Consciousness is mystifying -- in particular, we have made very little progress on the hard problem of explaining how it is that we have inner subjective experience at all. This…
Recently we talked about the Chinese Room argument. One of the aims of the argument is to show that strong A.I. (A.I. that has understanding or consciousness) is impossible. It's…
Friday's post "Many Worlds and Occam's Razor" generated a lot of good discussion on Twitter over the weekend, with contributions from Philip Ball, Sabine Hossenfelder, Jim Baggott, and many others.…
If we want to speculate about whether an A.I. system could be conscious, we first need to specify which type of consciousness we mean. There is more than one type,…
One of the common objections to the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics is to invoke Occam's Razor ("Entities should not be multipled without necessity.") and to say that…
Two years ago, I wrote a paper called "Stoic Ethics for Artificial Agents" that was presented at Canadian A.I. It is a somewhat unusual paper, and argues for considering virtue…
I enjoyed this podcast episode with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. He has a book coming out, The Case Against Reality, and I'll have a much longer blog post when I've…
I wanted one of my first posts to be about the Chinese Room thought experiment, as it combines my interests in language, A.I., and consciousness. In this post, I'll lay…
My name is Gabriel, and I work in the areas of language, computing, and artificial intelligence. I also have a strong interest in consciousness and philosophy of mind, and this…
