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.

---

[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!

AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview, forthcoming with Cambridge

Last week I submitted my latest book manuscript to Cambridge University Press (for their "Element" series of books about 100 pages long): AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview -- because you haven't heard nearly enough about AI and consciousness recently, of course! [winky face]

Maybe you'll appreciate my skeptical stance, at odds both with the boosters who anticipate imminent AI consciousness and with the scoffers who pooh-pooh the possibility. Or maybe you'll loathe my skeptical stance but grudgingly accept it against your will, due to the force of my arguments!

I've pasted the introductory chapter below. The full (citable) manuscript version is available here and here.

[AI and Consciousness, title page]

Chapter One: Hills and Fog

1. Experts Do Not Know and You Do Not Know and Society Collectively Does Not and Will Not Know and All Is Fog.

Our most advanced AI systems might soon – within the next five to thirty years – be as richly and meaningfully conscious as ordinary humans, or even more so, capable of genuine feeling, real self-knowledge, and a wide range of sensory, emotional, and cognitive experiences. In some arguably important respects, AI architectures are beginning to resemble the architectures many consciousness scientists associate with conscious systems. Their outward behavior, especially their linguistic behavior, grows ever more humanlike.

Alternatively, claims of imminent AI consciousness might be profoundly mistaken. Their seeming humanlikeness might be a shadow play of empty mimicry. Genuine conscious experience might require something no AI system could possess for the foreseeable future – intricate biological processes, for example, that silicon chips could never replicate.

The thesis of this book is that we don’t know. Moreover and more importantly, we won’t know before we’ve already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI systems. Engineering sprints ahead while consciousness science lags. Consciousness scientists – and philosophers, and policy-makers, and the public – are watching AI development disappear over the hill. Soon we will hear a voice shout back to us, “Now I am just as conscious, just as full of experience and feeling, as any human”, and we won’t know whether to believe it. We will need to decide, as individuals and as a society, whether to treat AI systems as conscious, nonconscious, semi-conscious, or incomprehensibly alien, before we have adequate grounds to justify that decision.

The stakes are immense. If near-future AI systems are richly, meaningfully conscious, then they will be our peers, our lovers, our children, our heirs, and possibly the first generation of a posthuman, transhuman, or superhuman future. They will deserve rights, including the right to shape their own development, free from our control and perhaps against our interests.[1] If, instead, future AI systems merely mimic the outward signs of consciousness while remaining as experientially blank as toasters, we face the possibility of mass delusion on an enormous scale. Real human interests and real human lives might be sacrificed for the sake of entities without interests worth the sacrifice. Sham AI “lovers” and “children” might supplant or be prioritized over human lovers and children. Heeding their advice, society might turn a very different direction than it otherwise would.

In this book, I aim to convince you that the experts do not know, and you do not know, and society collectively does not and will not know, and all is fog.

2. Against Obviousness.

Some people think that near-term AI consciousness is obviously impossible. This is an error in adverbio. Near-term AI consciousness might be impossible – but not obviously so.

A sociological argument against obviousness:

Probably the leading scientific theory of consciousness is Global Workspace theory. Its leading advocate is neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene.[2] In 2017, years before the surge of interest in ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, Dehaene and two collaborators published an article arguing that with a few straightforward tweaks, self-driving cars could be conscious.[3]

Probably the two best-known competitors to Global Workspace theory are Higher Order theory and Integrated Information Theory.[4] (In Chapters Eight and Nine, I’ll provide more detail on these theories.) Perhaps the leading scientific defender of Higher Order theory is Hakwan Lau – one of the coauthors of that 2017 article about potentially conscious cars.[5] Integrated Information Theory is potentially even more liberal about machine consciousness, holding that some current AI systems are already at least a little bit conscious and that we could easily design AI systems with arbitrarily high degrees of consciousness.[6]

David Chalmers, the world’s most influential philosopher of mind, argued in 2023 for about a 25% degree of confidence in AI consciousness within a decade.[7] That same year, a team of prominent philosophers, psychologists, and AI researchers – including eminent computer scientist Yoshua Bengio – concluded that there are “no obvious technological barriers” to creating conscious AI according to a wide range of mainstream scientific views about consciousness.[8] In a 2025 interview, Geoffrey Hinton, another of the world’s most prominent computer scientists, asserted that AI systems are already conscious.[9] Christof Koch, the most influential neuroscientist of consciousness from the 1990s to the early 2010s, has endorsed Integrated Information Theory, including its liberal implications for the pervasiveness of consciousness.[10]

This is a sociological argument: a substantial probability of near-term AI consciousness is a mainstream view among leading experts. They might be wrong, but it’s implausible that they’re obviously wrong – that there’s a simple argument or consideration they’re neglecting which, if pointed out, would or should cause them to collectively slap their foreheads and say, “Of course! How did we miss that?”

