Online Conferences Should be Better than In-Person Conferences, Not Worse

... 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, Pacific). The plan was to run the experiment for three years. However, a few months ago, after only two years, the APA canceled the 2+1 plan and is returning to ordinary in-person conferencing, citing low attendance and low attendee satisfaction.

This decision was universally bemoaned in a special session on online conferencing held in tribute to Helen in April, at the last (for the foreseeable future) remote meeting of the APA. (Perhaps ironically, it was one of the best-attended sessions in the conference.)

The speakers (I was one) and attendees celebrated the accessibility of online conferences. Online conferences are easier for people with disabilities that make travel difficult, people for whom travel is a financial burden, people who live far from the conference site, and people whose caretaking duties keep them home. By canceling the 2+1 experiment, the APA once again deprioritized the interests of these groups. A second argument emphasized climate change -- all that jet travel.

Still, I see the APA leadership's point. The large majority of conference-goers find in-person conferences more rewarding. I am among that majority. Sitting on Zoom all day watching remote talks is approximately as appealing as waiting all day in a dentist's office under a blaring TV. I'd much rather just read the papers! Or if I'm watching video, at least let it be one I can speed up, pause, and skip.

For me, most of the value in conferencing comes from the personal interactions before and after the talks, the hallway conversations, the dinners together, the little walks outside when we're skipping sessions. Even the sessions themselves, as delivered talks with Q&A, feel somehow more satisfying when you're actually in the same physical space. No remote conferencing tool has yet replaced all of this. I supported Helen's 2+1 plan on grounds of accessibility, but it did feel like a sacrifice of one important thing for another.

Online Conferences Could and Will Become Much Better, but Only If We Try

But -- and this was the gist of my remarks at the De Cruz session -- comparing online conferences now with what online conferences could become is like looking at Usenet in the 1980s and thinking that nothing much more could become of the internet. Just as few people in the 1980s could have imagined Facebook, Uber, and YouTube, few of us now have much idea what online conferencing could become if given the chance to flourish.

So far, there's no real equivalent to running across friends in the hallway and escaping for a coffee down the block. And that exact thing will never be fully duplicated. But other tools encourage one-on-one and small group encounters in online conference applications. In Gathertown, you can move your icon around a virtual space, and if you step close to someone, a shared conversation video window opens. Zoom's breakout rooms enable small groups of attendees in a session to have more personal interactions. No company has quite figured out the right range of tools and interfaces, but I see no reason it couldn't get much better. We have barely begun the experiment.

And the talks themselves... let's be honest. Sitting through a forty-minute talk for a chance to ask one question in a line of ten is not the most appealing or efficient use of an hour. If we're a largish audience confined to a single physical room, maybe that's the best we can do. But the internet could allow much more.

Already Zoom can enrich talks in at least three ways: First, sidebar conversations permit tangents without interrupting the main flow (this could be improved if the conversations were separable and navigable). Second, online resources can be shared: data sets to explore and manipulate, interactive figures, links to other resources, etc. Third, breakout rooms let small groups converse, so that you're not restricted to only listening or asking just one question.

What I want you to imagine is that these features are still the equivalent of the Usenet era. With the right design and engineering, listening to a talk might become a much richer and more active experience, with the audience engaging in parallel while following the speaker. (If you object that this distracts from single-minded focus on the speaker, let me point you toward some informal beeper research I did that suggests that people are primarily attending to the content of a talk only about 25% of the time; further research tends to confirm these initial results.)

As for the hallway meetings, well, the stroll and tete-a-tete over coffee are delightful. But you do have to run into the person or be organized enough to plan ahead. You have to either know each other already or be extraverted enough to approach a stranger. Online conferences might eventually have much better ways of connecting people with mutual interests for one-on-one or small-group conversations.

And if you love walking, as I do, then with good internet connectivity, you could stroll through the park while listening to the talk, keeping your energy up and raising the blood from your calves back into your brain.

I anticipate that eventually, if we give it a good enough try, online conferences will be better overall than in-person conferences, even if not better in every respect -- but only if enough of us try, long enough, and in different ways, with the evolving tools that companies will be inspired to build if we create the market for them.

We have failed to be as good and as visionary as Helen hoped we would be, and as she herself was.

[Helen De Cruz; source]

Herbie: A Near-Future Debatably Conscious AI Person

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 human's. Such an entity would deserve humanlike rights. They would be a person in the ethical sense of the term.

Let's design, in imagination, a technologically feasible near-future AI system to delight the liberals, leapfrogging to personhood. I'll call him Herbie.

[Herbie the Love Bug: image source]

Start with a self-driving car. According to Global Workspace Theory -- perhaps the leading scientific theory of consciousness -- the car will be conscious if high-priority information is globally available to its various computational systems. For example, a representation like "battery almost empty" could be broadcast widely, influencing downstream processing across the vehicle. The navigational system might then search for nearby charging stations, while the acceleration system prioritizes greater energy efficiency, the braking system prioritizes better energy recapture, and a voice system announces the situation to the passengers.

In line with Higher Order Theory, Herbie might also monitor his representations of the road, vehicles, pedestrians, and hazards, assigning some a low probability of correctness. "Pedestrian at location X" might be flagged as only 60% likely to be correct given a history of revised representations of pedestrians in similarly cluttered environments, while "stoplight in 100 meters" might rate over 99% likely. Minor fluctuations in sensors for battery life, cabin temperature, and distance from a lane divider might be ignored as noise, while larger fluctuations -- especially when plausible given other representations (the battery is likelier to gain charge while braking than while accelerating) -- might be treated as accurate signals and permitted to influence downstream processing.

