The Splintered Mind

DigiDan's "Mistake" In the early 2020s, Anna Strasser, Matthew Crosby, David Schwitzgebel, and I built and tested a Large La...

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

... but what explains the change? For about 25 years, from the 1990s to the mid 2010s, the percentage of women earning PhDs in philosophy ...

Most scientists and philosophers of mind accept some version of what I'll call "substrate flexibility" (alternatively "su...

I have a new paper in draft, this time with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong . We critique three recent books that address the moral standing of no...

I propose that we define "Artificial Intelligence" in the obvious way. An entity is an AI if it is both artificial (in the relev...

Doubters of AI consciousness -- such as neuroscientist Anil Seth in a forthcoming target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences -- someti...

Since 2014, I've compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent awards nominations and "be...

I've been enjoying Nick Bostrom's 2024 book Deep Utopia . It's a wild series of structured speculations about meaning and purpo...

I'm traveling and not able to focus on my blog, so this week I thought I'd just share a section of my 2015 paper with Mara Garza de...

In Ned Beauman's 2023 novel Venomous Lumpsucker , the protagonist happens upon a breeding experiment in the open sea: a self-sustaining ...

New paper in draft! In 2015, Mara Garza and I briefly proposed what we called the Emotional Alignment Design Policy -- the idea that AI...

By a universal theory of consciousness , I mean a theory that would apply not just to humans but to all non-human animals, all possible AI s...