•  2
    The higher-order desire theory of pain states that pain’s unpleasantness is constituted by the subject’s desire not to feel pain. The theory faces the Euthyphro problem: it fails to accommodate the intuitive datum that pain’s unpleasantness explains and justifies the desire not to feel pain. To avoid this problem, the first-order desire theory proposes that pain’s unpleasantness is constituted by the subject’s desire not to be in the bodily condition represented by the feeling of pain. This pape…Read more
  •  48
    Language Agents and Malevolent Design
    Philosophy and Technology 37 (104): 1-19. 2024.
    Language agents are AI systems capable of understanding and responding to natural language, potentially facilitating the process of encoding human goals into AI systems. However, this paper argues that if language agents can achieve easy alignment, they also increase the risk of malevolent agents building harmful AI systems aligned with destructive intentions. The paper contends that if training AI becomes sufficiently easy or is perceived as such, it enables malicious actors, including rogue st…Read more
  •  240
    Against the Precisificational Approach to Fictional Inconsistencies
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (66). 2022.
    Fictional realists claim that fictional characters like Spiderman exist in reality. Against this view, Anthony Everett (2005; 2013) argues that fictional realists cannot determine whether characters α and β are identical if the relevant fiction states that α and β are identical and distinct at the same time. Some fictional re-alists, such as Ross Cameron (2013) and Richard Woodward (2017), respond to this objection by saying that the sense in which α and β are identical differs from the sense in…Read more