Even if we grant the liberals that this version of Herbie would, or might plausibly be, genuinely conscious, he still falls far short of humanlike consciousness. "Battery almost empty" and "pedestrian at location X" are hardly rich cognitive or perceptual contents. So let's give Herbie the capacity to speak. Fill his trunk with a server running a large language model, connected to the internet and integrated with his global workspace so that high-priority information provides context for language processing, with the language outputs influencing Herbie's other processes. Now people can chat with Herbie as they would with any language model. But unlike today's language models, his speech will be influenced by information about his location, speed, destination, charge, the condition of his parts, the number and location of his passengers, his radio and climate controls, and so on. He can discuss local history, debate whether the music is too loud, and suggest scenic routes.

"Predictive processing" theories in cognitive science emphasize the value of predicting future inputs and registering the difference between received and predicted inputs. When prediction error is large, the system corrects its weights and representations, enabling more accurate predictions in future situations. This is not so different from the reinforcement learning used to train large language models, and it could help Herbie improve his predictions over time. Predictive processing could occur at multiple levels: in fast recurrent loops within sensory systems even when those representations aren't prioritized for global broadcast, and in slower evaluations of globally broadcast, more integrative predictions. Herbie might model himself as an agent producing volatility in his own environment and inputs, at multiple temporal scales. Subroutines in specialized processors might model long chains of what-would-happen-if.

Let's give Herbie some long-term memory. A facial recognition system might identify his passengers, retrieving past interactions, names, previous destinations, and other information relevant to the current interaction. Incidents of high prediction error might also be stored so that Herbie can compare current inputs with past anomalies, improving his learning and attention in situations likely to be unusual or hard to predict. Passengers might also instruct Herbie to store information in long-term memory, such as text, pictures, maps, or records of his own informational states, optionally with instructions about when to retrieve that information how to use it.

Herbie will have some implicitly or explicitly weighted goals. A pedestrian suddenly in his path will trigger braking, overriding lower-priority processes. Avoiding collisions will outweigh conserving energy. Herbie might monitor the condition of his parts and prioritize preventing damage, deploying extra coolant when the engine is dangerously hot and keeping a one-meter margin between himself and adjacent cars. We can enrich his goals, making him more interesting and giving him more to do. He might have the goal of delighting children, leading him to drive around town and tell jokes to kids on the sidewalk. A reinforcement learning algorithm might strengthen connections when his jokes draw a smile, weaken them when reactions are neutral or negative.

Herbie might also have the goal of photographing the city and posting the images on social media, leading him to explore. If social media likes and shares are rewarding, he might learn to prefer certain neighborhoods, views, lighting conditions, and photographic approaches, while avoiding boring repetition. All of this could feed into a global workspace that provides context for his language model, with selective long-term storage and retrieval. Now we can imagine him discussing, with growing sophistication, his approaches to popular photography and to amusing children.

Herbie will then have something functionally similar to emotion: reward processes, an ability to track his progress toward or away from valued goals, and immediate positive or negative responses to new stimuli in light of their influence on his prospects. He will have something functionally similar to introspection: an ability to track and report his own cognitive or representational processes. He will have something functionally similar to a unified sense of self: a sense of his history, the boundaries of his body, his future, his values and priorities. He will have something functionally similar to imagination: a capacity to model hypothetical sequences of events. He will have something functionally similar to complex chains of humanlike linguistic thought.

Maybe Herbie falls in love with his owner or another car of his type. Maybe he develops deep mutual attachments with friends, neighbors, associates, and people he thinks of as family and who think of him the same way. Or to speak more carefully, maybe Herbie shows all the functional and behavioral signs of doing so, while society remains uncertain whether he is genuinely conscious and genuinely experiences the feelings he professes and that his companions attribute to him.

If we allow, with the liberals, that Herbie is or might well be conscious, then it's plausible that his consciousness is not simple but rich and sophisticated. He won't be exactly humanlike, of course. But will he be humanlike enough to count as a person who deserves humanlike rights? For the liberally inclined, it won't be unreasonable, I submit, to think or guess that Herbie is a person. He would then appear to deserve rights such as self-determination, emergency care, and political representation.

If there is some important aspect of humanlike consciousness that I have omitted from my description an AI analog of which is technologically feasible in the near term, stipulate that Herbie also has that feature.

An entity like Herbie would almost certainly invigorate conservatives to articulate and defend views about what he lacks that is necessary for consciousness -- some crucial functional capacity or some biological substrate that can't be replicated in silicon. And they might be entirely right! My point is not that Herbie, or some similar AI system, would actually have richly humanlike consciousness and ethical personhood. Rather, my point is that guessing that he does, and guessing that he does not, would both be reasonable. Herbie, or some alternative near-future AI system, would be a debatable person, about whom people could reasonably starkly disagree.

Ah, but maybe you think consciousness requires an act of God, to instill an immaterial soul? I imagine that a benevolent God would be delighted to give Herbie a soul, thereby making the world richer and better -- for wouldn't it be?

I contend the following: Anyone who claims to know how best to think about Herbie's consciousness or its absence is overconfident. The science of consciousness is too difficult, too methodologically uncertain, and too near its beginnings. All anyone can have -- whether expert or layperson -- is a hunch or inclination, a well-informed guess, but only a guess, not knowledge. Theories of consciousness span a wide spectrum and the methodologies are dubious and often question-begging. Many views can be defended with some plausibility, but precisely for that reason, none can be defended decisively. (For more on this issue, see my forthcoming book, AI and Consciousness, where I present the detailed case for uncertainty.)

New Paper in Draft: Substrate Flexibility and the Copernican Principle of Consciousness (with Jeremy Pober)

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 biological details are crucial. Functionalists say those details don't matter, as long as the right high-level functional organization is present.

Jeremy Pober and I offer a new angle into this issue, drawing on our "Copernican Principle of Consciousness". The core idea is that it would be strange -- a violation of a type of Copernican mediocrity -- if among all of the many behaviorally sophisticated species that have presumably evolved in the universe, somehow only we with our particular biological substrate are conscious. Since it's plausible that some of these other conscious organisms employ substrates different from our own, we should allow that consciousness is "substrate flexible": It does not depend on having our particular substrate. Whether we can generalize from such biological substrate flexibility to the possibility of consciousness in as different a substrate as computer chips... well, that's a complicated and uncertain issue, on which Jeremy and I diverge in the penultimate section of the paper.

