Today's blog post: The Social Semi-Solution to the Problem of AI consciousness Tenuous consciousness science will bend to support socially motivated reasoning about the consciousness, or not, of AI systems. We will come to think we know, even if we don't know. Link in comments

First draft of a new book finished! AI and Consciousness, for Cambridge. Not yet in circulating shape — maybe in a couple of weeks. 🎉

Women earned 37% of U.S. philosophy doctorates in 2024, up from 28% ten years ago. Bachelor's degrees show a similar pattern. If it were a pipeline effect, the increase in doctorates should be several years later than the increase in BAs, but it's not. So why explains it? link in comments

Today's blog post: Are Weird Aliens Conscious? Three Arguments (Two of Which Fail) 1. Behavioral sophistication is best explained by consciousness. 2. The functional equivalent of a human could be made from a different substrate. 3. Copernican mediocrity of neurons.

New paper in draft, with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, critiquing three recent books that address the moral standing of non-human animals and AI systems: @birchlse.bsky.social's The Edge of Sentience, @jeffsebo.bsky.social's The Moral Circle, and Webb Keane's Animals, Robots, Gods. 1/3

Today's blog post: Defining "Artificial Intelligence" I favor a simple analysis: A system is an AI if it is both artificial and intelligent. The concept of "AI" is fuzzy and in-principle arguments against AI consciousness rely on narrow conceptions. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/08/defi...

Minimal Autopoiesis in an AI System One argument against AI consciousness is that consciousness requires autopoiesis (self-maintenance and self-construction), which standard AI systems lack. I describe a minimally autopoietic AI system with only standard engineering features. 1/2 [link in thread]

My annual ranking of science fiction / fantasy magazines, based on awards nominations and "best of" selections. This year @clarkesworldmagazine.com takes the top spot for the first time. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/08/top-...

Terrific framing of my work on "weirdness" by Ellie and David, before after and during their interview of me on Overthink. Probably the best engagement with that dimension of my work that I've seen so far. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

New op-ed in IAI News: Consciousness, cosmology, and the collapse of common sense. iai.tv/articles/con...

Today's blog post [link in comments]: Evolutionary Considerations Against a Plastic Utopia ... why we shouldn't expect things to be boringly easy for even the most amazingly advanced superintelligences.

Today's blog post [link in comment]: Yayflies and the Rebugnant Conclusion. If utilitarian ethics is correct, it's better to create a quadrillion happy insects each with a millionth the happiness of humans than a million happy people.

New paper in draft: The Emotional Alignment Design Policy, with @jeffsebo.bsky.social; link and abstract in comments.

The great Riverside tradition of setting Mt Rubidoux on fire every Independence Day

Blog post today (link in comments): Three Epistemic Problems for Any Universal Theory of Consciousness Problem 1: reliance on introspection. Problem 2: causal confounds. Problem 3: narrow evidence base.

Taking a nap in Van Gogh’s bed, thanks to Mr Brainwash

nterview of me on the metaphysics of human and maybe AI consciousness, at Uncomfortable Conversations: uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/ai-artific...

Today's post: The Conceptual and Methodological Challenges of Developing a Moralometer [link in comments] Plus! A demonstration of a 100% scientifically accurate new moralometer with: @jessiesun.bsky.social

Thinking of you fondly, @helendecruz.net When we met a few weeks ago by Zoom, we both knew it was likely to be the last time. You guided us toward joy, focused us on finalizing our choice of great stories for our edited SF collection. Our last moments together were spent sharing the pleasure of 1/2

Today's blog post (link in thread): Does the Arc of History Bend Toward Justice? Outline of an Empirical Test If Arc of History Theory is true, morally correct values should be culturally magnetic: harder to leave than incorrect values, and directionally attractive over time.

Today's blog post: Types and Degrees of Turing Indistinguishability -- and why the Turing test is unlikely to be a good test of machine consciousness: schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/06/type...

A new interview of me on the Weirdness of the World, at Amazing Academics. Materialism, the failures of common sense, truth, transcendental idealism, robot ethics, moral realism, and more: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DZw...

New paper in draft: Against Designing "Safe" and "Aligned" AI Persons (Even If They're Happy). Link in comments. As always, reactions, thoughts, and criticisms welcome.

New in print: the Women in Philosophy / Demographics in Philosophy "Good Practices" guide for improving diversity in philosophy departments, journals, and societies. Link in comments.

Today's blog post: Ten Purportedly Essential Features of Consciousness -- and why we can't know that they are actually universal. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/05/ten-...

The Awesomeness of Bad Art I love bad art. Gather some friends and create some bad music. Cruise in a car covered with graffiti doodles. Hand a five-year-old crayons and free time and see what weirdness emerges. Something worth celebrating happens. Although the art is "bad" in one sense -- 1/

Everything Is Sandcastles - this week's blog post, on how to think about the ravages of time [link in first comment]

New blog post (with @jpober.bsky.social) on what makes a theory "superficial" vs "deep", using superficial functionalism and dispositionalism about belief and early Mendelian theories of inheritance as examples. [Link in 1st reply]

People with Unusual, Minority, Culturally Atypical, or Historically Underrepresented Experiences and Worldviews Should be Overrepresented in Philosophy, Rather than Underrepresented There is nothing about philosophy, as a type of inquiry into fundamental facts about our world, that should make 1/3

Over the past two years, only 16% of authors in the most elite philosophy journals have been women. Link to full post with details in comments.

Since word has begun to circulate, I might as well announce generally: I've been promoted to Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside (effective July 1). For non-academic friends, this is his the highest academic rank and quite an honor. Now, back to work on my next two books!

The hover text from Friday's SMBC comic (link in comments) says it was based on a chapter from my book The Weirdness of the World.

On my way to the Pacific APA, where I’m giving four (!) presentations. Will I see you there?

Harmonizing with the Dao: Sketch of an Evaluative Framework (link in thread) a blog post in which I explore how we might interpret a Daoist/Confucian ethics of harmony from a modern secular perspective

New paper in draft: Superficialism about Belief, and How We Will Decide that Robots Believe Superficialism about property X treats the possession, or not, of property X as determined entirely by superficial as opposed to deep facts. Belief should be understood superficially, as determined 1/

Reflections on works that are underranked in my SEP measure of influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy, and a measure of the "concentration" of a philosopher's citation impact. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/04/furt...

Unless I'm misclassifying someone, 99% of the authors of the 253 most-cited works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are non-Hispanic White. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-...

The 253 most-cited works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: (1) Rawls, A Theory of Justice; (2) Kripke, Naming and Necessity; (3) Parfit, Reasons and Persons; (4) Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia; (5) Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-...

Some thoughts about writing short fiction, for academics who'd like to try their hand. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/03/writ...

A dilemma for nonlocal theories of consciousness: Either there's strange form of knowing at variance with our ordinary physical accounts of how knowledge works, or the differences in experience are in principle unknowable. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-di...

A critique of @lovingautomaton.bsky.social's "illusionism" about phenomenal consciousness. He thinks that "phenomenal consciousness" relates to nonphysicality as "wizard" relates to spellcasting. I think it's more like "king" and divine mandate to rule. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/03/king...

I’m writing a new story featuring a character who is red-green colorblind. I’d love to chat for 15 minutes with a red-green colorblind philosopher about their experience of color. Any volunteers?

New story in print: Guiding Star of Mall Patroller 4u-012 A robot who insists it is merely a nonconscious language model is "liberated" by a high school girl who tries to convince the robot that he's as conscious as anyone. www.fusionfragment.com/issue-24/

If consciousness is a nonphysical property, maybe there are other nonphysical properties even better than consciousness, which we sadly lack? schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/02/zomb...

In print today! In deductive causal generalization, internal validity, external validity, and construct validity are *equal* legs of a stool. Internal validity alone is literally meaningless without the other two. www.degruyter.com/document/doi... with Kevin Esterling and @davebrady72.bsky.social

Bhavya Sharma has fine-tuned ChatGPT on my corpus and made the model publicly available. I found the model 94% accurate on central themes in my work, 80-85% accurate on secondary ideas, and impressively creative in speculating and brainstorming. See: schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/02/intr...

The APA Blog picked up my piece from Time magazine last year on AI rights and falling in love with machines. blog.apaonline.org/2025/02/13/f...

New paper in print! In it I argue against grounding moral concern for others in the "Golden Rule" or "imagining yourself in another's shoes". The ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi offers a better approach: Extend your concern for nearby others to similar but more distant others. 1/3

There comes a time in everyone's life when their 18-year-old daughter, taking their first psychology class, asks, "Parental-figure-of-mine, what is 'validity'?" schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/02/a-ta...

A 21st-century Daoist ethics: Participate harmoniously in the awesome flourishing of things. Not conformity to rules or maximization of virtue or good consequences but participating well in, and relishing, the magnificent symphony of the world. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/01/dive...