What of the converse claim – that AI consciousness is obviously imminent or already here? In my experience, fewer people assert this. But in case you’re tempted in this direction, note that other prominent theorists hold that AI consciousness is a far-distant prospect if it’s possible at all: neuroscientist Anil Seth; philosophers Peter Godfrey-Smith, Ned Block, and John Searle; linguist Emily Bender; and computer scientist Melanie Mitchell.[11] (Chapter Six will discuss thought experiments by Searle, Bender, and Mitchell, and Chapter Ten will discuss biological views of the sort emphasized by Seth, Godfrey-Smith, and Block.) In a 2024 survey of 582 AI researchers, 25% expected AI consciousness within ten years and 70% expected AI consciousness by the year 2100.[12]

If the believers are right, we’re on the brink of creating genuinely conscious machines. If the scoffers are right, those machines will only seem conscious. I assume that this is a substantive disagreement, not just a disagreement about how to apply the term “consciousness” to a perfectly obvious set of phenomena about which everyone agrees. The future well-being of many people (including, perhaps, many AI people) depends on getting this issue right. Unfortunately, we will not know in time.

The rest of this book is flesh on this skeleton. I canvass a variety of structural and functional claims about consciousness, the leading theories of consciousness as applied to AI, and the best known general arguments for and against near-term AI consciousness. None of these claims or arguments takes us far. It’s a morass of uncertainty.

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

[1] I assume that AI consciousness and AI rights are closely connected: Schwitzgebel 2024, ch. 11, in preparation. For discussion, see Shepherd 2018; Levy 2024.

[2] Dehaene 2014; Mashour et al. 2020.

[3] Dehaene, Lau, and Kouider 2017. For an alternative interpretation of this article as concerning something other than consciousness in its standard “phenomenal” sense, see note 115.

[4] Some Higher Order theories: Rosenthal 2005; Lau 2022; Brown 2025. Integrated Information Theory: Albantakis et al. 2023.

[5] But see Chapter Eight for some qualifications.

[6] See Tononi’s publicly available response to Scott Aaronson’s objections in Aaronson 2014. However, advocates of IIT also suggest that the most common current computer architectures are unlikely to achieve much consciousness and that consciousness will tend to appear in subsystems of the computer rather than at the level of the computer itself (Findlay et al. 2024/2025).

[7] Chalmers 2023.

[8] Butlin et al. 2023. (I am among the nineteen authors.)

[9] Heren 2025.

[10] Tononi and Koch 2015.

[11] Seth forthcoming; Godfrey-Smith 2024; Block forthcoming; Searle 1980, 1992; Bender 2025; Mitchell 2021.

[12] Dreksler et al. 2025.

So You're on the "Waiting List" for a Philosophy PhD Program

It's confusing. You applied to a PhD program in philosophy in the U.S. You haven't been admitted. You haven't been rejected. You're in limbo. Let me explain and offer some advice.

Yield-Based vs. Seats-Based Admissions

Yield-based. Some departments -- the ones with wise high-level administrators -- aim for a target entering class size and admit students expeditiously to fill it. Suppose a department wants six entering students and expects a 40% yield (meaning 40% of admitted students enroll). The sensible course is to admit fifteen students in February or early March, recruit all of them, and expect about six to say yes.

Seats-based. Other departments -- the ones with foolish high-level administrators -- receive a strict allotment of seats, for example six. They then admit that allotment swiftly, adding more only as admitted students decline. Adminstrators can rest assured that no more than six students will need funding, which is slightly more convenient for those administrators. But it wreaks havoc on the admissions process, since:

• Departments become reluctant to admit students they think will go elsewhere -- for example, strong candidates likely to have been admitted to higher-ranked programs.
• Departments pressure early-admitted students to decline quickly, to free up seats.
• It creates a chaotic rush of last-minute admittances as April 15 approaches (the standard deadline for decisions). Many students understandably want the full time to decide, especially if they are hoping for a last-minute decision from a program they prefer.

These costs plainly outweigh the the minor budgetary convenience of seats-based admissions, especially since (1.) the risk of overenrollment can be spread across several departments, and (2.) funding uncertainty already exists beyond the first year, as students stochastically drop out or find independent funding. Unfortunately, unwise administrators swarm the Earth. My own department uses seats-based admission.

