Letting Pass

For two months we kept the dog run, as if she might come back. But we had killed her ourselves, or rather the vet had, with that bright needle, in Pauline's arms. Pauline had thought she was ready; she was not.

Our children's favorite toys, from when they were two, are stacked and shelved in the garage -- and their bicycles from when they were ten, and their high school trophies. And our high school trophies, and Pauline's diaries from middle school in the 1970s, and appointment calendars of my father's from the 1980s with haircuts and meetings with his students and plumbers' phone numbers in lopsided handwriting -- calendars I'd grabbed after he died ten years ago, desperate to save a piece of him, though I still can't bear to look at them. I need to hold shreds of what he'd left, but now those shreds only remind me of their inadequacy.

Daoism teaches that the world is processes that rise and fade, turn a few circles and depart, that growing is always also losing, living is the reanimation of mounds of substance many times dead before -- but I can't see it that way. I dwell in a world of things and people, who I paradoxically want to change without changing, to move along without moving, never to age. Memory is insufficient, a tease, horribly semisweet -- itself fading, dying, the resonances of a bell that will not be struck again.

Two Dimensionalism about Other Minds, and Its Implications for Brain Organoids and Robots

You know (I hope!) that you are conscious. How do you know that other people are conscious too? This is the classic "problem of other minds".

The question isn't mainly developmental or psychological, but epistemic: What justifies you in believing that others have conscious experiences like yours -- feelings of joy and pain, thoughts in inner speech, dreams, sensory experiences -- instead of being, so to speak, automata who are all dark inside?

One common answer appeals to analogy: You are justified on grounds of others' similarity to you. It would be strange if entities so behaviorally and physiologically similar didn't also have similar streams of inner experience.

John Stuart Mill expresses it thus:

By what evidence do I know, or by what considerations am I led to believe, that there exist other sentient creatures; that the walking and speaking figures which I see and hear, have sensations and thoughts, or in other words, possess Minds?... I conclude that other human beings have feelings like me, because, first, they have bodies like me, which I know, in my own case, to be the antecedent condition of feelings; and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and other outward signs, which in my own case I know by experience to be caused by feelings (An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 3rd ed., 1867, p. 237).

Notice that Mill appeals to two very different types of similarity: similarity of body and similarity of acts and outward signs.

[title page of John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 3rd edition]

In a recent paper, Ned Block makes a similar distinction between first order realizer properties, like being made of a certain kind of "meat", and second order functional role properties, like being the kind of thing that causes crying.

Block's functionalist jargon would have been unfamiliar to Mill, but the idea is much the same. Mill writes:

I am conscious in myself of a series of facts connected by a uniform sequence, of which the beginning is modifications of my body, the middle is feelings, the end is outward demeanor. In the case of other human beings I have the evidence of my senses for the first and last links of the series, but not for the intermediate link; which must either the be same in others as in myself, or a different one.... (p. 237-238).

Mill, like a good functionalist, seeks something to fill the middle link of a causal chain from cause to X to effect. The filler or "realizer" of this functional role property could potentially be anything, though in him it is a feeling.

For example, in me, a mosquito sting and the resulting red bump leads to a feeling of itchiness, which in turn leads to scratching. In others, I see the same sting and bump and the same scratching, but I cannot see the itchiness between.

At first, Mill suggests that it's reasonable to assume the intermediate feeling (the itchiness) simply on the grounds that "no other force need be supposed" (p. 238). But later he supports the claim also by appeal to physiological similarity:

I look about me, and though here is only one... body... which is connected with all my sensations in this peculiar manner, I observe that there is a great multitude of other bodies, closely resembling in their sensible properties... this particular one, but whose modifications do not call up, as those of my own body do, a world of sensations in my consciousness. Since they do not do so in my consciousness, I infer that they do it out of my consciousness, and that to each of them belongs a world of consciousness of its own... (p. 238-239).

Because others' bodies are like mine, I infer that the intermediate X -- the feeling of itchiness, in our example -- is also similar.

Let's call this view two-dimensionalism about other minds: Only when another entity is both physiologically and functionally (that is, in terms of typical causes and effects) similar to me am I justified in inferring that it has experiences like mine. When the two dimensions diverge, skepticism follows.

Human babies are physiologically similar to adult humans but functionally quite different. In the bad old days, I gather, there used to be doubts about whether babies were conscious, for example, whether they could actually feel pain (and thus anesthesia was not regularly practiced). Yet because the causes and effects of their pain responses are similar, as well as their physiology, such doubt was misplaced.

Brain organoids are a more difficult case. Human brain cells can be grown in vitro, in clusters of tens of millions of neurons. Could consciousness arise in such systems? Functionally, brain organoids are radically impoverished compared to ordinary humans. But if what matters is neurophysiology, maybe a sufficiently large or well-structured brain organoid would be conscious.

Robots present a complementary case: Language models are becoming similar to us in linguistic behavior. We might guess or imagine that some future robots will become functionally or behaviorally similar to us in other ways too, while remaining physiologically very different. Block argues in his recent paper, as well as in earlier work, that we don't know that the physiology doesn't matter. Maybe only "meat machines" can be conscious, while silicon machines, even if functionally very similar to us, could never be conscious.

The crux of the matter lies, perhaps, in whether two-dimensionalism or one-dimensionalism is the right response to the problem of other minds. The one-dimensionalist -- Mill, briefly -- holds that if we see the right types of similar causal relationships between inputs and outputs, that's enough to justify attributing consciousness (perhaps on grounds of simplicity or parsimony: "no other force need be supposed"). The two-dimensionalist, like Block, thinks doubt is justified unless there's both functional and physiological similarity.

Two dimensionalists are thereby committed to doubting AI consciousness, unless we someday create AI that is not only functionally but physiologically similar to us.

Must one-dimensionalist functionalists reject organoid consciousness? That's not as clear. I see at least two paths for them to accept organoid consciousness. First, they might define the functional roles in terms of features internal to neural systems -- not mosquito bites and scratching, but things like information sharing across a global workspace. Second, they might use the functional role to identify a physiological type, and then a la David Lewis, attribute consciousness whenever that physiological type is present, even if it isn't -- in that particular system -- playing its typical functional role.

Eek! The Plummeting Philosophy Major in the U.S.

Three years ago, I posted some optimistic reflections about how the philosophy major seemed to be recovering from its recent decline in the U.S. I take it back. The National Center for Education Statistics has released its numbers from the 2023-2024 academic year, and it's bad.

First off: The humanities in general have been hemorrhaging majors since about 2008. English in particular has been hammered. In the 2000-2001 academic year, 4.5% bachelor's degrees recipients were English majors. Now it's 1.7%. [1]

[declining humanities majors; click to enlarge and clarify]

Since philosophy started out low, its decline is not as visually evident in the graph. Here are the raw numbers.

Year: Philosophy BAs awarded (as a % of all Bachelor's degrees)

2001: 5836 (.49%)
2002: 6529 (.52%)
2003: 7023 (.54%)
2004: 7707 (.57%)
2005: 8283 (.60%)
2006: 8532 (.60%)
2007: 8541 (.59%)
2008: 8778 (.59%)
2009: 8996 (.59%)
2010: 9268 (.59%)
2011: 9292 (.57%)
2012: 9362 (.56%)
2013: 9427 (.54%)
2014: 8820 (.49%)
2015: 8184 (.44%)
2016: 7489 (.40%)
2017: 7572 (.39%)
2018: 7667 (.39%)
2019: 8074 (.40%)
2020: 8209 (.40%)
2021: 8328 (.40%)
2022: 7958 (.39%)
2023: 7550 (.38%)
2024: 7091 (.36%)

As you can see, there were grounds for hope around 2019-2021. However, since 2021 the number of bachelor's degree completions in philosophy has fallen from 8328 to 7091 -- a 15% decline in just three years. The percentage of college students receiving philosophy degrees is at an all-time low.