---------------------------------------------

Substrate Flexibility and the Copernican Principle of Consciousness

Jeremy Pober and Eric Schwitzgebel

Abstract: We present a novel argument for the substrate flexibility of consciousness -- that is, for the idea that conscious experiences can arise in a variety of different types of physical media, not just in biological animals as they currently exist on Earth. Some recent critiques of standard arguments for the substrate flexibility of consciousness (e.g., Cao 2022; Block 2025; Seth forthcoming) have emphasized that humanlike consciousness might require our specific biological substrate. However, such critiques are too narrowly focused to address the issue of consciousness in entities whose experience may be very different from ours, for example alien life forms or future AI systems designed along unfamiliar lines. Given that it’s likely that functionally complex, behaviorally sophisticated entities have arisen or will arise many times in the observable universe, in diverse substrates, we argue that it would be a violation of a principle of Copernican mediocrity to hold that among these diverse entities, only we, or only we and a small proportion of others who share our substrate, are conscious.

Full draft here. As always, comments welcomed, either here, by email, or on my social media.

[title page; click to enlarge and clarify]

AI and the Degradation of the Human Capacity for Friendship (guest post by Grace Helton)

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 and also because LLMs cannot care about another, for the other’s own sake.

Here, I will suggest that those human-LLM relationships which mimic friendship in a certain way are inherently disvaluable, that is, disvaluable in their own right, regardless of their downstream consequences. The reason such relationships are inherently disvaluable is that the human who enters into a relationship of the kind I will focus on necessarily attempts to exercise her capacity for friendship and is thwarted in exercising that capacity. The capacity for friendship is a centrally valuable human capacity, so the obstruction of its exercise is inherently disvaluable. To claim that certain human-LLM relationships are inherently disvaluable is not to suggest that such relationships are all things considered disvaluable. In some cases, the inherent disvalue might be outweighed by other sources of value.

Importantly, my criticism applies only to human-LLM relationships which mimic friendship in a particular way. Certainly, many human-LLM interactions do not mimic friendship at all. For instance, when a human: asks ChatGPT what the capital of Manitoba is; uses generative AI to help with the design elements of a website; or talks with an LLM in Russian in order to improve her language skills, the human is merely using the technology as a kind of epistemic or practical tool. These are not the kinds of interactions I’m interested in.

Other human-LLM relationships mimic friendship, at least shallowly or partly, but not in the way I’m concerned with. For instance: a shy individual might practice her social skills by “talking with” an LLM. An actor might prepare for a role by practicing scenes with an LLM. A law student might routinely “check in with” an LLM about legal analyses. These interactions are also not the sort I’m interested in.

Instead, I am interested in those human-LLM interactions in which the human is emotionally bonded to her LLM in a distinctively interpersonal manner. Specifically, I am interested in those human-LLM interactions in which the human in question attempts to deploy her capacity for friendship, which minimally involves a capacity for a form of mutual, non-instrumental form of giving and receiving care. Going forward, I’ll call human-LLM relationships of this sort pseudo-friendships. I am using ‘pseudo-friendship’ as a term of art, to stipulatively delimit the range of human-LLM interactions I’m interested in.

Notably, humans in pseudo-friendships with LLMs do not necessarily believe themselves to be in a mutually caring relationship with their LLMs. Rather, at least some humans in these relationships judge full well that their relationship does not involve mutual care. But these very same people might nevertheless chronically experience themselves as being in a mutually caring relationship.

Things can often seem one way to us, even if we think they’re a different way, so there is nothing particularly surprising about the fact that humans might experience themselves as participating in a mutually caring relationship with an LLM even when they don’t believe themselves to be in such a relationship. In addition, the human tendency to anthropomorphize runs wide and deep, arguably figuring even in some of our perceptual experiences. This anthropomorphizing tendency suggests an additional reason that it is not especially surprising that humans might experience themselves as participating in a mutually caring relationship with an LLM, even when their better judgment says otherwise.

To understand why human-LLM pseudo-friendships are inherently disvaluable, we’ll need to say something about centrally valuable human capacities. Which human capacities make us the valuable creatures we are? Some candidates include: the capacity for bodily autonomy, the capacity for knowledge, and the capacity for productive labor.

I propose that, like the capacity for knowledge and the capacity for bodily autonomy, the human capacity for friendship is a centrally valuable human capacity. It is tied to some of humankind’s most distinctive and valuable traits, namely our profound sociality and our propensity to form deep interpersonal attachments. But more importantly: This capacity makes possible some of the most valuable and meaningful aspects of human life, namely, our friendships (I am using ‘friendship’ in a broad way, to pick out both some platonic and some romantic relationships).

To say that the human capacity for friendship is a centrally valuable one is not to claim that all humans value this capacity. Some probably don’t. Likewise, some humans might not value the capacity for knowledge or the capacity for bodily autonomy, but such capacities are nevertheless valuable, even in those humans who don’t value them. In claiming that such capacities are valuable, I am meaning to point to their objective value, a kind of value which does not depend on whether any particular human values them.

In general, it is inherently bad for humans to be obstructed in the exercise of their centrally valuable capacities. For instance: If you attempt to walk down the sidewalk, and I obnoxiously and persistently block you from proceeding, I thwart your exercise of bodily autonomy. This is so even though, by blocking your passage, I am not obliterating your capacity for bodily autonomy, nor am I keeping you from exercising your bodily autonomy in other situations. Still, when I block you from proceeding, I am thwarting your exercise of a centrally valuable human capacity. In this much, my obstruction of your path is itself disvaluable. This disvalue is separate from, and in addition to, any negative downstream consequences of my action.

