Professor of Philosophy, UC Riverside belief, consciousness, AI, science fiction, moral psychology, classical Chinese philosophy, metaphysics....
Riverside, CA
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My recent book AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview is free online today and tomorrow (through Oct 19, presumably UK time). I don't think the hard copy is available yet. Get it while it's free!
cambridge.org/core/elements/…
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Friends and readers: I have cancer.
The type of cancer is not yet fully confirmed, but all signs point toward kidney cancer that has spread to my hips, back, and pleura. On the bright side, all my blood tests so far are normal, suggesting that the cancer is moving slowly, 1/6
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age and with a worse prognosis than I.
In case any of you are worried in light of last week's post about self-sacrifice with terminal diagnoses, I assure you that although my reflections at the time were more immediately personally relevant than they might have seemed, while 5/6
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New podcast interview of me on Empathy Unbound, mostly about whether AI could soon be conscious and what the consequences would be:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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An interview of me on the Micah Zarin podcast, on AI consciousness, human weirdness, moral motivation, the value of philosophy, the value of diversity, and more.
piped.video/watch?v=tzjGGBB9…
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The Appeal of (Semi-?) Biological Naturalism
[link in thread]
Biological naturalism about consciousness will, I predict, soon be hot. As AI systems start to look more and more like conscious or sentient entities, at least superficially, doubters will be increasingly drawn to 1/3
ALT A Mark Tobey painting
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arguments against their consciousness. Especially appealing will be arguments that characterize consciousness specifically as a biological phenomenon, one that can't occur in ordinary, non-biological computer systems.
In today's post I describe the structure of such 2/3
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arguments and their limitations.
schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co…
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Should We Build AI Guardian Angels?
[link to post in thread]
Answer: no (in response to @dioscuri), in part because each generation should nurture the next, not the other way around.
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New interview of me on possible AI consciousness, including the "Leapfrog Hypothesis", according to which the first conscious AIs will have sophisticated consciousness rather than simple "frog-like" experiences:
piped.video/watch?v=bcWw91Ql…
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Chapter Zero of my new book in draft, Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights (comments warmly welcomed!), here: schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co…
ALT Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights, Eric Schwitzgebel, under contract for Princeton University Press
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New paper in draft! I've been working on this one since 2018, never satisfied, redrafting over and over. I'm sure it still needs considerable work, but I'm finally ready to circulate it.
Walking the Walk
Ethicists who advocate moral principles without trying to live by them 1/5
ALT Walking the Walk title page
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content, such as “don’t eat meat”, is difficult to fully understand without living by it: A meat-eating professor who recommends vegetarianism will generally have only a thin grasp of the way of life they recommend. These limitations give us reason to discount the 4/5
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understanding of ethicists who don’t attempt to live by their principles, even when their arguments are beautiful on the page.
faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/Sc…
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