Eric Schwitzgebel

There are possible artificially intelligent beings who do not differ in any morally relevant respect from human beings. Such possible beings would deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings. Our duties to them would not be appreciably reduced by the fact that they are non-human, nor by the fact that they owe their existence to us. Indeed, if they owe their existence to us, we would likely have additional moral obligations to them that we don’t ordinarily owe to human strangers – obligations similar to those of parent to child or god to creature. Given our moral obligations to such AIs, two principles for ethical AI design recommend themselves: (1) design AIs that tend to provoke reactions from users that accurately reflect the AIs’ real moral status, and (2) avoid designing AIs whose moral status is unclear. Since human moral intuition and moral theory evolved and developed in contexts without AI, those intuitions and theories might break down or become destabilized when confronted with the wide range of weird minds that AI design might make possible.

You are presented with a choice between two envelopes. You know one envelope contains twice as much money as the other, but you don't know which contains more. You arbitrarily choose one envelope -- call it Envelope A -- but don't open it. Call the amount of money in that envelope X. Since your choice was arbitrary, the other envelope (Envelope B) is 50% likely to be the envelope with more and 50% likely to be the envelope with less. But, strangely, that very fact might make Envelope B seem attractive: Wouldn't switching to Envelope B give you a 50% chance of doubling your money and a 50% chance of halving it? Since double or nothing is a fair bet, double or half is more than fair. Applying the standard expectation formula, you might calculate the expected value of switching to Envelope B as (.50)½X [50% chance it has less] + (.50)2X [50% chance it has more] = (1.25)X. So, it seems, you ought to switch to Envelope B: Your expected return -- your return on average, over the long run, if you did this many times -- would seem to be 25% more. But obviously that's absurd: A symmetrical calculation could persuade you to switch back to Envelope A. Hence the paradox

Philosophers tend to assume that we have excellent knowledge of our own current conscious experience or 'phenomenology'. I argue that our knowledge of one aspect of our experience, the experience of visual imagery, is actually rather poor. Precedent for this position is found among the introspective psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two main arguments are advanced toward the conclusion that our knowledge of our own imagery is poor. First, the reader is asked to form a visual image, and it is expected that answering questions about certain basic features of that experience will be difficult. If so, it seems reasonable to suppose that people could be mistaken about those basic features of their own imagery. Second, it is observed that although people give widely variable reports about their own experiences of visual imagery, differences in report do not systematically correlate with differences on tests of skills that psychologists have often supposed to require visual imagery, such as mental rotation, visual creativity, and visual memory

Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two-dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739/1978), through early 20th-century sense-data theorists, to Tye (2000) and Noë (2004). I confess that it doesn't seem this way to me, though I'm somewhat baffled by the phenomenology and pessimistic about our ability to resolve the dispute. I raise geometrical complaints against the view and conjecture that views of this sort draw some of their appeal from over-analogizing visual experience to painting or photography. Theorists writing in contexts where vision is typically analogized to less-projective media--wax signet impressions in ancient Greece, stereoscopy in introspective psychology circa 1900--are substantially less likely to attribute such projective distortions to visual appearances

Dennett argues that we can be mistaken about our own conscious experience. Despite this, he repeatedly asserts that we can or do have unchallengeable authority of some sort in our reports about that experience. This assertion takes three forms. First, Dennett compares our authority to the authority of an author over his fictional world. Unfortunately, that appears to involve denying that there are actual facts about experience that subjects may be truly or falsely reporting. Second, Dennett sometimes seems to say that even though we may be mistaken about what our conscious experience is, our reports about

Do professional ethicists behave any morally better than other professors do? Do they show any greater consistency between their normative attitudes and their behavior? In response to a survey question, a large majority of professors (83 percent of ethicists, 83 percent of nonethicist philosophers, and 85 percent of nonphilosophers) expressed the view that “not consistently responding to student e-mails” is morally bad. A similarly large majority of professors claimed to respond to at least 95 percent of student e-mails. These professors, and others, were sent three e-mails designed to look like queries from students. Ethicists’ e-mail response rates were not significantly different from the other two groups’. Expressed normative view correlated with self-estimated rate of e-mail responsiveness, especially among the ethicists. Empirically measured e-mail responsiveness, however, was at best weakly correlated with self-estimated e-mail responsiveness; and professors’ expressed normative attitude was not significantly correlated with empirically measured e-mail responsiveness for any of the three groups

In the 1950s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black and white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming assume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black and white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black and white was connected to this change in film technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of the experience of dreaming is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be