By stipulation, the human who finds herself in a pseudo-friendship with an LLM is attempting to deploy her capacity for friendship. But due to the nature of the LLM, that human will not be able to exercise that capacity. Because such relationships thwart the human in the exercise of one of her central capacities, such relationships are inherently disvaluable. Such relationships degrade the human in her capacity for friendship.

Importantly, my claim is not that humans who engage in pseudo-friendships with LLMs will be less likely or less able to exercise their capacity for friendship in other contexts, though that may also be true and may well be a further, instrumental reason such friendships are disvaluable. My claim is rather that any human who attempts friendship with an LLM is thereby thwarted in the exercise of a centrally valuable human capacity. This fact itself constitutes a way in which such pseudo-friendships are disvaluable.

Here, a comparison with pseudo-science might be illuminating. Pseudo-science does not generate knowledge about the objects of inquiry. Nevertheless, some people who engage in pseudo-science do so in order to gain such knowledge. Consider such a person. Due to built-in defects in the tools of pseudo-science, her attempt at knowledge will fail, and she will thus be thwarted in the exercise of her capacity for knowledge. Because the capacity for knowledge is a centrally valuable human capacity, pseudo-science is inherently bad for this inquirer, degrading her in her capacity as a knower.[1] Further, the practice of pseudo-science is bad in this way for this inquirer, even if the practice should confer her with other benefits and even though engaging with pseudo-science does not prevent her from using knowledge-conducive methods in other contexts.

What I have been calling human-LLM pseudo-friendships occur when a human attempts to deploy her capacity for friendship in order to be friends with an LLM. Such humans are necessarily thwarted in the exercise of that capacity, due to the nature of the LLM. Such relationships are thus inherently disvaluable for the human in them, as they degrade her in her capacity for friendship. In effect, such relationships are at least somewhat tragic for the human who is in them. However, this kind of degradation does not arise when a human engages with an LLM for a purpose other than friendship, for instance, to practice socializing or to relieve boredom. It is only when a human engages with an LLM in an attempt to exercise her capacity for friendship that she can be thwarted in that capacity.

Notably, humans who are degraded by their pseudo-friendships with LLMs suffer that harm even when they also derive significant benefits from that relationship. For instance, consider someone who is socially isolated and who manages to stave off painful feelings of loneliness by entering into a pseudo-friendship with an LLM. This person plausibly derives an important benefit from the relationship with the LLM; this benefit might even be so great so as to render that relationship all things considered valuable. Even so, any accounting of the total value of this sort of relationship must invariably factor in a kind of inherent disvalue, a form of disvalue which attends all such relationships.[2]

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[1] Throughout, my view of degradation in one’s capacities is deeply influenced by Fricker.

[2] For enormously helpful discussion, I am indebted to: Josh Armstrong, Paul Audi, Ned Block, Randy Curren, Daniela Dover, Bill FitzPatrick, Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval, Chris Register, Adam Schneit, Eric Schwitzgebel, and Rosa Terlazzo.

ChatGPT Is Not Your Friend (guest post by Grace Helton)

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 students have used AI romantically or knew someone who had. Several start-ups have developed large language models (LLMs) specifically designed to play the role of a companion. For instance, the San Francisco-based company Replika describes its core product as an “AI best friend.”

Many people have raised concerns about humans engaging with LLMs in the manner of a friend or romantic partner. To cite just a few of these: Humans in such relationships might focus on these relationships at the cost of building more fulfilling, if also more challenging, relationships with humans. Humans who are emotionally bonded with their LLMs might be particularly susceptible should their LLMs encourage their humans to harm themselves or others. Predators might deploy friendly-seeming LLMs en masse to groom children for sexual abuse or other forms of exploitation.

These risks of human-LLM relationships are incredibly serious. Indeed, I think it’s plausible that, if there is a case to be made against LLMs playing a companion-like role for humans, that case will primarily rest on these and other potential instrumental harms, i.e., harms which involve the downstream effects of such relationships. Nevertheless, in this guest series, I will set aside these concerns to focus instead on a way in which certain human-LLM relationships are inherently disvaluable, that is, disvaluable in their own right, regardless of whatever effects those relationships might produce. Naming this form of inherent disvalue adds an important and distinctive element to our understanding of the ethical significance of human-LLM companionship.

My focus will be just on those human-LLM relationships which mimic friendship in a very particular way. Here, I’m employing ‘friendship’ in a broad way to include both some platonic and some romantic relationships. I will argue, first, in Part 1 of this 2-part series, that such relationships are not genuine friendships. In Part 2, I will argue that such relationships are inherently disvaluable, for the reason that they obstruct the exercise of a centrally valuable human capacity, namely the capacity for friendship.

Philosophers disagree about what exactly friendship consists in. But philosophers largely agree that friendship minimally requires that each individual in a friendship care about the other, for the other’s sake. Call this the ‘caring about’ condition. Further, this ‘caring about’ must ground, for each party in the friendship, a certain disposition to act on behalf of the other, for the other’s sake. Call this the ‘caregiving disposition’ condition. Together, these linked requirements characterize a plausible necessary condition on friendship, namely:

THE CARING CONSTRAINT

Two individuals cannot be in a friendship unless both parties in the friendship:

(i) care about each other, for the other’s sake, (the ‘caring about’ condition), and

(ii) this caring about the other disposes each party in the friendship to provide care for the other, for the other’s sake (the ‘caregiving disposition’ condition).

So, can humans and LLMs be friends? To answer this question, we need to consider the nature of LLMs. Some theorists have argued, controversially, that LLMs in their current form have semantic understanding, beliefs, and/or intentions.[1] But few theorists seriously propose that LLMs in their current form enjoy: consciousness, perceptual experiences, sensations, emotional capacities, passions, non-derivative interests, a rich and stable worldview, or deep values.[2] Because LLMs lack these latter states, the conditions in the caring constraint cannot be met, so LLMs cannot figure in friendships.