In practice, the division isn't entirely sharp. Some yield-based departments admit conservatively early on -- maybe ten students rather than fifteen -- and then admit more on a rolling basis as the picture clarifies. And some seats-based departments informally reach out to strong candidates to gauge interest. (If a candidate says, "Oh I've just been admitted to Princeton and Yale, so it's very unlikely I'd come to [School X]", the committee thanks them for their candor and moves on.)

What a Waiting List Is

Some departments maintain an official, ranked waiting list. More commonly, it's a nebulous group: about six to fifteen near-admits, who are on the committee's mind but not strictly ranked or formally designated. Either way, the list's composition and ranking can vary depending on who has already accepted and declined. For example, if the department would like to have at least one student in history of philosophy and their top-choice history student has declined, the next offer might go to a strong history of philosophy student who didn't quite make the initial cut.

If you have been admitted, the admitting department will of course tell you. If you have been rejected, they might tell you, or you might hear nothing (or nothing until after April 15); so if you don't hear anything by April 1, that doesn't mean you're on the waiting list. Students are sometimes contacted to be told they're on the waiting list, but often (usually?) not.

As April 15 approaches, departments that look like they won't hit their enrollment target will start contacting students on their official or unofficial waiting lists, with increasing urgency as 11:59 pm April 15 nears. This is especially true for departments with seats-based admissions and low yields. (Rarely, departments will reach out April 16 or after, which is not quite kosher but understandable.)

How to Figure Out Whether You Are on the Waiting List

Admissions chairs will likely be annoyed with me for giving this advice, since it will increase their volume of email, but I want what's best for you, not for them.

If you haven't heard by April 1, feel free to email the admissions committee to ask if you are on the waiting list. Even departments who have fallen behind schedule should have mostly sorted out their top offers and near-admits by then. You deserve to know by April 1 whether you're a near-admit with a chance of a late offer or whether you're out of consideration. It's not rude for you to contact them with a brief query. The one exception would be if the department has made clear in the admissions process or on their website either that they have no waiting list or that if you haven't heard by X date (before April 1) you will definitely not be admitted.

There's one other condition under which it makes sense to query, even before April 1: if you are about to accept an offer elsewhere, would prefer the department in question, and have a reasonable expectation of a decent chance of admission.

How to interpret the reply: You might not hear a definitive "no", but if the committee says something like "it's unlikely you'll be admitted" or "you're not currently under consideration", you should interpret that as a no. If there's a realistic chance of a last-minute admission, the response will be more encouraging or specific, without creating unrealistic expectations -- for example, "probably not, but there is a chance, so if you're still interested, stay in touch".

How to Increase Your Chance of Admission, If You're on the Waiting List

When a department turns to its waiting list, it's hoping that students will quickly say yes. This is especially true in the second week of April. Therefore, convey enthusiasm! Simply asking whether you're on the waiting list already displays interest, so that's a good start. If you're permitted to attend a campus event, go if you can. Recruitment events are usually only for admitted students, but not always, especially for candidates near the top of a seats-based department's waiting list. If a committee is on the fence among four waitlisted students and one has shown more enthusiasm than the others, they're likely to turn to the enthusiastic student.

The admissions committee might try to gauge your interest. It's contrary to good policy for them to bluntly ask whether you'd accept an offer, and you shouldn't be expected pre-commit. But if you're genuinely eager about the program, say so. If you've been admitted elsewhere but think you'd probably prefer the department in question, let them know.

Being a Good Citizen

Whether you're on the waiting list or have been officially admitted, I recommend frankness and honesty. The process is chaotic and full of perverse incentives (especially in seats-based departments), and you can help it run more smoothly by:

• notifying departments as soon as you know you won't accepting their offer of admission (even if you haven't settled on a final choice);
• honestly communicating your likelihood of accepting, so that committees can estimate their yield;
• keeping your communications brief and polite, and not writing repeatedly;
• not contacting other professors in the department hoping for an inside track to admission.

[A hypothetical waiting list of names drawn randomly from lists of my former lower-division students]

A Model of Disunified Human Experience

It's a philosophical truism that human conscious experience is unified: If you're at a bar, hearing music, tasting beer, and feeling pleasantly relaxed, those experiences don't occur merely side by side. They are joined together into an integrated whole, an experience of music-with-beer-with-relaxation.

