Professor of Philosophy, UC Riverside belief, consciousness, AI, science fiction, moral psychology, classical Chinese philosophy, metaphysics....
Riverside, CA
Joined November 2014
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Why Do I Want Myself in Particular to Exist in Ten Years?
I dearly hope to be alive in a decade -- but what if anything justifies this intensity of feeling?
(Reflections inspired by my recent cancer diagnosis.)
schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co…
ALT Joan Miro, May 1968
Another interview of me on the possibility AI consciousness, with Cameron Berg (22 minutes).
(It's a couple of weeks old, but I missed the announcement in the flurry of activity around my cancer diagnosis.)
youtube.com/@RECIPROCAL_RESE…
My first immunotherapy visit, in the company of Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Science-fictional reading during a treatment that would have been science fiction ten years ago.
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Today has been my first day rolling solo around campus in a manual wheelchair. An unanticipated benefit: students kindly offering to hold doors, push me up slopes, and reach things down from shelves. A much-increased density of... let's call them micro-kindnesses. I feel 1/2
ALT me in wheelchair on campus
encouraged about the human spirit.
(If you missed the news earlier: newly discovered metastatic kidney cancer with multiple spine metastases and risk of fracture or cord collapse.) 2/2
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An Argument for Vastly Many Observers Smaller than a Proton [abbreviated argument here; link to full-length blog post at end of thread]
Assumption 1: The universe is infinite.
Assumption 2: If the universe is infinite, complexity recurs at large scales.
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Assumption 3: If the universe is infinite and complexity recurs at large scales, so do life and intelligence.
Assumption 4: Given Assumptions 1-3, it would be an un-Copernican coincidence if we happened to occupy the smallest scale hosting intelligent observers.
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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/…
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
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…
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.
youtube.com/watch?v=tzjGGBB9…
