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A new measure of life satisfaction: the Riverside Life Satisfaction ScaleJournal of Personality Assessment 101 621-630. 2018.The Satisfaction With Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) has been the dominant measure of life satisfaction since its creation more than 30 years ago. We sought to develop an improved measure that includes indirect indicators of life satisfaction (e.g., wishing to change one’s life) to increase the bandwidth of the measure and account for acquiescence bias. In 3 studies, we developed a 6-item measure of life satisfaction, the Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale, and obtained reli…Read more
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51Dehumanizing the Cognitively Disabled: Commentary on Smith’s Making MonstersAnalysis 83 (4): 780-787. 2023.
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49The Weirdness of the WorldPrinceton University Press. 2024.How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the …Read more
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84Creating a large language model of a philosopherMind and Language 39 (2): 237-259. 2023.Can large language models produce expert‐quality philosophical texts? To investigate this, we fine‐tuned GPT‐3 with the works of philosopher Daniel Dennett. To evaluate the model, we asked the real Dennett 10 philosophical questions and then posed the same questions to the language model, collecting four responses for each question without cherry‐picking. Experts on Dennett's work succeeded at distinguishing the Dennett‐generated and machine‐generated answers above chance but substantially short…Read more
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74Borderline consciousness, when it’s neither determinately true nor determinately false that experience is presentPhilosophical Studies 180 (12): 3415-3439. 2023.This article defends the existence of _borderline consciousness._ In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there’s a sharp boundary across the apparent continuum between conscious systems and nonconscious ones, or consciousness is a vag…Read more
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70Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete PersonsJournal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9): 188-203. 2023.Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a possible 'ancillary mind' modelled on a system envisioned in Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between a communicating group of individuals and a single, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a grey zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither deter…Read more
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12The Behavior of EthicistsIn Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. 2016.We review and present a new meta‐analysis of research suggesting that ethicists in the United States appear to behave no morally better overall than do non‐ethicist professors. Measures include: returning library books, peer evaluation of overall moral behavior, voting participation, courteous and discourteous behavior at conferences, replying to student emails, paying conference registration fees and disciplinary society dues, staying in touch with one's mother, charitable giving, organ and blo…Read more
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21Uncle Iroh, From Fool to Sage – Or Sage All Along?In Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt (eds.), Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy: Wisdom From Aang to Zuko, Wiley-blackwell. 2022.Book Three of Avatar: The Last Airbender portrays Uncle Iroh as wise and peace‐loving, in the mold of a Daoist sage. This chapter argues that Iroh's Book One foolishness is a pose, and Iroh's character does not fundamentally change. In Book One, he is wisely following strategies suggested by the ancient Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi for dealing with incompetent leaders. His seeming foolishness in Book One is in fact a sagacious strategy for minimizing the harm that Prince Zuko would otherw…Read more
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AppendixIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
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5Reinstalling EdenIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.This chapter presents a story that depicts the creation of a simulated world “Eden”. According to the author, installing Adam and Eve was a profound moral decision. Their lonely island is transformed into an archipelago. They were shielded from the blights that afflict humanity; they suffer no serious conflict, no death or decay. Then, the archipelagans were put in charge of their own experiment. Adam and Eve were given science and a drive to discover the truth of their being. They realized that…Read more
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23Students Eat Less Meat After Studying Meat EthicsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (1): 113-138. 2023.In the first controlled, non-self-report studies to show an influence of university-level ethical instruction on everyday behavior, Schwitzgebel et al. (2020) and Jalil et al. (2020) found that students purchase less meat after exposure to material on the ethics of eating meat. We sought to extend and conceptually replicate this research. Seven hundred thirty students in three large philosophy classes read James Rachels’ (2004) “Basic Argument for Vegetarianism”, followed by 50-min small-group d…Read more
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Can large language models be trained to produce philosophical texts that are difficult to distinguish from texts produced by human philosophers? To address this question, we fine-tuned OpenAI's GPT-3 with the works of philosopher Daniel C. Dennett as additional training data. To explore the Dennett model, we asked the real Dennett ten philosophical questions and then posed the same questions to the language model, collecting four responses for each question without cherry-picking. We recruited 4…Read more
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513How far can we get in creating a digital replica of a philosopher?In Raul Hakli, Pekka Mäkelä & Johanna Seibt (eds.), Social Robots in Social Institutions. Proceedings of Robophilosophy 2022, Ios Press. pp. 371-380. 2023.Can we build machines with which we can have interesting conversations? Observing the new optimism of AI regarding deep learning and new language models, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: We want to find out how far we can get in creating a digital replica of a philosopher. This project has two aims; one more technical, investigating of how the best model can be built. The other one, more philosophical, explores the limits and risks which are accompanied by the creation of digital replicas. In…Read more
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1The unskilled Zhuangzi : Big and useless and not so good at catching ratsIn Karyn Lai & Wai Wai Chiu (eds.), Skill and Mastery Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi, Rowman and Littlefield International. 2019.