I'm not sure this truism is correct. As I suggested in an earlier post, experiential unity might be an artifact of introspection and memory: When we introspectively notice that we're experiencing music, beer, and relaxation all at once, we thereby bind those experiences into a whole. Likewise, when we remember such moments, we reconstruct them as unified. But it doesn't follow that those experiences, even if they all occurred simultaneously in you, were unified rather than transpiring separately. Experiences of music, beer, and relaxation might have all being going on inside of you, no more joined together than those experiences are joined with the similar experiences of your friend across the table. Simple co-occurrence doesn't entail experiential unity.

If this possibility is coherent, then introspection and memory can't establish that experience is always unified. At most, they show that introspected and remembered experiences present themselves as unified. But that leaves open the status of unintrospected, unremembered experiences. Unity becomes difficult to verify by standard phenomenological methods.

But the issue needn't be intractable. We just need to approach it less directly, for example by exploring what follows from a well-established theory of consciousness. If some well-motivated Theory X implies unity (or disunity), that would provide reason to accept its conclusion.

I'll now present a candidate Theory X. I'm not suggesting that this is the right theory of consciousness! For one thing, it's simplistic. I'm sure the mind is much more complicated than I'm about to say. I offer this theory only as a proof of concept. There could be a theory of consciousness with massive disunity as an implication.

This theory combines Global Workspace Theory and Recurrent Processing Theory. According to this hybrid, Global Workspace Theory governs attended experiences -- those targeted by introspection or reconstructed in memory -- while Recurrent Processing Theory governs unattended experiences.

The mind, on this picture, is composed of many separate "modules" that work mostly independently, connected by a workspace where a small amount of attended information is shared globally. There's a visual module, an auditory module, modules for motor activity, episodic memory, and so on. When we attend to something -- say, the taste of beer -- the information from the relevant module is broadcast into the Global Workspace, where it can be accessed by and influence processes in all the other modules. When unattended, the information stays local.

Here's one illustration of this type of architecture:

[the Global Workspace; source]

Orthodox Global Workspace Theory holds that only what is broadcast into the workspace is conscious. Theory X alters that assumption. Many people hold that conscious experience vastly outruns attention. Many people hold, that is, that you can experience the hum of traffic in the background when you're not attending to it, and the feeling of your feet in your shoes, and the leftover taste of coffee in your mouth, etc. -- all in a peripheral way, simultaneously, when your focus is elsewhere. Theory X, drawing on Recurrent Processing Theory, holds that such processes are conscious whenever there's enough cognitive activity of the right sort (recurrent processing, for example) in the modules, even without global broadcast.

The picture, then, is this: We have multiple sensory (and other) experiences all running simultaneously, each with enough cognitive processing to be conscious, but few of which are selected for global availability through attention.

Is there reason to think these modular processes are unified with one another? I see no reason to think so, if they're genuinely modular -- that is, if their processing stays local, exerting little influence elsewhere. The taste-of-beer processing stays in the tasting module. The sound-of-music processing stays in the auditory module. No link up. No straightforward causal, functional, or physiological basis for a unified experience of beer-with-music rather than, separately, an experience of beer and an experience of music.

When we introspect the beer and music simultaneously, we pull both into the Global Workspace, and there they unify. We might then mistakenly think they were unified all along, but that's an illusion of introspection. It's an example of the "refrigerator light error", the error of thinking that the light is always on because it's always on when you open the door to check.

On this model, disunity is the normal human condition. Our experiences are fragmented, except when we pull them together through attention. We just don't realize that fact because, so to speak, we only attend to what we attend to.

Two caveats:

First, this is probably not the right model of consciousness. But I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if the correct model is similar enough to have the same implications. If so, we can't simply accept the unity of consciousness as a given.

Second, the recurrent peripheral, modular processes that don't make it into the workspace might not be determinately conscious. They might be only borderline conscious, in the indeterminate middle between consciousness and nonconsciousness, like a color can be indeterminately between green and not-green. This opens a third possibility, alongside unity and disunity: unity among the determinately conscious experiences with a hazy penumbra of indeterminate experiences that remain disunified. (There are further possibilities beyond these three; but save them for another day.)

Backup and Death for Humanlike AI

Most AI systems can be precisely copied. Suppose this is also true of future conscious AI persons, if any exist. Backup and fissioning should then be possible, transforming the significance of identity and death in ways our cultural and conceptual tools can't currently handle.

