The Splintered Mind

Here's an argument that I'm sure will give my philosopher of physics collaborator Jacob Barandes the fits.

My recent book AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview is free online today and tomorrow (through Oct 19, presumably UK time).

Friends and readers: I have cancer.

[Content warning: suicide] This will be a morbid post; forgive me.

Biological naturalism about consciousness will, I predict, soon be hot.

I have argued that if we someday create AI persons -- that is, AI systems with genuinely rich conscious experiences, fully deserving of equal rights with ordinary humans -- then we should not design them to deferentially serve us, even if serving us makes…

In July, I began circulating a draft of my next book, Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights.

Over almost a decade, starting in 2007, I conducted a series of empirical studies (mostly collaboratively with Joshua Rust) on the moral behavior of ethics professors.

Is the world morally ordered?

Just what you wanted!

Since 2014, I've compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent award nominations and "best of" placements over the previous ten years.

AI and Consciousness, hot off the press at Cambridge University Press and free online until Aug 26!

Aloha from Kauai!

Aloha from Honolulu!

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.

I don't want to read your AI-generated email.

Here.

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.

Available here.

Biological naturalists (e.g., Godfrey-Smith, Block, Searle, Seth) suggest that computers aren't made of the right kind of stuff to be conscious.

... but collectively, we haven't yet figured out how.

Liberals about AI consciousness hold that we might soon (if we haven't already) create genuinely conscious AI systems.

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.

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, e…

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.

Human beings matter morally.

Way back in April 2006, I launched The Splintered Mind.

I offer for your consideration the following ethical motto: Do your thing.

I've just started reading Kim Stanley Robinson's acclaimed climate-science utopia, The Ministry for the Future.

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 rece…

It's confusing.

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.

Most AI systems can be precisely copied.