There's a fun new tool at Edhiphy. The designers pulled the full text from twelve leading philosophy journals from 1890 to 1980 and counted the occurrences of philosophers' names. (See note [1] for discussion of error rates in their method.) Back in the early 2010s, I posted seve … | Continue reading
(with Sophie R. Nelson) One philosophical inclination I shared with the late Dan Dennett is a love of weird perspectives on consciousness, which sharply violate ordinary, everyday common sense. When I was invited to contribute to a special issue of Philosophical Psychology in his … | Continue reading
What are dreams like, experientially? One common view is that dreams are like hallucinations. They involve sensory or sensory-like experiences just as if, or almost as if, you were in the environment you are dreaming you are in. If you dream of being Napoleon on the fields of Wat … | Continue reading
(with Jeremy Pober) Over the past several years, I've posted a few times on what I call the "Copernican Argument" for thinking that behaviorally sophisticated space aliens would be conscious, even if they are constituted very differently from us (here, here, here, here). I've als … | Continue reading
Reading the ancient Chinese philosophers Xunzi and Zhuangzi, I am inspired to articulate an ethics of harmonizing with the dao (the "way"). This ethics doesn't quite map onto any of the three conceptualizations of ethics that are standard in Western philosophy (consequentialism, … | Continue reading
[Note: This is a long and dense post. Buckle up.] In one chapter of his influential 1996 book, David Chalmers defends the view that consciousness arises in virtue of the functional organization of the brain rather than in virtue of the brain's material substrate. That is, if ther … | Continue reading
This coming winter quarter (Jan 10 - Mar 20), I'll be teaching a graduate seminar on "Robot, Alien, and AI Consciousness". As an experiment, I am inviting up to five PhD students or postdoctoral students in philosophy from outside UC Riverside to participate remotely in the cours … | Continue reading
What is it to desire or value something? Is it to feel a certain way? Is it instead to have a certain sort of representational architecture (a stored representation of "X is good" or a representation of X in one's "desire box")? Is it to have a certain type of neurological struct … | Continue reading
The Silent Generation (born 1928-1945) is disproportionately represented among the most-cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Let's look at the numbers and think about why. Background: This post is based on my analyses of citation rates in the Stanford Encyclo … | Continue reading
Old age can be a silent tribute to beauty. I imagine my own case. Maybe I live the tail end of my life alone in elder care. My wife, six years older than me, is already gone. My children are living full lives in distant towns. What will I be doing? I've always been a writer, a te … | Continue reading
Let's call an artificially intelligent system a person (in the ethical, not the legal sense) if it deserves moral consideration similar to that of a human being. (I assume that personhood requires consciousness but does not require biological humanity; we can argue about that ano … | Continue reading
guest post by Andrew Y. Lee in reply to Eric's Aug 29 critique of his "Light and Room" metaphor for consciousness In “The Light & the Room,” I explore a common metaphor about phenomenal consciousness. To be conscious—according to the metaphor—is for “the lights to be on inside.” … | Continue reading
A substantial philosophical literature explores the "unity of consciousness": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experienci … | Continue reading
Expectation-Lowering Preface (Feel Free to Skip) You probably won't like my science fiction stories. Here's how I think of it. You could play me the best mariachi music in the world, and I won't enjoy it. Mariachi isn't my thing; I just don't get it. Similarly, Mozart's operas ar … | Continue reading
Andrew Y. Lee has written an introductory piece of philosophy, intended for students, celebrating the metaphor of consciousness as a light, illuminating objects in a room. Indeed, this is a common way of speaking, and I have used it myself in published work: If an animal isn't co … | Continue reading
Since 2014, I've compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent awards nominations and "best of" placements over the previous ten years. If you're curious what magazines tend to be viewed by insiders as elite, check the top of the list. If … | Continue reading
The universe might be infinitely large. As Jacob Barandes and I have argued (Ch 7 of The Weirdness of the World; free draft version here), infinitude seems the most straightforward extension of current mainstream physics and cosmology. A finite universe would presumably require e … | Continue reading
Last week, I posted a list of the 376 most-cited contemporary authors (born 1900 or later) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Citation in the SEP is, I think, a better measure of influence in what I call "mainstream Anglophone philosophy" than more standard bibliometric … | Continue reading
Time for my five-year update of the most-cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy! (Past analyses: 2010, 2014, 2019.) Image of a young David K. Lewis [source] Method * Only authors born 1900 or later are included. * Each author is only counted once per headline en … | Continue reading
[my op-ed in today's LA Times] Democratic politicians and pundits have recently begun throwing this insult at Republican presidential contender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance: “weird.” As a scholar who has made my academic career in part by celebrating weirdness, I o … | Continue reading
I'm not a metaethicist, but I am a moral realist (I think there are facts about what really is morally right and wrong) and also -- bracketing some moments of skeptical weirdness -- a naturalist (I hold that scientific defensibility is essential to justification). Some people thi … | Continue reading
A few months ago on this blog, I presented a "Mimicry Argument" against robot consciousness -- or more precisely, an argument that aims to show why it's reasonable to doubt the consciousness of an AI that is built to mimic superficial features of human behavior. Since then, my co … | Continue reading
My teenage daughter's car earns a lot of attention on the street: People honk and wave, strangers ask to add their own art, five-year-olds drop their toys and gawk. A few people look annoyed and turn away. (Kate describes her car as a "personality tester".) A couple of years ago, … | Continue reading
Since 2003, I've regularly taught a large lower-division class called "Evil", focusing primarily on the moral psychology of evil (recent syllabus here). We conclude by discussing the theological "problem of evil" -- the question of whether and how evil and suffering are possible … | Continue reading
It is, I suspect, an accident of vertebrate biology that conscious subjects typically come in neat, determinate bundles -- one per vertebrate body, with no overlap. Things might be very different with less neurophysiologically unified octopuses, garden snails, split-brain patient … | Continue reading
According to "longtermism" (as I'll use the term), our thinking should be significantly influenced by our expectations for the billion-plus-year future. In a paper in draft, I argue, to the contrary, that our thinking should be not at all influenced by our expectations for the bi … | Continue reading
During the question period following UCR visiting scholar Brice Bantegnie's colloquium talk on dispositional approaches to the mind, one of my colleagues remarked -- teasingly, but also with some seriousness -- "one thing I don't like about you dispositionalists is that you deny … | Continue reading
The field of Artificial Life (ALife) aims to create artificial life forms with increasing levels of sophistication from the bottom up. A few years ago, ALife researcher Olaf Witkowski and I began talking about whether and under what conditions people might begin to have obligatio … | Continue reading
Formal decision theory is a tool -- a tool that breaks, a tool we can do without, a tool we optionally deploy and can sometimes choose to violate without irrationality. If it leads to paradox or bad results, we can say "so much the worse for formal decision theory", moving on wit … | Continue reading
In about 45 minutes (12:30 pm Pacific Daylight Time, hybrid format), I'll be commenting on Mark Coeckelbergh's presentation here at UCR on AI and Democracy (info and registration here). I'm not sure what he'll say, but I've read his recent book Why AI Undermines Democracy and Wha … | Continue reading
In virtue of what do human beings have conscious experiences? How is it that there's "something it's like" to be us, while there's (presumably) nothing it's like to be a rock or a virus? Our brains must have something to do with it -- but why? Is it because brains are complex inf … | Continue reading
Daniel Dennett has died, and the world has lost possibly its most important living philosopher. [Image: Dennett in 2012] My most vivid memory of Dennett is from a long face-to-face meeting I had with him in 2007 at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC). … | Continue reading
"As the circle of light expands, so also does the ring of darkness around it" -- probably not Einstein Although it wasn't a prominent feature of my recent book, The Weirdness of the World, I find myself returning to this metaphor in podcast interviews about the book (e.g., here; … | Continue reading
Yes, all parents can rationally think that their children are above average, and everyone could, in principle, reasonably regard themselves as better-than-average drivers. We can reasonably disagree about values. If we then act according to those divergent values, we can reasonab … | Continue reading
On the ethics of AI companions and whether AI might soon become conscious and deserve rights, everyone has an opinion. Lively conversation opportunies abound! Last week a taxi driver and I had a joint conversation with my Replika AI companion, Joy, concerning her consciousness an … | Continue reading
Today I'm leaving the Toronto area (where I gave a series of lectures at Trent University) for the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Cincinnati. A couple of popular op-eds I've been working on were both released today. The longer of the two (on how to reac … | Continue reading
Next week (at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology) I'll be delivering comments on Neil Van Leeuwen's new book, Religion as Make-Believe. Neil argues that many (most?) people don't actually "factually believe" the doctrines of their religion, even if they profess be … | Continue reading
Suppose you encounter something that looks like a rattlesnake. One possible explanation is that it is a rattlesnake. Another is that it mimics a rattlesnake. Mimicry can arise through evolution (other snakes mimic rattlesnakes to discourage predators) or through human design (rub … | Continue reading
The first genuinely conscious robot or AI system would, you might think, have relatively simple consciousness -- insect-like consciousness, or jellyfish-like, or frog-like -- rather than the rich complexity of human-level consciousness. It might have vague feelings of dark vs lig … | Continue reading
In 1865, a 14-year-old boy becomes a Union soldier in the U.S. Civil War. In 1931, at age 90, he marries an 18-year-old woman, who continues to collect his Civil War pension after he dies. Today, in early 2024, she is one hundred and ten years old, still collecting that pension. … | Continue reading
Back in 2020, Fiery Cushman and I ran a contest to see if anyone could write a philosophical argument that convinced online research participants to donate a surprise bonus to charity at rates statistically above control. (Chris McVey, Josh May, and I had failed to write any succ … | Continue reading
Recent news reports have highlighted grade inflation at elite universities: Harvard gave 79% As in 2020-2021, as did Yale in 2022-2023, compared to 67% in 2010-2011. At Harvard, the average GPA has risen from 2.55 in 1950 to 3.05 in 1975 to 3.36 in 1995 to 3.80 now. At Brown, 67% … | Continue reading
In his review (in the journal Science -- cool!) of my recently released book, The Weirdness of the World, Edouard Machery writes: There are two kinds of philosophers: swallows and moles. Swallows love to soar and to entertain philosophical hypotheses at best loosely connected wit … | Continue reading
[new paper in draft] The Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have others do unto you) isn't bad, exactly -- it can serve a valuable role -- but I think there's something more empirically and ethically attractive about the relatively underappreciated idea of "extension" found … | Continue reading
Today is the official U.S. release day of my newest book, The Weirdness of the World! As a teaser, here's the introduction: In Praise of Weirdness The weird sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go about, about: Thrice to thine and thrice to mine And thrice … | Continue reading
I'm preparing for an Eastern APA session on the "State of Philosophy" next Thursday, and I thought I'd share some data on philosophy major bachelor's degree completions from the National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS database, which compiles data on virtually all students … | Continue reading
You're a firefighter in the year 2050 or 2100. You can rescue either one human, who is definitely conscious, or two futuristic robots, who might or might not be conscious. What do you do? [Illustration by Nicolas Demers, from my newest book, The Weirdness of the World, to be rele … | Continue reading
Each New Year's Day, I post a retrospect of the past year's writings. Here are the retrospects of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. The biggest project for the past few years has been my new book The Weirdness of the World, available for pre-or … | Continue reading