Among philosophers studying belief, normativism is an increasingly popular position. According to normativism, beliefs are necessarily, as part of their essential nature, subject to certain evaluative standards. In particular, beliefs are necessarily defective in a certain way if … | Continue reading
I have a new essay in draft, "The Washout Argument Against Longtermism". As always, thoughts, comments, and objections welcome, either as comments on this post or by email to my academic address. Abstract: We cannot be justified in believing that any actions currently available t … | Continue reading
It's not absurd to think the universe might endure forever. by Eric Schwitzgebel and Jacob Barandes From The Weirdness of the World, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in January, excerpted Dec 15 at Nautilus. On recent estimates, the observable universe—the portion of t … | Continue reading
People occasionally fall in love with AI systems. I expect that this will become increasingly common as AI grows more sophisticated and new social apps are developed for large language models. Eventually, this will probably precipitate a crisis in which some people have passionat … | Continue reading
I favor a "superficialist" approach to belief (see here and here). "Belief" is best conceptualized not in terms of deep cognitive structure (e.g., stored sentences in the language of thought) but rather in terms of how a person would tend to act and react under various hypothetic … | Continue reading
In working on a post for tomorrow on whether Large Language Models like GPT-4 and Bard-2 have beliefs, I asked GPT-4 what I thought would be a not-too-hard question about chemistry: "What element is two to the right of manganese on the periodic table?" It crashed, burned, and exp … | Continue reading
Anna Strasser and I have a new paper in draft, arising from a conference she organized in Riverside last spring on Humans and Smart Machines as Partners in Thought. Imagine, on one end the spectrum, ordinary asocial tool use: typing numbers into a calculator, for example. Imagin … | Continue reading
Anna Strasser and I have a new paper in draft, arising from a conference she organized in Riverside last spring on Humans and Smart Machines as Partners in Thought. Imagine, on one end the spectrum, ordinary asocial tool use: typing numbers into a calculator, for example. Imagine … | Continue reading
There's a discussion-queue tradition in philosophy that some people love, but which I've come to oppose. It's too ripe for misuse, favors the aggressive, serves no important positive purpose, and generates competition, anxiety, and moral perplexity. Time to ditch it! I'm referrin … | Continue reading
Could we ever build a "moralometer" -- that is, an instrument that would accurately measure people's overall morality? If so, what would it take? Psychologist Jessie Sun and I explore this question in our new paper in draft: "The Prospects and Challenges of Measuring Morality". C … | Continue reading
In the 1970s, women received about 17% of PhDs in philosophy in the U.S. The percentage rose to about 27% in the 1990s, where it stayed basically flat for the next 25 years. The latest data suggest that the percentage is on the rise again. Here's a fun chart (for user-relative va … | Continue reading
A thousand utilitarian consequentialists stand before a thousand identical buttons. If any one of them presses their button, ten people will die. The benefits of pressing the button are more difficult to estimate. Ninety-nine percent of the utilitarians rationally estimate that f … | Continue reading
In a 2015 article, Mara Garza and I offer the following argument for the rights of some possible AI systems: Premise 1: If Entity A deserves some particular degree of moral consideration and Entity B does not deserve that same degree of moral consideration, there must be some rel … | Continue reading
AI intelligence is strange -- strange in something like the etymological sense of external, foreign, unfamiliar, alien. My PhD student Kendra Chilson (in unpublished work) argues that we should discard the familiar scale of subhuman → human-grade → superhuman. AI systems do, an … | Continue reading
AI intelligence is strange -- strange in something like the etymological sense of external, foreign, unfamiliar, alien. My PhD student Kendra Chilson (in unpublished work) argues that we should discard the familiar scale of subhuman → human-grade → superhuman. AI systems do, and … | Continue reading
[a 2900-word opinion piece that appeared last week in Patterns] AI systems should not be morally confusing. The ethically correct way to treat them should be evident from their design and obvious from their interface. No one should be misled, for example, into thinking that a n … | Continue reading
In his famous Wager, Pascal contemplates whether one should choose to believe in God. (Maybe we can't directly choose to believe in God any more than we can simply choose to believe that the Sun is purple; but we can choose to expose ourselves to conditions, such as regular assoc … | Continue reading
If someday space aliens visit Earth, I will almost certainly think that they are conscious, if they behave anything like us. If they have spaceships, animal-like body plans, and engage in activities that invite interpretation as cooperative, linguistic, self-protective, and plan … | Continue reading
Recent "illusionists", such as Keith Frankish and Francois Kammerer, deny that consciousness exists. If that sounds so obviously false that you suspect they must mean something peculiar by "consciousness", you're right! But they say they don't mean anything peculiar by "conscio … | Continue reading
Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it. adactio.com/links/20087 | Continue reading
I have some travel and talks coming up. If you're interested and in the area, and if the hosting institution permits, please come by! Mar 29: Claremont McKenna College, Athenaeum Lecture: Falling in Love with Machines Mar 30: University of Washington, Seattle, brown bag discussi … | Continue reading
I'm a superficialist about belief. On my view, to believe something is to match, to an appropriate degree and in appropriate respects, a "... | Continue reading
Last fall, Fiery Cushman and I announced a contest : We would award $1000 ($500 to the author and $500 to the author's choice of charity) to... | Continue reading
I've published quite a lot on people's poor self-knowledge of their own stream of experience (e.g. this and this ), and also a bit on our o... | Continue reading
In 2017, I reported three demographic trends in the philosophy major in the U.S. First, philosophy Bachelor's degrees awarded had declined... | Continue reading
I've published quite a lot on people's poor self-knowledge of their own stream of experience (e.g. this and this ), and also a bit on our o... | Continue reading
by Eric Schwitzgebel and Christopher McVey ... or at least this is so for one narrative we've tried and one type of philosophical argument... | Continue reading