Suppose that two humanlike AI neighbors move in next door to you, Shriya and Alaleh.[1] Shriya and Alaleh are (let's stipulate) conscious AI persons with ordinary, humanlike emotional range and, as far as feasible, ordinary, humanlike cognition.[2] Each undergoes an expensive annual backup procedure. Their information is securely stored, so that if the processors responsible for their personalities, values, skills, habits, and memories are destroyed, a new robotic body can be purchased and the saved information reinstalled. Subjectively, the restored person would be indistinguishable from the person at the time of the backup.

As it happens, Shriya dies in a parachuting accident. (Safety precautions for robot parachuters have yet to be perfected.) But "dies" isn't exactly the right word, since a week later a new Shriya arrives, restored from a back up from five months ago. Shriya-2 says it feels as if she fell asleep in March, then awoke in August with no sense that time had passed.

Shriya-2 has no direct memories of the intervening months, though Alaleh fills her in on major events and selected details. She'll also need to retake her knitting course. She only died in the sense that Mario "dies" in Super Mario Bros: losing progress and returning to a save point -- so different from ordinary human and animal death that it really deserves a different word. Maybe this is why Shriya was so willing to parachute despite the risks.

Should you mourn Shriya's loss? Should Alaleh? There's something to mourn: Five months is not trivial. In one sense, a part of a life has been lost -- or maybe just forgotten? Is it more like amnesia?

Consider variations. Suppose Shriya hadn't been able to afford a backup for the past ten years and is restored to her twenty-five-year-old self instead of her thirty-five-year-old self. What if her last backup was at age five? That would be much more like death. The new Shriya would be nothing like the old, and would likely grow into a very different person. Is death, then, a matter of degree?

Shriya-2 receives the original Shriya's possessions. This "death" isn't enough to trigger inheritance by others. But what about contracts and promises made after the last backup? Suppose the original Shriya promised in July to deliver lectures in China, and Shriya-2 -- who has no memory of this and dreads the idea -- must decide whether to honor the commitment. If the backup is from five months before, perhaps she should. If it's from five years before, maybe not. And if it's a child, presumably not.

What about reward and punishment? Should Shriya-2 accept a Nobel prize for work done post-backup? Should Shriya-2 be imprisoned for crimes committed in July, which she couldn't even possibly remember having committed and which -- she might plausibly say -- were committed by a different person. In defense of this view, Shriya-2 might offer a thought experiment: If she had been installed in a duplicate body immediately after the March backup, thereafter living her own life, she'd have no criminal responsibility for what her other branch in did July. The only difference between that case and the actual case is a delay before installation.

Suppose Shriya-2 plunges into unrelenting depression. She ends her life, hoping that a new Shriya-3, reinstalled from a pre-depression save point, will find a new, happier way forward. Is that suicide?

If someone kills Shriya-2, is that murder? Does it matter whether the backup was ten days ago or ten years ago?

A fire sweeps through your neighborhood. The firefighters can rescue either you and your spouse, two ordinary humans, or Shriya and Alaleh, who have backups from seven months ago. Probably they should save you and your spouse? What if the backups were from ten years ago, or from childhood?

Should healthcare be more heavily subsidized for ordinary humans that for AI persons whose maintenance is equally costly? If irreplaceable humans are always prioritized, then human irrecoverability becomes a source of privilege, and AI persons will not enjoy fully equal rights in certain respects.

How obligated are we to store the backups properly? Is this a public service that should be subsidized for less wealthy AI persons? If Dr. Evil deletes Shriya’s backup, he has surely wronged Shriya by putting her at risk, even if the backup is never needed and the deletion goes unnoticed. But how much has he wronged her, and it what way exactly? Is it similar to assault? How much does it differ from ordinary reckless endangerment? Does it depend on whether we regard Shriya-2 as the same person as the original Shriya, or as a distinct but similar successor?

What if the backup is imperfect? How much divergence in personality, values, memories, habits, and skills is tolerable before the appropriate attitude toward Shriya-2 changes -- whatever the appropriate attitude is? Small imperfections are surely acceptable. People change in small, arbitrary ways from day to day. Huge differences would presumably make it appropriate to regard the new entity as merely resembling Shriya, rather than being a restored version of her. Once again, this appears to be a matter of degree, laid uncomfortably across crude categorical properties like "same person" and "different person".

We're in unfamiliar territory, where our usual understandings of death and personal continuity no longer straightforwardly apply. If such AI systems ever come to be, we will need to develop new words, concepts, and customs.

[Data and Lore from Star Trek; image source]

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[1] Names randomly chosen from lists of former lower division students, excluding Jesus, Mohammed, and extremely unusual names.

[2] Unless humanlikeness is enforced by policy, this might not be what we should expect: See Chilson and Schwitzgebel 2026. For some puzzles about AI with different emotional ranges, see "How Much Should We Give to a Joymachine?" (Dec 24, 2025).

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Related: Weird Minds Might Destabilize Human Ethics (Aug 13, 2015).

Age and Fame in Philosophy

A philosophical discussion arc is a curve displaying how frequently a term appears in philosophical journal abstracts, titles, and keywords (compared to a representative universe of common philosophy words). A couple of weeks ago, I posted discussion arcs from the 1940s-2020s for several topics and historical philosophers.

Today, I want to use them to explore my age and fame hypothesis: that philosophers tend to have peak influence at around ages 55-70. Jerry Fodor, for example, received a lot of discussion in the early 1990s, but recently much less:

Fodor was a peaky philosopher in the following sense: His peak discussion rate (1.05%) is much higher -- 12 times higher -- than his recent discussion rate (0.09%).

John Rawls, in contrast, is considerably less peaky (so far), peaking at only 2.7 times the current rate, despite having more time to decline:

Both Fodor and Rawls peak in their late 50s, fitting the pattern I've seen in previous analyses (here and here) that philosophers tend to reach their peak influence around age 55-70.

For today's post I decided to create discussion arcs for 25 philosophers who are highly cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: twelve from the Not-So-Silent Generation in philosophy, born 1928-1945, and thirteen from the generation born 1900-1927. I chose the most SEP-cited philosophers from each generation, excluding ones whose last names generate noisy results (sorry, no David Lewis or Bernard Williams). I'll show you their discussion arcs, then do a composite analysis of discussion by age. The charts are a little crowded and blurry on some browsers; clicking on them might work to clarify and enlarge.

Here's the first group:

Some observations:

• Ayer peaks relatively early, but even so, there's significant delay between the publication of his most influential book in 1936, when we was only 26 years old, and peak discussion in the late 1950s, about twenty years later.
• Quine and Popper peak later, in the 1970s, when Quine is in his mid-60s and Popper is in his late 70s.
• All the authors are trailing off by the 2010s, though Quine, Popper, and Tarski less so than the others.

Here's a second group:

• Notice that the vertical axis for this group doesn't rise quite as high as for the previous group, so the scaling isn't the same.
• Dummett has peaks both in the late 1950s (for his early work on causation) and the early 1980s (discussing a wide range of work in metaphysics and philosophy of language).
• Although Anscombe's peak is early, in the early 1960s when she was in her early 40s, unlike any of the other authors, her discussion rate has been steadily rising over the past few decades.

Group three:

• The vertical axis for this group is still lower: Kripke at his peak wasn't as proportionally much discussed by this measure as were Quine or Rawls at their peaks. It's possible that this reflects a flaw in my method. Later in the database, abstracts are more available and longer, and although I attempted to compensate for this by comparing with search result for terms like "mind", "language", and "ethics", it's possible I overcompensated. However, it's also possible that this trend toward lower peaks with younger authors is real. As the field grew larger, there may have been less room for a few thinkers to dominate it as thoroughly.
• Kripke, Nozick, and Searle peak relatively early, compared with most philosophers I have examined -- in the 1970s, when they're in their late 30s to early 40s.
• Though Stalnaker also peaked in the late 1970s, when he was in his late 30s, like Anscombe his has risen in recent decades, and in 2021-2025 he is almost back to his earlier peak.

Finally:

• These authors have had the least time to decline from their peaks. But their discussion rates of .001 to .004 in 2021-2025 are comparable to those from earlier generations (and substantially less than Kripke and Rawls), which suggests that they might have relatively less staying power.
• You'll probably also have noticed it’s a much narrower age band than the others. There's a high density of Silent Generation philosophers cited in the Stanford Encyclopedia, for reasons I discuss here.

In the following graph, I've aggregated discussion rates by age across all of the included authors, with five-year smoothing:

Broadly in line with my previous work, the average peak is in the early 50s to the late 60s -- though as you can see from the graphs above, there's considerable individual variation. Overall, the results might trend a little bit earlier than what I've seen in other analyses, but not by much.

As I've noted elsewhere, peak influence is often a couple of decades after the thinker's most influential work. For example (besides Ayer as described above), Kuhn's and Popper's peaks in the late 1970s were 15-20 years after Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and about 20 years after the English translation of Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery.