Eric Schwitzgebel

Probably best to read the paper. I personally don't find it very convincing, because of the many speculative premises. But that is not a refutation. Here it is: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFlexibility-2…

There's a great philosophy paper making this argument: Schwitzgebel, Eric. “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, vol. 172, no. 7, 2015, pp. 1697–721. https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140130a.h… Discussed previously on HN: July 2015 (210 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847 Feb 2021 (78 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217834 Dec 2023 (1 comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38814769

Hideous things can be done by evil people, but also accidentally by well-meaning people when they don't realize what the stakes are. How many people stop being racist only because they leave the environment where racism was prevalent and they get exposed to a different heuristic on human worth? There's a paper discussing heuristics for determining the moral worth (not intelligence) of being which advocates the precautionary principle: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIRights2-180604.ht… > avoid acting heinously by the standards of any reasonable ethical principle that draws a significant proportion of well-informed, thoughtful theorists

You might enjoy this paper : https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pd… Its a bit long but I thought it was completely worth the read. It proceeds in a very gradual series of steps to make the point that societies could very well be conscious :)

People can act with "seemingly-conscious" intent without ever becoming "consciously" aware of the action. Eric Schwitzgebel wrote a lot about this; one of my favorites of his is How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation. https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

well, if you follow the point of view of materialists, you have to accept that the united states of america are a living, conscious, entity, of which you (maybe) are a part. http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721…

Eric Schwitzgebel composed a list of "philosophically interesting" SF from the recommendations of 34 professional philosophers: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SF-MasterList-14110… It also includes non-printed media.

> its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that). There’s no need to replace that. Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1], and people who enjoyed discussing it continued through the end of their worlds multiple times, whether the Greeks, Romans (Augustine), Persians or anyone else who saw the world they believed in died. YC isn’t in a zero sum game. They’ll certify anyone they think is awesome as awesome. Harvard will only certify a maximum number in the matriculating class, and they certainly won’t deliberately create competitors in that space like YC did with Pioneer. YC does its very best to disrupt itself. It does pay those it’s educating and there are technically competitors to it as an accelerator. [1] https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothe… https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthicists-15071…

This book (from a philosophy professor AFAIK unaffiliated with any AI company) makes what I find a pretty compelling case that it's correct to be uncertain today about what if anything an AI might experience: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIConsciousness-251016… From the folks who think this is obviously ridiculous, I'd like to hear where Schwitzgebel is missing something obvious.

> Corporations themselves don't have agency or even consciousness "Agency" in the sense you're using it is "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power" (Merriam Webster). It seems pretty clear that corporations have that. As for consciousness, prove it. But first read "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious": https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm

Fortunately, we have a chatbot that can simulate him perfectly: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/GPT-3-Dennett-23020…

> I decided to look at UC Riverside's grade distributions since 2013, since faculty now have access to a tool to view this information. For context, the author is Eric Schwitzgebel: “an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief” Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schwitzgebel https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/

The kinds of rights you're thinking about (voting, wealth) are very anthropocentric. I'm not sure they would even make sense in the context of machines. But we can certainly consider "moral rights", things like the right to have suffering inflicted on them by others. While reading into the OP I discovered there's a paper on just this topic by two of the people associated with the organisation: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/AIRights.htm

You're staring down a rabbit hole. If want answers to some of these questions, enjoy: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism Note: there are no real answers here, of course. I think the "purpose" though would be a less myopic view of what a person is. Notably, that there's no reason "person" and "homo sapien" should be synonymous. Once you admit that, then things start to get really fuzzy and we need a framework to get back to something that makes sense.

Link to PDF http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Courtesy-110202.pdf (..or pay US$45 to read its 10 pages at the given link.)

"If Materialism is true, the United States is likely conscious." http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721…

Paper investigating whether ethicists are more ethical: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/BehEth-140123a.htm

see also this 2014 article on consciousness in 'rather dumb group entities' including 'antheads' https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pd…

A post I made a while back that seems relevant: > The proteins in a cell form complex organelles, each with a specific role to play in the functioning of the cell. The cells in your body each specialize to constitute a complex, conscious organism. Likewise, you are part of a complicated social and technological network.[1] And just as the cell doesn’t ask the proteins what they think of their functions, our human ecosystem doesn’t care much what we think about it’s operation. As technology creates more and more refined models of the human body and mind we will find ourselves slotted more and more tightly into roles so the whole machine can operate more efficiently. [1] https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm

The premise of this article reminds me of this essay: "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious" https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140130a.h…

You might enjoy this essay by Eric Schwitzgebel: _If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious_ http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140130…

Link to the referenced paper, "If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious", which I found fascinating. Thanks for mentioning it! http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm

Humans can actually get pretty good at echolocation http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Echo.pdf https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_navigate_the_…

> What we really need therefore (IMHO) is to teach ethics to people that work with data Studies seem to indicate that studying and teaching ethics does not make you more inclined towards ethical behavior.[1] On top of that, from personal experience in business ethics courses, "ethical" has an extremely suspicious equivalence with "the thing which limits the company's exposure to liability." [1] http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/BehEth-140123a.pdf

For some wider context of his views, check out his other articles, particularly http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/CrazyMind.htm. I don't get the impression that Schwitzgebel takes analytic philosophy very seriously, which is something I find very refreshing about him (compared to other philosophers of consciousness such as Chalmers). His early interest was on ancient Chinese philosophy, and in http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ZZ.htm, he promotes what he regards as an ancient Chinese outlook about not taking language too seriously, which contrasts with traditional Anglo-American philosophy.

Huh okay thanks for commenting, I was very confused about what exactly I was reading until you prompted me to look him up. Interesting guy — he’s a full time professional academic in philosophy, and yet writes like a hacker, even going as far as to skip APA citations in favor of undescribed hyperlinks! The style is a fascinating mix of analytic (such as only giving the time of day to recent theories, and constricting his argument to an explicit outline) and a more casual blog style. He’s also been writing about exactly this — perhaps in slightly less unified (hehe) terms - since at least 2007: https://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ If you find the time, could you share what the big takeaways were that had a profound effect? I’m guessing it was a practical exercise that trained you to more accurately introspect, but that’s just a guess. I’m way too deep into all this philosophy stuff already so I mostly got indignant disagreement out of this essay, and I’d like to see it in a more productive light!

I understand that you view qualia as structural properties, and can map trillions of physical brain-configurations to trillions of subjective brain-states. However there is still a massive discrepancy between our subjective experience of such states, and the physical configurations that are claimed to represent it - which is why it is not a satisfactory answer to the hard problem of consciousness for many people. The 2 big discrepancies I see are this: 1. We have the subjective perception of free will: I can choose to write these sentences or not. Where does that intention originate? If our consciousness is just neuronal computation, then it is completely deterministic or probabilistic. That is entirely contradictory of most people's experience, because we can choose what we want to do, and do things that strongly contradict our "mood". Some people can even go further to consciously modify their brain states. If you claim that is also just a product of complex structural properties, you get into an infinitely regressing claim. 2. Despite being able to create incredibly complex connected structures, arguably even more complicated than a single person's brain, such as the Internet, we have no evidence of such an entity having a subjective feeling of consciousness. There is simply no parallel in our current knowledge for how subjective experience can arise from system configurations. You seem to be simply assuming that an experience is such a configuration, but we have no…