Bachelor's degree completions in general have declined somewhat. They peaked at 2,068,932 in the 2020-2021 academic year and have declined slightly in every subsequent year, down to 1,959,325 for the 2023-2024 academic year -- a 5% decline overall. Possible explanations of this general trend include: a hangover from the pandemic, demographic shifts, or a decline in the perceived value of a university education.

I was curious whether the decline in philosophy majors would be more pronounced at schools with fewer philosophy majors. In a post from 2021, I had found that from 2010-2019, just 20 schools accounted for 17% of philosophy degrees awarded in the U.S. Returning to those same data for the 2023-2024 academic year, I found that the top 20 schools now account for 22% of all philosophy degrees awarded.

Another way to examine the increasing concentration is to check Carnegie classifications. Carnegie classifies undergraduate institutions as "selective" if they are in the 40th-80th percentile of selectivity in undergraduate admissions based on test scores, and "more selective" if they in the 80th-100th percentile of selectivity. Fifty-two percent of philosophy degree recipients are from "more selective" schools, compared to 25% of bachelor's degree recipients overall; and 84% of philosophy degree recipients are from either selective or more selective schools, compared to 62% overall. In 2010-2019, 45% of philosophy BAs were from more selective schools (vs. 23% overall) and 80% were from either selective or more selective schools (vs. 60% overall), confirming the increasing concentration.

Thus, relatively elite schools award disproportionately many philosophy degrees -- and this tendency has increased as the percentage of students earning philosophy degrees has declined.

For those who are curious which universities awarded the most philosophy degrees in 2023-2024, according to the NCES IPEDS classifications, it is:

University of Pennsylvania 193
University of California-Los Angeles 117
University of California-Santa Barbara 93
University of California-Berkeley 91
University of Washington-Seattle Campus 88
University of Southern California 84
New York University 76
University of Maryland-College Park 75
University of Chicago 71
Boston College 71
University of Colorado Boulder 69
Boston University 67
Arizona State University Digital Immersion 65
University of Wisconsin-Madison 57
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 56
University of California-Davis 55
Emory University 55
Columbia University in the City of New York 53
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 51
University of California-Santa Cruz 48
University of Florida 47
Arizona State University Campus Immersion 46
University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus 46
The University of Texas at Austin 46

Note: Some of these numbers include interdisciplinary philosophy majors, such as Penn's Philosophy, Politics & Economics major.

All of these universities except the two Arizona State universities are Carnegie classified as "more selective".

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

[1] Method: The NCES IPEDS databases, custom data files, EZ group U.S. only, completions by CIP number, including both first and second majors, CIP categories 16 for foreign language and literature, 23 for English, 54 for History, and 38.01 for Philosophy. Each year captures the academic year ending that spring. For example 2024 is the 2023-2024 academic year.

Is AI Conscious? A Primer on the Myths and Confusions Driving the Debate

Susan Schneider, David Sahner, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Mark Bailey, and I have just posted a circulating white paper "Is AI Conscious? A Primer on the Myths and Confusions Driving the Debate". Really, Susan, David, Robert, and Mark did almost all the work. I only contributed a few thoughts and one short section.

We're hoping the paper will be helpful for policy-makers and non-philosophers who are hoping to understand the central issues and concepts in debates about the possibility of AI consciousness. We discuss the definition of "consciousness"; how consciousness differs from "intelligence" and "life"; the difference between "sentience" and "sapience"; what "agency" and "functionalism" mean in these contexts; the difference between "consciousness" and "self-consciousness"; and how the prospects for AI consciousness look on various metaphysical theories such as computational functionalism and substance dualism; and other such issues.

We don't go deep on any of these issues and aren't attempting to present a novel perspective. But if you're feeling at sea and want an efficient overview of some of the central ideas, we hope you'll find it helpful.

New Book in Draft: AI and Consciousness

This book is a skeptical overview of the literature on AI consciousness.

We will soon create AI systems that are conscious according to some influential, mainstream theories of consciousness but are not conscious according to other influential, mainstream theories of consciousness. We will not be in a position to know which theories are correct and whether we are surrounded by AI systems as richly and meaningfully conscious as human beings or instead only by systems as experientially blank as toasters. None of the standard arguments either for or against AI consciousness take us far.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Hills and Fog
Chapter Two: What Is Consciousness? What Is AI?
Chapter Three: Ten Possibly Essential Features of Consciousness
Chapter Four: Against Introspective and Conceptual Arguments for Essential Features
Chapter Five: Materialism and Functionalism
Chapter Six: The Turing Test and the Chinese Room
Chapter Seven: The Mimicry Argument Against AI Consciousness
Chapter Eight: Global Workspace Theories and Higher Order Theories
Chapter Nine: Integrated Information, Local Recurrence, Associative Learning, and Iterative Natural Kinds
Chapter Ten: Does Biological Substrate Matter?
Chapter Eleven: The Problem of Strange Intelligence
Chapter Twelve: The Leapfrog Hypothesis and the Social Semi-Solution

Draft available here.

Per my usual custom, anyone who gives comments on the entire manuscript (by email please, to my academic address at ucr.edu) will receive not only the usual acknowledgement but an appreciatively signed copy once it appears in print.

Why Philosophy?

Why Philosophy? has published a brief interview of me on the nature and practice of philosophy. I figured I'd cross-post here.

[landing page of Why Philosophy? detail]

What is philosophy to you?

My graduate advisor Alison Gopnik once characterized philosophy as just “very theoretical anything.” Take any issue you want and plunge deep enough, and you’re doing philosophy.

Philosophy is not a subject area. It is an approach, a style of thinking, a willingness to dive in and consider the deepest ontological, normative, conceptual, and broadly theoretical questions regarding anything. Any topic – the mind, language, physics, ethics, hair, Barbie dolls, carpentry, auto racing – can be approached philosophically. For all X, there is a philosophy of X.

How were you first introduced to philosophy?

That question seems to presuppose that philosophy is a formal discipline of some sort that one needs to be introduced to. But already in middle school my friends and I had opinions – and were willing to argue at length about them – about what makes a teacher good or bad, about whether when and why it’s okay and not okay to use swear words, why what we thought of as “modern art” sucked, and under what conditions it’s reasonable for a game master to do a total-party-kill in Dungeons & Dragons. Isn’t that already philosophy?

How do you practice philosophy today?

In living life thoughtfully, we are always already practicing philosophy.

What is a philosophical issue that is important to you?

Discovering and rediscovering awe in the wondrous, incomprehensible complexity of the world. Here we are, basically just bags of mostly water, and we can look up at the sky and wonder about the origin of the stars, we can look back into the past and wonder about the origins of morality, we can create art, we can cooperate on multi-year, multi-million-person projects. Pretty good for bags of water! But the intractable complexity of reality will always exceed our simple comprehension.

What books, podcasts, or other media have stood out to you as a philosopher?

One of my favorite philosophers, Helen De Cruz, died this year, far too young. Check out her Substack, her book Wonderstruck, and her article on friendship with the ancients.

Early Career Hugo Nominations -- Yes, They Definitely Happen

Every summer, I post a prestige ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on major awards nominations and "best of" anthology selections in the previous ten years. One question is whether such awards largely reflect the past accomplishments of an already illustrious career. Do new authors with great stories have a shot at such awards, or do they almost always go to old-timers?

Adrian Ward has shared some data with me that helps address this question.

Adrian looked at Hugo nominations (the Hugo being the best-known award) in the short story and novelette categories since 2015. For each nomination, he noted the number of "major" magazine publications by the author before the nominated story and the number published in the three years immediately after. The included "major" magazines, based on my prestige ranking, were Analog, Apex, Asimov's, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Reactor/Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny. Excluded from analysis were stories not originally published in English, since those authors rarely publish in English-language magazines, and the "Sad Puppies" stories of 2015-2016. (Sad Puppies was an attempt to game the Hugos.)

We might characterize authors with five or fewer major magazine publications before their nomination as "early career" authors. Of course, this isn't a perfect measure: Some might have long careers of publishing in other venues, and some might have mostly published books instead of stories. But I hope it's a reasonable enough proxy.

By this measure, almost half of Hugo nominations go to early-career authors: 51/112 (46%). Indeed, thirteen (12%) went to authors with no qualifying publications before the nomination. [For a list of authors, see Note 1]

Authors with 6-19 previous qualifying publications received 35 nominations (31%) -- though some of these authors were very established novel writers, showing the imperfection of this proxy measure. [Note 2]

Authors with 20 or more previous qualifying publications received 26 nominations over the 11-year period (23%).[Note 3]

Adrian also looked at how many publications in those same twelve magazines these authors had over the next three years (for nominations in 2022 and earlier). The majority of the early career authors (21/39, 54%) had none, and the average number was 1.3. It's unclear how much to make of this, but it doesn't look like a Hugo nomination is typically a stepping stone to further publication in these twelve magazines. [Note 4] That itself is encouraging in a way. Editors of these magazines often say they are interested in new talent and prefer not to just publish the same well-known names.

I conclude that short story and novelette nominations for the Hugo don't feature mainly the same group of big-name established writers. Lots of relative newcomers get a shot -- but it's not an automatic ticket to a prolific short-story career.

Thanks for these intriguing data, Adrian!

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

[1] With zero previous qualifying publications: S.R. Algernon, Nina Allan, Zen Cho, Steven Diamond, Kary English, Isabell Fall, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Stix Hiscock, Blue Neustifter, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Shiv Ramdas, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Rivers Solomon. With 1-5: Lou Antonelli, Brooke Bolander, Siobhan Carroll, Rae Carson, Ted Chiang (!), P. Djeli Clark (2), Meg Elison, Sarah Gailey (2), Sarah Gailey, Alix E. Harrow (3), Simone Heller, S.L. Huang (2), Jose Pablo Iriarte, Ai Jiang, Rachael K. Jones, Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, Samantha Mills, Premee Mohamed, C.L. Polk, Vina Jie-Min Prasad (2), Nibedita Sen, K.M. Szpara, Wole Talabi, Ursula Vernon, Fran Wilde, John Wiswell (2), John Wiswell, Alyssa Wong (2), and John C. Wright (2).

[2] Brooke Bolander (3), John Chu, Tina Connolly, Amal El-Mohtar, A.T. Greenblatt, Daryl Gregory, Thomas Ha, Carolyn Ives Gilman, N.K. Jemisin (2), Rachael K. Jones, Isabel J. Kim, Stephen King, T. Kingfisher (2), Naomi Kritzer, Seanan McGuire, Linda Nagata, Suzanne Palmer, Sarah Pinsker, Gray Rinehart, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Catherynne M. Valente, Carrie Vaughn, Ursula Vernon, Marie Vibbert, Nghi Vo (2), Fran Wilde (3), Caroline M. Yoachim (2). Some of these authors overlap with Group 1, as they shifted from the 0-5 category to the 6-19 category over the years. [ETA: Adrian reminds me that Vernon and Kingfisher are the same author, though analyzed separately here.]

[3] Aliette de Bodard (3), Michael F. Flynn, Mary Robinette Kowal, Naomi Kritzer (6), Yoon Ha Lee (2), Edward M. Lerner, Suzanne Palmer, Sarah Pinsker (6), Rajnar Vajra, Catherynne M. Valente (2), and Caroline M. Yoachim (2). Some of these authors overlap with Group 2, as they shifted from the 6-19 category to the 20+ category over the years.

[4] This is a highly imperfect measure of whether the author continued in science fiction. For example, Rebecca Roanhorse is among the authors who earned a Hugo nomination with her first major magazine publication. She went on to publish several novels but no more short stories in the twelve included magazines. Most of the others published multiple stories thereafter, though often in edited collections or in magazines not included among the twelve.

[The Hugo Award; image source]