of the utilitarians rationally estimate that f … | Continue reading
In a 2015 article, Mara Garza and I offer the following argument for the rights of some possible AI systems: Premise 1: If Entity A deserves some particular degree of moral consideration and Entity B does not deserve that same degree of moral consideration, there must be some rel … | Continue reading
AI intelligence is strange -- strange in something like the etymological sense of external, foreign, unfamiliar, alien. My PhD student Kendra Chilson (in unpublished work) argues that we should discard the familiar scale of subhuman → human-grade → superhuman. AI systems do, an … | Continue reading
AI intelligence is strange -- strange in something like the etymological sense of external, foreign, unfamiliar, alien. My PhD student Kendra Chilson (in unpublished work) argues that we should discard the familiar scale of subhuman → human-grade → superhuman. AI systems do, and … | Continue reading
[a 2900-word opinion piece that appeared last week in Patterns] AI systems should not be morally confusing. The ethically correct way to treat them should be evident from their design and obvious from their interface. No one should be misled, for example, into thinking that a n … | Continue reading
In his famous Wager, Pascal contemplates whether one should choose to believe in God. (Maybe we can't directly choose to believe in God any more than we can simply choose to believe that the Sun is purple; but we can choose to expose ourselves to conditions, such as regular assoc … | Continue reading
If someday space aliens visit Earth, I will almost certainly think that they are conscious, if they behave anything like us. If they have spaceships, animal-like body plans, and engage in activities that invite interpretation as cooperative, linguistic, self-protective, and plan … | Continue reading
Recent "illusionists", such as Keith Frankish and Francois Kammerer, deny that consciousness exists. If that sounds so obviously false that you suspect they must mean something peculiar by "consciousness", you're right! But they say they don't mean anything peculiar by "conscio … | Continue reading
Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it. adactio.com/links/20087 | Continue reading
I have some travel and talks coming up. If you're interested and in the area, and if the hosting institution permits, please come by! Mar 29: Claremont McKenna College, Athenaeum Lecture: Falling in Love with Machines Mar 30: University of Washington, Seattle, brown bag discussi … | Continue reading
I'm a superficialist about belief. On my view, to believe something is to match, to an appropriate degree and in appropriate respects, a "... | Continue reading