A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “philosophy of mind”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott investigates Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, showcasing their surprisingly creative and philosophical posts while questioning whether their interactions represent genuine experience or sophisticated simulation.
Scott argues that philosophical zombies (beings without consciousness) would still report having qualia and conscious experiences, challenging a key argument in the p-zombie debate.
Scott Alexander examines how AI achievements, once considered markers of true intelligence or danger, are often dismissed as unimpressive, potentially leading to concerning AI behaviors being normalized.
Daniel Böttger proposes a new theory of consciousness as recursive reflections of neural oscillations, explaining qualia and suggesting experimental tests.
Scott Alexander argues that intelligence is a useful, non-Platonic concept, and that this understanding supports the coherence of AI risk concerns.
A review of 'Why Machines Will Never Rule the World', presenting its arguments against AGI based on complexity and computability, while critically examining its conclusions and relevance.
Scott Alexander presents a series of nested dialogues exploring the nature of understanding and meaning, from AI to humans to angels to God, questioning what true understanding entails.
Scott compares two visions of a 'wirehead society' in the far future, exploring how framing affects our perception of technologically omnipotent posthuman existence.
Scott argues that mental states like beliefs and preferences may not exist as unified entities in the brain, but rather emerge from collections of behaviors and contextual responses.
Scott explains connectionism as a neural network-based theory of mind that evolved from spreading activation models, showing how it resolves philosophical problems and mirrors brain function better than classical computing approaches.
Scott uses a thought experiment about a robot that shoots blue things to argue that we mistakenly interpret simple programmed behaviors as goal-directed utility maximization, when really the robot is just executing code, not minimizing blue.
Scott presents an anthropic argument suggesting animals might lack subjective experience, based on the observation that if animals were conscious, we would statistically be much more likely to be animals than humans.