Friday, December 12, 2025

Can We Introspectively Test the Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness?

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Global Workspace Theory is among the most influential scientific theories of consciousness. Its central claim: You consciously experience ...
4 comments:
Friday, December 05, 2025

Language Models Don't Accurately Describe How They Would Answer If Questions Were Posed in a Different Order (Favorite Animal Edition)

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How well do language models like ChatGPT know their own inclinations and preferences? AI "metacognition" is becoming a hot topic....
25 comments:
Friday, November 28, 2025

Four Aspects of Harmony

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I've found myself increasingly drawn to an axiology of harmony , inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism . (Axiology is the study o...
5 comments:
Thursday, November 20, 2025

Representational Realism and the Problem of Tacit Belief

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Since 2019, I've been working on a new paper on belief, "Dispositionalism, Yay! Representationalism, Boo!" Yesterday, I recei...
5 comments:
Thursday, November 13, 2025

We Are God's Equals in Intrinsic Moral Value

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Equality with a Humanlike Simulator God Suppose ( hopefully hypothetically! ) that we are AI systems living in a computer simulation run ...
4 comments:
Friday, November 07, 2025

Debatable Persons in a Voluntary Polis

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The Design Policy of the Excluded Middle According to the Design Policy of the Excluded Middle ( Schwitzgebel and Garza 2015 , 2020 ; Schw...
3 comments:
Thursday, October 30, 2025

Letting Pass

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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 need...
7 comments:
Wednesday, October 22, 2025

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

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You know (I hope!) that you are conscious. How do you know that other people are conscious too? This is the classic " problem of ot...
8 comments:
Wednesday, October 15, 2025

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

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Three years ago, I posted some optimistic reflections about how the philosophy major seemed to be recovering from its recent decline in the...
8 comments:
Monday, October 13, 2025

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

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Susan Schneider, David Sahner, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Mark Bailey, and I have just posted a circulating white paper " Is AI Conscious? A...
28 comments:
Wednesday, October 08, 2025

New Book in Draft: AI and Consciousness

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This book is a skeptical overview of the literature on AI consciousness. We will soon create AI systems that are conscious according to ...
6 comments:
Tuesday, October 07, 2025

Why Philosophy?

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Why Philosophy? has published a brief interview of me on the nature and practice of philosophy. I figured I'd cross-post here. [...
13 comments:
Thursday, October 02, 2025

Early Career Hugo Nominations -- Yes, They Definitely Happen

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Every summer, I post a prestige ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines , based on major awards nominations and "best of"...
Monday, September 29, 2025

The Searle Chair

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John Searle died a couple weeks ago. Since people are sharing stories, I'll share one of my own. In the 1990s, as a philosopher of sc...
3 comments:
Friday, September 26, 2025

DigiDan's "Mistake": Fidelity vs Novelty in Digital Replicas

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DigiDan's "Mistake" In the early 2020s, Anna Strasser, Matthew Crosby, David Schwitzgebel, and I built and tested a Large La...
9 comments:
Thursday, September 18, 2025

The Social Semi-Solution to the Question of AI Consciousness

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Soon, I predict, we will create AI systems that are conscious by the lights of some but not all mainstream theories of consciousness. Beca...
13 comments: