The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

The Splintered Mind

schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com

reflections in philosophy of psychology, broadly construed

Essays / personalScienceAI / ML

’10’15’20’25
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1,626 from 25 Apr 2006 to 25 Oct 2026
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weekly (53 in the last year)
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Latest

October 2026

  1. An Argument for Vastly Many Observers Smaller than a Proton
  2. AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview Available Free Until Oct 19
  3. I Have Cancer
  4. Giving One's Life
  5. The Appeal of (Semi-?) Biological Naturalism about Consciousness

September 2026

  1. Should We Build AI Guardian Angels?
  2. Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights -- Chapter Zero
  3. New in Draft: "Walking the Walk"
  4. Types and Conditions of Moral Order

August 2026

  1. Summary of The Weirdness of the World
  2. Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2026
  3. AI and Consciousness
  4. Obfuscatory Philosophy as Intellectual Authoritarianism and Cowardice (repost)
  5. The Summer Illusion (repost)

July 2026

  1. The Cognitive Advantages of Being of Two Minds, or Twelve, or Twelve Hundred
  2. AI Slop and Evidence about Evidence: Why Philosophy Journals Should Reject AI-Written Prose
  3. New Book in Draft! Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights
  4. Bare Functionalism Versus Digital Computational Functionalism

June 2026

  1. New in Draft: Strange Intelligence: Moral Puzzles of Unhumanlike AI
  2. Do Computers Have the Wrong "Substrate" for Consciousness? Two Flavors of Biological Naturalism
  3. Online Conferences Should be Better than In-Person Conferences, Not Worse
  4. Herbie: A Near-Future Debatably Conscious AI Person

May 2026

  1. New Paper in Draft: Substrate Flexibility and the Copernican Principle of Consciousness (with Jeremy Pober)
  2. AI and the Degradation of the Human Capacity for Friendship (guest post by Grace Helton)
  3. ChatGPT Is Not Your Friend (guest post by Grace Helton)
  4. Superhuman Moral Standing

April 2026

  1. Twenty Years of The Splintered Mind
  2. Do Your Thing
  3. Kim Stanley Robinson on the Value of Science Fiction
  4. AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview, forthcoming with Cambridge
  5. So You're on the "Waiting List" for a Philosophy PhD Program

March 2026

  1. A Model of Disunified Human Experience
  2. Backup and Death for Humanlike AI
  3. Age and Fame in Philosophy
  4. Philosophy Should Be Among the Most Diverse Disciplines, Not the Least

February 2026

  1. Discussion Arcs for Topics and Philosophers
  2. Disunity and Indeterminacy in Artificial Consciousness (and Maybe in Human Consciousness Too)
  3. The Intrinsic Value of Diversity
  4. Artificial Intelligence as Strange Intelligence: Against Linear Models of Intelligence (New Paper in Draft)

January 2026

  1. Does Global Workspace Theory Solve the Question of AI Consciousness?
  2. Is Signal Strength a Confound in Consciousness Research?
  3. AI Mimics and AI Children
  4. Humble Superintelligence
  5. Writings of 2025

December 2025

  1. "Severance", "The Substance", and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves
  2. How Much Should We Give a Joymachine?
  3. Debatable AI Persons: No Rights, Full Rights, Animal-Like Rights, Credence-Weighted Rights, or Patchy Rights?
  4. Can We Introspectively Test the Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness?
  5. Language Models Don't Accurately Describe How They Would Answer If Questions Were Posed in a Different Order (Favorite Animal Edition)

November 2025

  1. Four Aspects of Harmony
  2. Representational Realism and the Problem of Tacit Belief
  3. We Are God's Equals in Intrinsic Moral Value
  4. Debatable Persons in a Voluntary Polis

October 2025

  1. Letting Pass
  2. Two Dimensionalism about Other Minds, and Its Implications for Brain Organoids and Robots
  3. Eek! The Plummeting Philosophy Major in the U.S.
  4. Is AI Conscious? A Primer on the Myths and Confusions Driving the Debate
  5. New Book in Draft: AI and Consciousness
  6. Why Philosophy?
  7. Early Career Hugo Nominations -- Yes, They Definitely Happen

September 2025

  1. The Searle Chair
  2. DigiDan's "Mistake": Fidelity vs Novelty in Digital Replicas
  3. The Social Semi-Solution to the Question of AI Consciousness
  4. Women Earned 37% of U.S. Philosophy Doctorates in 2024, Up from 28% Ten Years Ago
  5. Are Weird Aliens Conscious? Three Arguments (Two of Which Fail)

August 2025

  1. Sacrificing Humans for Insects and AI: A Critical Review
  2. Defining "Artificial Intelligence"
  3. Minimal Autopoiesis in an AI System
  4. Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2025

July 2025

  1. Evolutionary Considerations Against a Plastic Utopia
  2. The Argument from Existential Debt
  3. Yayflies and Rebugnant Conclusions
  4. The Emotional Alignment Design Policy
  5. Three Epistemic Problems for Any Universal Theory of Consciousness

June 2025

  1. The Conceptual and Methodological Challenges of Developing a Moralometer
  2. Does the Arc of History Bend Toward Justice? Outline of an Empirical Test
  3. Types and Degrees of Turing Indistinguishability; Thinking and Consciousness

May 2025

  1. New Paper in Draft: Against Designing "Safe" and "Aligned" AI Persons (Even If They're Happy)
  2. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Philosophy: Good Practices Guide
  3. Ten Purportedly Essential Features of Consciousness
  4. The Awesomeness of Bad Art
  5. Everything Is Sandcastles
  6. When Is a Theory Superficial?

April 2025

  1. People with Unusual, Minority, Culturally Atypical, or Historically Underrepresented Experiences and Worldviews Should be Overrepresented in Philosophy, Rather than Underrepresented
  2. 16% of Authors in Elite Philosophy Journals Are Women
  3. Harmonizing with the Dao: Sketch of an Evaluative Framework
  4. New Paper in Draft: Superficialism about Belief, and How We Will Decide That Robots Believe
  5. Further Reflections on the Most-Cited Works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Underranked Works and Concentration Percentage

March 2025

  1. The Gender and Race/Ethnicity of Authors of the Most-Cited Works of Mainstream Anglophone Philosophy
  2. The 253 Most Cited Works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  3. Writing Short Fiction: Suggestions for Academics
  4. A Dilemma for Nonlocal Theories of Consciousness
  5. Kings, Wizards, and Illusionism about Consciousness

February 2025

  1. New Story in Print: Guiding Star of Mall Patroller 4u-012
  2. Zombie is to Human as Human is to XXX?
  3. New in Print: The Necessity of Construct and External Validity for Deductive Causal Inference
  4. Introducing e-Schwitz: A Language Model Tuned on my Philosophical Work
  5. Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes vs Extending Your Concern
  6. A Taxonomy of Validity: Eeek!

January 2025

  1. Diversity, Disability, Death, and the Dao
  2. If You Ask "Why?", You're a Philosopher and You're Awesome
  3. Severance, The Substance and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves
  4. A Robot Lover's Sociological Argument for Robot Consciousness
  5. Writings of 2024

December 2024

  1. How to Create a Vengefull Kurtain Rods Song
  2. Reply to Chalmers: If I'm Living in a Simulation, It Might be Brief or Small
  3. Age and Philosophical Fame in the Early Twentieth Century
  4. Morally Confusing AI Systems Should Have Doubt-Producing Interfaces

November 2024

  1. Unified vs. Partly Disunified Reasoners
  2. Philosophical Fame, 1890-1960
  3. New in Draft: When Counting Conscious Subjects, the Result Needn't Always Be a Determinate Whole Number
  4. Three Models of the Experience of Dreaming: Phenomenal Hallucination, Imagination, and Doxastic Hallucination
  5. New in Draft: The Copernican Argument for Alien Consciousness; The Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness

October 2024

  1. The Ethics of Harmonizing with the Dao
  2. An Objection to Chalmers's Fading Qualia Argument
  3. Join My Graduate Seminar on Robot, Alien, and AI Consciousness
  4. A Dispositionalist Approach to Desire and Valuing
  5. The Not-So-Silent Generation in Philosophy

September 2024

  1. How to Improve the Universe by Watching TV Alone in Your Room
  2. Against Designing AI Persons to be Safe and Aligned
  3. How Illuminating Is the Light?
  4. The Disunity of Consciousness in Everyday Experience
  5. Themes and Aims of My Science Fiction

August 2024

  1. Is Being Conscious Like "Having the Lights Turned On"?
  2. Top Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazines 2024
  3. An Argument for Physical Laws Too Small-Scale and Too Large-Scale for Us to Detect
  4. Women Constitute 12% and People of Color 3% of the Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  5. The 376 Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  6. The Problem with Calling Trump and Vance Weird

July 2024

  1. A Metaethics of Alien Convergence
  2. How the Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness Works
  3. Color the World

June 2024

  1. Is the World Morally Well Ordered? Secular Versions of the "Problem of Evil"
  2. Conscious Subjects Needn't Be Determinately Countable: Generalizing Dennett's Fame in the Brain
  3. The Meta-Epistemic Objection to Longtermism
  4. Two-Layer Metaphysics: Reconciling Dispositionalism about Belief with Underlying Representational Architecture

May 2024

  1. Could We Eventually Have Moral Obligations to Non-Conscious Artificial Microbes?
  2. Formal Decision Theory Is an Optional Tool That Breaks When Values are Huge
  3. AI and Democracy: The Radical Future

April 2024

  1. Neurons Aren't Special: A Copernican Argument
  2. Flexible Pluralism about Others' Interpretation of Your Philosophical Work
  3. Philosophy and the Ring of Darkness
  4. Every Scholar Should Feel Relatively Underappreciated

March 2024

  1. Replika AI Recommends Jail Time for People Who Mistreat Her
  2. Mind-Bending Science and AI Rights
  3. Religious Believers Normally Do and Should Want Their Religious Credences to Align with Their Factual Beliefs
  4. The Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness
  5. The Leapfrog Hypothesis for AI Consciousness

February 2024

  1. Could Someone Still Be Collecting a Civil War Widow's Pension? A Possibility Proof
  2. What Types of Argument Convince People to Donate to Charity? Empirical Evidence

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