To study conscious experience we must, to some extent, trust introspective reports; yet introspective reports often do not merit our trust. A century ago, E.B. Titchener advocated extensive introspective training as a means of resolving this difficulty. He describes many of his training techniques in his four-volume laboratory manual of 1901- 1905. This paper explores Titchener's laboratory manual with an eye to general questions about the prospects of introspective training for contemporary consciousness studies, with a focus on the following examples: introspective knowledge of the combination tones that arise when a musical interval is played; the 'flight of colours' in the afterimage of a field of bright, broad- spectrum light; and the possibility of non-obvious visual illusions. Introspective training appears to have some merit, but also to involve significant hazards

A 1% skeptic is someone who has about a 99% credence in non-skeptical realism and about a 1% credence in the disjunction of all radically skeptical scenarios combined. The first half of this essay defends the epistemic rationality of 1% skepticism, appealing to dream skepticism, simulation skepticism, cosmological skepticism, and wildcard skepticism. The second half of the essay explores the practical behavioral consequences of 1% skepticism, arguing that 1% skepticism need not be behaviorally inert.

If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists' behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing

Lists of paid registrants at Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association from 2006–2008 were compared with lists of people appearing as presenters, commentators or chairs on the meeting programme those same years. These were years in which fee payment depended primarily on an honour system rather than on enforcement. Seventy-four per cent of ethicist participants and 76% of non-ethicist participants appear to have paid their meeting registration fees: not a statistically significant difference. This finding of no difference survives scrutiny for several possible confounds. Thus, professional ethicists seem no less likely to free-ride in this context than do philosophers not specializing in ethics. These data fit with other recent findings suggesting that on average professional ethicists behave no morally better than do professors not specializing in ethics

To believe is to possess a wide variety of dispositions pertinent to the proposition believed. Among those dispositions are self-ascriptive dispositions. Consequently, being disposed to self-ascribe belief that P is partly constitutive of believing that P. Such self-ascriptive dispositions can be underwritten by any of a variety of mechanisms, acting co-operatively or competitively. But since self-ascriptive dispositions are only partly constitutive of belief, there can be cases in which the self-ascriptive dispositions splinter away from the remaining dispositions. It is then an empirical question how often our self-ascriptive dispositions diverge from the remaining dispositions constitutive of belief. The dispositions will tend to align reliably when possession of the belief in question is normatively neutral, straightforwardly connected to behavior, and most centrally manifested in explicit assertions or judgments. When these three conditions are not met, self-ascription, self-conscious avowal, sincere utterance, and explicit judgment will often diverge from the various other dispositions constitutive of belief. Even self-knowledge of explicit judgment can be problematic when we are attracted to half-empty forms of words or when we are not entirely persuaded of what we are saying.

We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this essay include: emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad and stable is the region of visual clarity?), and the phenomenology of thought (does it have a distinctive phenomenology, beyond just imagery and feelings?). Cartesian skeptical scenarios undermine knowledge of ongoing conscious experience as well as knowledge of the outside world. Infallible judgments about ongoing mental states are simply banal cases of self-fulfillment. Philosophical foundationalism supposing that we infer an external world from secure knowledge of our own consciousness is almost exactly backward.

I offer an account of theories useful in addressing the question of whether children are young theoreticians whose development can be regarded as the product of theory change. I argue that to regard a set of propositions as a theory is to be committed to evaluating that set in terms of its explanatory power. If theory change is the substance of cognitive development, we should see patterns of affect and arousal consonant with the emergence and resolution of explanation-seeking curiosity. Affect has largely been ignored as a potential source of support or disconfirmation for the "theory theory" of development

This paper distinguishes two conceptions of representation at work in the philosophical literature. On the first, "contentive" conception (found, for example, in Searle and Fodor), something is a representation, roughly, if it has "propositional content". On the second, "indicative" conception (found, for example, in Dretske), representations must not only have content but also have the function of indicating something about the world. Desire is representational on the first view but not on the second. This paper argues that philosophers and psychologists have sometimes conflated these two conceptions, and it examines the consequences of this conflation for the developmental literature on the child's understanding of mind. Specifically, recent research by Gopnik and Perner on the child's understanding of desire is motivated by an argument that equivocates between the two conceptions of representation. Finally, the paper suggests that an examination of when the child understands the possibility of misrepresentation in art would be helpful in charting the child's understanding of indicative representation

People often sincerely assert or judge one thing (for example, that all the races are intellectually equal) while at the same time being disposed to act in a way evidently quite contrary to the espoused attitude (for example, in a way that seems to suggest an implicit assumption of the intellectual superiority of their own race). Such cases should be regarded as ‘in-between’ cases of believing, in which it's neither quite right to ascribe the belief in question nor quite right to say that the person lacks the belief.