The Splintered Mind
The Splintered Mind
Eric Schwitzgebel
Reflections in philosophy of psychology, broadly construed. Blog by Eric Schwitzgebel, American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology, philosophy of mind, and the nature of belief, as well as Classical Chinese philosophy.
Latest Posts
AI and Consciousness, hot off the press at Cambridge University Press and free online until Aug 26! Summary: Our most advanced AI systems might soon – within the next five to thirty years – be as richly and meaningfully conscious as...
Aloha from Kauai! Here's another snail for your enjoyment. Since I'm still on vacation, here’s a repost with edits from 2011 and from my 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures. [giant African land snail, seen...
Aloha from Honolulu! I have vacation brain, so I'll do a summer-themed repost. [Photo from the Bishop Museum malacology exhibit] *************************************Every spring I suffer the Summer Illusion. The following three...
I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. [from Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird] The literature on superintelligence and AI alignment tends to assume that an intelligent AI will have...
I don't want to read your AI-generated email. Lots of reasons why, but here's the core of it: I want the text to reflect your thoughts. I want to know that you, the human, actually had those ideas and had them authentically enough to...
Here. Comments welcomed, hoped for, treasured. Over the past couple years I've been working on a pair of books, AI and Consciousness and Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights. I began circulating AI and Consciousness last fall, and it should...
In philosophy of mind, people sometimes say things like the following: If functionalism is true about consciousness, then digital computers could be conscious; all it requires is that they instantiate the right programs. And yes, most...
Available here. Abstract: Future AI persons might both (1.) deserve moral consideration and rights fully equal with natural human persons, and (2.) have lifeways so radically different from ours as to break familiar patterns of moral...
Biological naturalists (e.g., Godfrey-Smith, Block, Searle, Seth) suggest that computers aren't made of the right kind of stuff to be conscious. Consciousness, they suggest, requires a biological substrate that computers lack. It's not...
... but collectively, we haven't yet figured out how. Yet! Helen De Cruz and the 2+1 Experiment The inspired advocacy of the late (dearly missed) Helen De Cruz convinced the American Philosophical Association to try out what they called...
Liberals about AI consciousness hold that we might soon (if we haven't already) create genuinely conscious AI systems. Conservatives about AI consciousness hold that AI consciousness remains in the distant future if it's possible at all....
Given the surge of interest in AI consciousness, the issue of "substrate independence" or "substrate flexibility" is now a hot topic in the metaphysics of mind. That is, does being conscious require having a particular material...
Part Two of a two-part seriesby Grace Helton (guest blogger) [Joan Miro, The Garden, 1925; image source] In the first part of this 2-part series, I argued that relationships between humans and large language models (LLMs) do not qualify...
Part One of a two-part seriesby Grace Helton (guest blogger)[Paul Klee, Angel Applicant, 1939; source]Some people have come to interact with ChatGPT as though it were a kind of friend or romantic partner. For instance, a 2025 New York...
Human beings matter morally. We have moral standing. Our interests deserve consideration -- for our own sakes, and not just as means to ends. Good ethical decision-making requires valuing human lives. Most philosophers hold that humans...