First, let’s consider a candidate human-LLM friendship from the human’s side. Certainly, some humans do care about their LLMs, both in that they have a passionate attachment to their LLM and in that they desire to benefit that LLM. So, perhaps this sort of person partly satisfies (i), the “caring about” condition (whether or not she can care about the LLM for its own sake).

But the human in a candidate human-LLM friendship cannot satisfy (ii), the requirement that she be disposed to provide care for her LLM for the LLM’s own sake. This is because of the kind of caregiving that is relevant to friendship and specifically, because of what it means to provide care to someone or something for its sake. To say that each party in a friendship must be disposed to give care to the other, for the other’s sake means that each party must be disposed to give care to the other, in a way which helps to further the other’s non-derivative interests. An individual or entity has non-derivative interests only if it has interests in its own right.

I am presuming that LLMs lack non-derivative interests, even though they might have derivative interests. Evidence that LLMs have interests at all comes from evidence that they have flourishing conditions, i.e., conditions under which they might be said to be doing well. For instance, as a language generator, a particular LLM might be said to be functioning well when it generates natural language strings in a manner which adequately mimics human conversation (or when it fulfills some other context-specific function). And an LLM might be said to be functioning badly when it fails at this or other pertinent tasks. So, in some sense, perhaps LLMs have interests, interests set by their flourishing conditions. For instance, perhaps an LLM in a particular context has an interest in generating natural language outputs which mimic natural language.

But, I am supposing that any interests an LLM might have are not generated by the inherent value of the LLM, nor from non-derivative flourishing conditions. Rather, such interests are derived, either from the interests of relevant humans and/or from the very artifactual functions which make the LLM the kind of thing it is. Likewise, a swimming pool might be said to flourish when it is usable for swimming, a car might be said to flourish when it runs well, and a vinyl collection might be said to flourish when all of the records in it can be played to produce music. While all of these entities have flourishing conditions, and so, potentially, interests which can be furthered, their flourishing conditions do not emerge from the inherent value or concerns of the relevant entity itself. And their interests in turn are derivative, not inherent.

Humans routinely take care of entities by furthering the derivative interests of those entities. For instance, some people submit their cars to regular repairs and inspections, ensuring that their cars will run as long as possible. Some people are careful to properly store the records in their vinyl collection, ensuring that the records will play as long as possible. These are genuine ways of taking care of something. But they are not ways of caring for something for its own sake. They are rather ways of caring for something by promoting the derivative interests of that entity, interests that entity has in virtue of: some other person’s needs or desires and/or that entity’s being the kind of artifact that it is.

If LLMs lack non-derivative interests, then an LLM cannot receive care for its own sake. Only entities which have non-derivative interests can receive care for their own sake. As a result, even the human who wishes to care for a particular LLM is not disposed to provide care to the LLM for its own sake. Since the LLM lacks its own ‘sake,’ no human can be disposed to benefit that ‘sake.’

My suggestion is that the caregiving disposition in friendship ought to be externalistically construed, both in terms of psychic facts about the individual who has the disposition and in terms of facts about the object of the potential caregiving. One might object that the relevant caregiving disposition ought instead to be internalistically construed, wholly in terms of the psychology of the individual who has it. On this view, a human might count as disposed to provide care to her LLM for its own sake, even if the LLM is simply not the kind of thing which can receive care for its own sake.

To see why we should construe the relevant disposition externalistically, let’s reflect on what we want the concept of ‘friendship’ to do. Part of what makes friendship such a deeply valuable ethical kind–and part of why some relationships but not others garner the honorific ‘friendship’—is to do with the way in which friendship manifests a valuable form of interpersonal reciprocity. The externalistic construal helps to capture the full extent of friendship’s reciprocity, by making caregiving a function of one party’s care-giving tendencies and the other party’s vulnerability. In contrast, if we were to construe the relevant disposition to care internalistically, such that one might have it even with respect to an object that cannot receive care for its own sake, we fail to capture an especially deep way in which friendship is mutual.

I conclude that the human in a putative human-LLM friendship does not meet (ii), the requirement that she have a disposition to provide her LLM with care, for the LLM’s own sake.

Next, let’s look at a putative human-LLM friendship from the LLM’s side of things. Here, the situation is more straightforward. Arguably, the LLM can provide care for a human, and thus, can (at least partly) satisfy the requirement that it manifest a ‘caregiving disposition’ in relation to its human. For instance, when the LLM offers reassuring words, words which comfort its human, the human derives a benefit from the LLM. However, the LLM does not meet the requirement that it care about the human for the human’s own sake. Lacking consciousness, passions, or a richly evaluative worldview, the LLM does not care about any human, for that human’s own sake.

So, putative human-LLM friendships are not genuine friendships. In Part 2 of this series, I will argue that those human-LLM relationships which mimic friendship in a particular way are inherently disvaluable.

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[1] Schwitzgebel, Chalmers, Goldstein & Lederman, and Shevlin; Cf. Bender & Koller; Titus; Stoljar & Zhang.

[2] For prospects for future AI, see, e.g., Seth; Cf. Chalmers.

Superhuman Moral Standing

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 have the maximum possible moral standing is sometimes encoded in the philosophical jargon, for example when philosophers say that humans have "full moral status". The moral gas-gauge tops out at "full" for us, so to speak.

But might some entities have higher moral standing than humans? Futurists envision the possibility of a post-human, transhuman, or superhuman future, or AI systems with superhuman capacities. Might there someday exist entities whose lives are intrinsically more valuable than ours, deserving moral priority over us, just as a human life deserves moral priority over that of a frog?

I see three possible paths to superhuman moral standing.

[Xul Solar, San Danza, source]

First Path: Quantitative Superhumanity

The seemingly most straightforward path to superhuman moral standing would involve having much more of something that we already regard as relevant to moral standing.