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66Engaging charitable giving: The motivational force of narrative versus philosophical argumentPhilosophical Psychology 37 (5). 2024.Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attit…Read more
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500Empirical Relationships Among Five Types of Well-BeingIn William Lauinger (ed.), Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, . pp. 339-376. 2021.Philosophers, psychologists, economists and other social scientists continue to debate the nature of human well-being. We argue that this debate centers around five main conceptualizations of well-being: hedonic well-being, life satisfaction, desire fulfillment, eudaimonia, and non-eudaimonic objective-list well-being. Each type of well-being is conceptually different, but are they empirically distinguishable? To address this question, we first developed and validated a measure of desire fulfill…Read more
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1080Designing AI with Rights, Consciousness, Self-Respect, and FreedomIn Francisco Lara & Jan Deckers (eds.), Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 459-479. 2023.We propose four policies of ethical design of human-grade Artificial Intelligence. Two of our policies are precautionary. Given substantial uncertainty both about ethical theory and about the conditions under which AI would have conscious experiences, we should be cautious in our handling of cases where different moral theories or different theories of consciousness would produce very different ethical recommendations. Two of our policies concern respect and freedom. If we design AI that des…Read more
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599The Unskilled Zhuangzi: Big and Useless and Not So Good at Catching RatsIn Karyn Lai & Wai Wai Chiu (eds.), Skill and Mastery Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi, Rowman and Littlefield International. pp. 101-110. 2019.The mainstream tradition in recent Anglophone Zhuangzi interpretation treats spontaneous skillful responsiveness – similar to the spontaneous responsiveness of a skilled artisan, athlete, or musician – as a, or the, Zhuangzian ideal. However, this interpretation is poorly grounded in the Inner Chapters. On the contrary, in the Inner Chapters, this sort of skillfulness is at least as commonly criticized as celebrated. Even the famous passage about the ox-carving cook might be interpreted more …Read more
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611The Pragmatic Metaphysics of BeliefIn Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 350-375. 2021.On an intellectualist approach to belief, the intellectual endorsement of a proposition (such as “The working poor deserve as much respect as the handsomely paid”) is sufficient or nearly sufficient for believing it. On a pragmatic approach to belief, intellectual endorsement is not enough. Belief is behaviorally demanding. To really, fully believe, you must also “walk the walk.” This chapter argues that the pragmatic approach is preferable on pragmatic grounds: It rightly directs our attention …Read more
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57Students Eat Less Meat After Studying Meat EthicsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1-26. 2021.In the first controlled, non-self-report studies to show an influence of university-level ethical instruction on everyday behavior, Schwitzgebel et al. (2020) and Jalil et al. (2020) found that students purchase less meat after exposure to material on the ethics of eating meat. We sought to extend and conceptually replicate this research. Seven hundred thirty students in three large philosophy classes read James Rachels’ (2004) “Basic Argument for Vegetarianism”, followed by 50-min small-group d…Read more
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87Is There Something it’s Like to be a Garden SnailPhilosophical Topics 48 (1): 39-63. 2020.The question “are garden snails conscious?” or equivalently “is there something it’s like to be a garden snail?” admits of three possible answers: yes, no, and denial that the question admits of a yes-or-no answer. All three answers have some antecedent plausibility, prior to the application of theories of consciousness. All three answers retain their plausibility after the application of theories of consciousness. This is because theories of consciousness, when applied to such a different speci…Read more
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101The Diversity of Philosophy Students and FacultyThe Philosophers' Magazine 93 71-90. 2021.How diverse is philosophy? In this paper we explore recent data on the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of philosophy students and faculty in the United States. We have found that women are underrepresented in philosophy at all levels from first-year intention to major through senior faculty. The past four years have seen an increase in the percentage of women philosophy majors at the undergraduate level, but it remains to be seen if this recent increase in the percentage of women will event…Read more
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697Susan Schneider's Proposed Tests for AI Consciousness: Promising but FlawedJournal of Consciousness Studies 28 (5-6): 121-144. 2021.Susan Schneider (2019) has proposed two new tests for consciousness in AI (artificial intelligence) systems, the AI Consciousness Test and the Chip Test. On their face, the two tests seem to have the virtue of proving satisfactory to a wide range of consciousness theorists holding divergent theoretical positions, rather than narrowly relying on the truth of any particular theory of consciousness. Unfortunately, both tests are undermined in having an ‘audience problem’: Those theorists with the…Read more
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718Do ethics classes influence student behavior? Case study: Teaching the ethics of eating meatCognition 203 (C): 104397. 2020.Do university ethics classes influence students’ real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy a…Read more
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58Against the mind package view of minds: Comments on Carrie Figdor's Pieces of mindMind and Language 35 (5): 671-676. 2020.Carrie Figdor's Pieces of mind lays the groundwork for critiquing the mind package view of minds. According to the mind package view, psychological properties travel in groups, such that an entity either has the whole mind package or lacks mentality altogether. Implicit commitment to the mind package view makes it seem absurd to attribute some psychological properties (e.g., preferences) to entities that lack other psychological properties (e.g., feelings). Contra the mind package view, we are p…Read more
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30A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical MisadventuresMIT Press. 2019.A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |