Aversions to Idealism
I was reading John Heil's (fairly brief) discussion of idealism in his philosophy of mind book. It's an interesting read because he spends most of the time saying that the…
Consciousness and A.I.
I am reading Stuart Russell's new book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, and highly recommend it. A lot has been written in the past few years…
Blogging “Artificial You,” Part IV
In Chapter 4 of the book, Schneider discusses possible tests of consciousness for artificial agents. I'll briefly summarize the tests here and add a few comments: The AI Consciousness Test…
Blogging “Artificial You,” Part III
Chapter 3 of Artificial You has three basic purposes: Explaining why AI might develop in such a way that superintelligent AIs are not conscious. Explaining that we might need to…
Blogging “Artificial You”, Part II
In this post, I'll review Chapter 2 of Schneider's book Artificial You. The previous review post is here. The Problem of AI Consciousness In Chapter 2, Schneider introduces what she…
Blogging Susan Schneider’s “Artificial You”, Part I
I've recently started reading Susan Schneider's new book Artificial You, and have decided to write about it as I go. The subtitle is "AI and the Future of Your Mind,"…
The Mindless Hypothesis
In the previous post, I talked about Alex Byrne's paper Skepticism about the Internal World (PDF). In that post, I focused on the first part of the paper, and in…
Alex Byrne and Skepticism About the External World
I recently read Alex Byrne's paper Skepticism About the Internal World (PDF warning), and in this post I want to focus on the first part of the paper, where he…
Machines and Understanding
This recent blog post by Thomas Dietterich has received much well-deserved attention. And while the title What does it mean for a machine to "understand"? sounds like a philosophical work,…
Infallibility, Inflation, and Explosion
In this very interesting discussion between Richard Brown, Keith Frankish, and Philip Goff, Frankish makes the point that the core of his illusionist view is the denial of a phenomenal…