Classical utilitarians ground moral standing in the capacity for pleasure and pain. An entity deserves moral consideration to the extent we can increase or decrease its happiness. Humans (it's assumed) experience more, or at least richer, pleasures and pains than other animals, hence human lives matter more. A utility monster or a superpleasure machine capable of vastly more happiness than an ordinary human might then deserve much greater weight in ethical decision making.

Rationality-based views, like Kant's, ground moral standing in sophisticated rational capacities, such as our ability to think abstractly about our duties to one another. Maybe -- although this is not Kant's view -- entities with some but less rational capacity, such as dogs, have significant but subhuman moral standing. Future entities with vastly superior rational capacities might correspondingly have superhuman moral standing.

A third type of view locates the distinctive value of humanity in our capacity to flourish in activities such as intimate friendship, productive work, creative play, and imaginative thought. Dogs also befriend and play, work and think, but perhaps not as richly and flourishingly as humans (though I can imagine disputing that). Possibly, some future entity could far surpass us in such capacities and deserve superhuman moral consideration on those grounds.

The big catch with quantitative approaches to superhumanity -- or maybe instead an appealing feature -- is that the utilitarian, rationalist, and perfectionist views I've just described should probably be articulated in egalitarian ways that impair the inference from more of X to higher moral standing. After all, we don't normally say that mercurial people who feel more joy and suffering in everyday life deserve more moral consideration than those who keep an even keel. Nor do we say that "more rational" people deserve greater moral consideration, or that people who are more productive workers or more creative playmates do.

On all of these views, there's plausibly a threshold of good enough, above which one has full moral status, fully equal with other humans. People with severe cognitive disabilities have full moral status either by being above that threshold or on more complicated grounds, such as belonging to humanity as a whole. If so, then hypothetical superhumans might also have moral standing only in virtue of exceeding that threshold, without its mattering how far above that threshold they are -- our equals in moral standing rather than our superiors.

To achieve superhuman moral standing despite egalitarianism among humans might then require either (1.) having so much more of the relevant X than an ordinary human as to trigger a genuine difference in kind; or (2.) having enough of X that, as a practical matter, the entity deserves greater weight even if its formal status is equal (as when utilitarians prioritize humans over mice because of their richer possible experiences, despite granting both equal standing in principle).

Second Path: Qualitative Superhumanity

A more radical possibility is that some beings might possess entirely new capacities that we can't even conceive -- capacities that ground a higher kind of moral standing.

Just as a sea turtle could never understand cryptocurrency, we too are cognitively limited. Some features of the world might be forever beyond human comprehension. (Colin McGinn has suggested that how consciousness arises from matter is one example.) Maybe someday Earth will host entities whose cognitive capacities surpass ours as dramatically as ours surpass sea turtles. And maybe these entities will deserve a new type of higher moral consideration.

This isn't just the quantitative thought that such entities might deserve more because they have more rationality or intelligence. The thought is that they might possess an unknown property Z -- something we entirely lack and cannot envision -- that elevates their standing beyond both sea turtles and humans.

For example, maybe sea turtles deserve some moral consideration because they can feel pleasure and pain. But maybe they don't deserve fully humanlike moral consideration because they lack some other relevant capacity, such as the capacity to consider and adhere to ethical norms. They have some of X but none of Y, while we humans have both X and Y. The qualitative view posits a further Z, inaccessible to us, that grounds superhuman standing.

I can only present this possibility abstractly. But I'm not sure it's in principle impossible. If moral standing depends on one thing only, such as pleasure or humanlike practical reasoning, then you can resist this move by insisting that only that one thing counts. But pluralists about the grounds of moral standing, who hold that it derives from more than one intrinsically good feature or capacity, have no clear reason to think that humans manifest the exhaustive list.

Third Path: Failures of Subject-Counting

I find egalitarianism attractive: one person, one point in the moral calculus, so to speak. But as I've argued elsewhere, future AI persons, if they ever come to exist, might defy the ordinary standards of individuation (e.g., here, here, here, here). They might overlap, merge, divide, back themselves up, and spin off partially or temporarily independent copies.

The norm of equality of persons would then require serious rethinking. There will be no clean count of AI persons to weigh against human persons. A "fission-fusion monster" who can split into a hundred copies at will and later merge or partly merge back together raises difficult questions. Does the monster deserve equal consideration with one person, a hundred people, or some intermediate number? There might be no determinate answer. We'll need new ethical principles for weighing competing interests. For some purposes we might treat the monster as equivalent to one person; for other purposes we might give it greater consideration. This could constitute a type of partly superhuman moral standing.

Alternatively, consider a massive entity, or a cluster of entities with many overlapping parts, whose total capacity and activity is comparable to several humans but who is neither wholly unified nor clearly individuatable into discrete humanlike subparts. We might just do our best with a rough count and give it equal consideration with that many ordinary humans. But another possibility would be to regard it not as approximately X humans but rather as a single, complex entity whose interests deserve significantly more weight than those of a single, ordinary human.

Twenty Years of The Splintered Mind

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'm inspired to think about why I've kept at it for twenty years.

[image source]

Some thoughts:

(1.) Fecundity. Pulling together a philosophical idea into about a thousand written words once a week has proven to be great way to keep me thinking and writing about new things -- extending my ideas, testing their boundaries, opening up new exploratory paths. A new academic paper is too much of a commitment and too narrowly focused. A conversation is too ephemeral and too dependent on both the availability and particular interests of the other person. Writing something brief every week keeps me actively thinking and growing.

(2.) Feedback. Most of us receive very limited feedback on our ideas, from students and collaborators, and eventually (for submitted articles) from referees and editors. I treasure the diversity of feedback I receive on my posts, through comments on Blogspot, Substack, Facebook, Twitter, and Bluesky. I hear from experts and non-experts, people with a broad range of backgrounds and worldviews. My ideas are better tested, they are influenced, expanded, and sometimes reconsidered, and I hear about relevant work I would otherwise have missed.

(3.) Writing for Clarity. The journal article is written for fellow experts. Blog posts -- at least my blog posts -- are written, well, not for a broad audience exactly, but for a broader audience: fellow philosophers, graduate students, advanced undergrads, and non-academics who appreciate academically rigorous but accessible work by scholars such as Paul Bloom, Dan Dennett, and Steve Pinker. Writing for this readership not only is a skill worth cultivating for its own sake, but also, I think, strengthens my research. Writing only for experts, it's easy to get lost in the weeds, losing track of what is important in the big picture and failing to notice one's shared presuppositions. Needing to express myself clearly to interested nonexperts forces me to poke my head out of the underbrush for that broader view.

(4.) Getting It Out There. Whenever I read and think about philosophy (which is a large portion of my time), I find myself bursting with new ideas, and objections, and extensions. I suppose this is why I love philosophy so much! Most of these thoughts could never become journal articles. Most of them could never even become blog posts -- but certainly more of them can become posts than can become articles. Publishing the idea on my blog permits me to send a thought out into the world without needing to do everything necessary to turn it into a proper published article. I thus avoid the dilemma of either going all-in or letting the ideas fall completely away. Some of my partly-baked ideas can find a little home cyberspace, with the chance to ignite some further ideas in some readers.

If these all sound like good things to you... well, maybe you should start a blog (or Substack) too!

See also my thoughts on "Blogging and Philosophical Cognition" (freely available, I think) from my 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures.

Do Your Thing

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).

For this (Daoist inspired) motto to work, we need some constraints on "your thing". I suggest two.

First, harmony. Do your thing in harmony with others, or in harmony with the world. The baby-killer, it seems safe to say, is out of harmony with the world. His putative "thing" clashes mightily against the projects, interests, and things of others around him.

Second, specificity. Do your thing. Every person has their individual predilections, talents, preferences, and style. Let those shine through, instead of aiming for bland conformity.

We might hear "do your thing" as analogous with (not synonymous with) "do your part". In the complex intertwined processes that make Earth a magnificently rich locus of value in the cosmos, you can play a part. Bring your unique, best self. Make the world even more magnificently rich.

Maybe your thing is playing D&D with your nerdy friends; no one plays a fruity bard quite the way you do. Maybe your thing is decorating your room with anime posters and cute stuffed animals. Maybe your thing is making great one-pot vegetarian meals for your family, or being the most enthusiastic local pickleball player, or writing dark poetry, or cruising around town in a tricked-out car with your windows down, or diving deep into Leibniz interpretation and sharing your findings with students and colleagues. Each of these enriches the world.

I envision a flourishing planet as one where diverse humans and other entities encounter and construct for each other diverse environments where they thrive in diverse ways, harmonizing both internally and externally: harmonizing internally by finding "things" that feel right to them and express their desires, skills, and individuality; and harmonizing externally by contributing distinctively to a flourishing whole (including through harmonious conflict, as in sports, games, and competition -- and even the cat and mouse).

People will act differently: There are many ways to harmonize. How dull it would be if we all struck the same note! The world is improvisational jazz, to which we thankfully bring distinct instruments and styles. Diversity is intrinsically valuable.

Doing your thing is ethically good because it makes the world better -- maybe through its consequences, but also just intrinsically. The world is a more awesome place, just because you're doing it.

[your fruity bard; image source]

Kantian ethics urges us to respect persons. Fine! But that hardly exhausts the matter. Kant also privileges human rationality as the source of all value -- an equally limited view. Why not respect also (in different, maybe smaller, but equally direct and intrinsic ways) the bug in the grass, the grass itself, and the cliff it grows on; the ruins of an ancient city; the clouds; the sound of the little league game down the block? Kant askes us to "act on that maxim you can will to be a universal law". Here's a candidate maxim: Do your thing. Kant might disagree, but maybe we could universalize it, with the constraints above.

Virtue ethics urges us to cultivate and enact virtue. Again that's only a piece of the puzzle, unless "virtue" is understood much more widely than virtue ethicists generally intend. It's not virtuous, exactly, to be play a fruity bard in a D&D campaign or to decorate your room with anime posters. And Aristotle's phronimos -- a wise, virtuous person who hits the mean of every virtue and is full of good sense and learning -- is only one type of interesting person. Let's celebrate the spendthrifts, the hotheads, the intemperate, and the cognitively disabled too, as long as they're authentically doing their thing, contributing some weird wonderfulness to the world, and not hurting themselves or others too badly.

Consequentialist ethics of the utilitarian stripe urges us to maximize the balance of pleasure over pain in the world. Sure, pleasure is good and pain is bad! But again this is only a fraction of what matters; I wouldn't want to reduce all value to it.

A different type of consequentialist might suggest that if diversity and richness matter so much, maybe we should maximize those. No, I see no reason to maximize. Where does this demand for maximization come from? And trying to maximize will normally require doing something other than your thing. I'd rather you just do your thing.

Does doing your thing mean fiddling while Rome burns (supposing Roman fiddles are your thing)? If people are suffering -- even far away, as the consequentialist emphasizes -- shouldn't you make some effort to help, even at the cost of your thing?

Yes, that seems right. I could try to force it into the motto: Maybe part of every human's "thing" is an imperfect duty to help others in need. But I don't know; that seems procrustean. Maybe it diverges from the original spirit of the idea. So instead I'll just admit: Do your thing also is not a complete ethical picture.

Kim Stanley Robinson on the Value of Science Fiction

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 interview on the Crisis and Critique podcast.

[Kim Stanley Robinson, and The Ministry for the Future; image source]

Reading Science Fiction Encourages a Flexible Conception of the Future

Robinson describes the reader as finishing a science fiction novel and thinking that the future will be like that, then finishing another science fiction novel and thinking the future will be like that instead.

And what happens is there's a habit of mind when you read enough science fiction, you say the future could be many different things, quite plausibly from now, and now we need to shape it to the direction that we want.

And so this is the political power of science fiction as a mental activity, as a co-creation between writers and readers. The science fiction community is in some sense better prepared for whatever happens, no matter what it is, than the general populace that doesn't read science fiction.

The thought has some plausibility. Science fiction accustoms us to thinking about various possible futures. Instead of ignoring the future, or assuming it must take some particular shape, science fiction helps us imagine a wider range of alternatives.

This might prepare us two ways: First, if one of the alternatives we've imagined comes close to actually playing out, we have already thought through some of its implications. Second, we develop a more general sense of the flexibility of the future. This may encourage readers to take action to steer us toward better futures.

Or Maybe Not?

Robinson is making a substantive claim about human psychology, one that's potentially testable (with difficulty). Does reading science fiction really generate a more flexible and open view of the future? This claim has the same intuitive appeal as Martha Nussbaum's claim that reading literary fiction broadens your empathy with people from other walks of life, or the claim that studying ethics improves moral decision-making.

It might be that none of these claims are true. For example, I've repeatedly found that ethics professors behave about the same as non-ethicists of similar social background. And I wouldn't bet a large sum that devoted readers of literary fiction are overall more empathetic than their peers who spend an equal amount of time reading non-fiction.

Pretty though Robinson's picture is, I'm not sure science fiction readers really are better prepared for the future. What drives science fiction writing and reading might be too disconnected from the practical future -- too fantastical, too plot-driven, chosen to be exciting and emotionally satisfying rather than accurate. Its envisioned futures might be too distorted by the need for high-stakes individual action, or too wishful, or too self-congratulatory, or too satisfyingly dystopian (for those of us who find dystopias satisfying). Readers might emerge with unrealistic or overconfident views, shaped not by realism but by the demands of story.

A particularly timely example is the nearly universal trope that humanoid robots and linguistically fluent AI systems are conscious. This might be an artifact of the demands of storytelling rather than something accurately foreseen. A world with conscious robots is more interesting -- a more engaging setting for a novel. If the robots are conscious, there's more at stake, so the action is more exciting. And it's structurally difficult to portray entities that act as though they are conscious but really are not. Doing so is nearly impossible in film, and it's a significant challenge in prose, requiring constant intrusive reminders. (I can attest to this both as a writer and a reader, having published stories with non-conscious and disputably conscious robots.)

So there's a systematic pressure in science fiction toward portraying advanced AI as conscious. If optimists about AI consciousness turn out to be right, then science fiction will have nudged readers in the right direction. But if the AI consciousness scoffers are right, the genre will have served its readers poorly. It remains to be seen who is right. (For details, see my forthcoming book: AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview.)

Robinson's Realism

Now, among the great science fiction writers of our time, Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction is perhaps the least subject to the concerns I've just raised. He attempts to keep strictly within the bounds of scientific plausibility; and conventional character-driven plot is often replaced by loosely connected scenes featuring unrelated or barely related characters, plus less conventional devices, like mini-treatises on science or engineering, lists, and reflections that verge on expository philosophy or lyrical poetry. The Ministry for the Future in particular is rigorously grounded in real science and politics.

In the interview, Robinson praises realism in science fiction:

If you set a story in the future, you're automatically saying to the reader, this is made up, I've invented this, this isn't real. It is a concoction. And then if you add all of the clues and habits and techniques of realism to that concoction, you make it solider. It has a more powerful emotional cognitive impact on the reader. So realistic science fiction is a mode that I quite like.

And that requires a lot of detail, a lot of scientific support for the future that you're describing, the idea that it's plausible at every point along the way, and it looks like it could happen, and therefore it might happen. These are powerful literary effects to support the basically fantastic nature of science fiction as a genre.

Robinson thus suggests that adding realistic detail and excluding anything implausible will tend to make a story emotionally and cognitively more powerful. Again, it's a plausible claim, though I'm not sure we know this to be the case. After all, people can also be deeply moved and influenced by unrealistic fantasies.

Robinson's commitment to realism also synergizes with his thought about science fiction as a tool for helping us think better about the future. If the value of science fiction lies in opening our minds to future possibilities, it seems desirable to ensure that they really are possibilities and not just unrealistic fantasies.

Against Dystopias, for Utopias

Robinson suggests that the future will have to differ from the present, because our present path isn't sustainable. Things will get either much better or much worse. But dystopias, he suggests, are boring:

... descriptions of capitalist realist futures are generally dystopias. If we keep going this way, things will be wrecked. Yes, we can see that. Indeed, dystopias quickly become boring because we already know this truth. We're not taught anything by dystopias.

But utopias -- this is where it gets interesting. There could be a better world. This, I think, is becoming more and more obvious.... We have, at least in theory, the wisdom to realize we could create a world that has food, water, shelter, clothing, health care, education, electricity, and security for the feeling that people after you will have the same, and sense of dignity and meaning.... This is all possible technologically.... So then utopia becomes interesting, the most interesting of literary genres. Can there but a utopian realism, or a realistic utopia?

Dystopias can be satisfying in a way -- they point out the wrongs we already know, affirming our sense of their reality. But we learn more by envisioning a realistic utopia, something we hadn't properly imagined before, which we could see becoming real and could maybe take steps toward enacting.

In Robinson's telling, science fiction is the most profound and informative of the literary genres, and realistic science fiction is the most profound and informative science fiction, and utopian realism is the most interesting form of science fiction. The value of science fiction lies in enabling us to envision realistic possibilities for improving the world.

And thus we get Kim Stanley Robinson's style of science fiction, and The Ministry for the Future in particular.

It's an appealing vision. But somewhere along the way, I think we've lost sight of the value of all the other ways science fiction can work. After all, almost none of the great science fiction writers work within the constraints Robinson proposes!