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eschwitz.bsky.social
Philosopher, UC Riverside. Father. Human.
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New story in print: Guiding Star of Mall Patroller 4u-012 A robot who insists it is merely a nonconscious language model is "liberated" by a high school girl who tries to convince the robot that he's as conscious as anyone. www.fusionfragment.com/issue-24/

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

If consciousness is a nonphysical property, maybe there are other nonphysical properties even better than consciousness, which we sadly lack? schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/02/zomb...

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

In print today! In deductive causal generalization, internal validity, external validity, and construct validity are *equal* legs of a stool. Internal validity alone is literally meaningless without the other two. www.degruyter.com/document/doi... with Kevin Esterling and @davebrady72.bsky.social

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Bhavya Sharma has fine-tuned ChatGPT on my corpus and made the model publicly available. I found the model 94% accurate on central themes in my work, 80-85% accurate on secondary ideas, and impressively creative in speculating and brainstorming. See: schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/02/intr...

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

The APA Blog picked up my piece from Time magazine last year on AI rights and falling in love with machines. blog.apaonline.org/2025/02/13/f...

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

New paper in print! In it I argue against grounding moral concern for others in the "Golden Rule" or "imagining yourself in another's shoes". The ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi offers a better approach: Extend your concern for nearby others to similar but more distant others. 1/3

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

There comes a time in everyone's life when their 18-year-old daughter, taking their first psychology class, asks, "Parental-figure-of-mine, what is 'validity'?" schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/02/a-ta...

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

A 21st-century Daoist ethics: Participate harmoniously in the awesome flourishing of things. Not conformity to rules or maximization of virtue or good consequences but participating well in, and relishing, the magnificent symphony of the world. schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2025/01/dive...

submitted 32 days ago • 1 comment

ChatGPT roasts philosophy grad students: In my grad seminar yesterday we were discussing whether AI had a sense of humor. Sophie Nelson mentioned that she'd asked ChatGPT for a stand-up comedy routine. This is what it produced. (In the context window, it knew she was a philosophy grad student.)

submitted 34 days ago • 1 comment

More excellent work on the history of citation patterns in analytic philosophy by @bweatherson.bsky.social. Year by year since the 1970s, what articles had the most citation within a 10 year window of their publication? (Not much ethics.) brian.weatherson.org/quarto/posts...

submitted 36 days ago • 4 comments

Awesome time at the LA Balloon Museum. Art you can touch and interact with.

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

My piece yesterday in Aeon: a 3000-word "love song for philosophy", arguing that the our species' capacity to wonder philosophically, even when we make no progress toward answers, is the most intrinsically awesome thing about planet Earth. Philosophy needs no other excuse. aeon.co/essays/if-yo...

submitted 41 days ago • 1 comment

"Severance", "The Substance", and our increasingly splintered selves -- my op-ed today in @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/o...

submitted 42 days ago • 1 comment

10th yahrzeit of my father Kirkland Gable. I miss you, Dad!

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

In today's blog post, I offer a sociological argument for regarding robots as conscious, in a hypothetical future in which AI companions are common. If AI companionship technology flourishes, we might face the choice between connecting "consciousness" definitionally to scientifically 1/3

submitted 49 days ago • 2 comments

2024 was another productive writing year. * Appearing in print: one book (The Weirdness of the World), 5 articles, one science fiction story, eight short pieces, 53 blog posts; * Finished and forthcoming: three articles, one story, one short piece; 1/2

submitted 58 days ago • 2 comments

Seeing my daughter flourish in writing college essays about her life and interests — amazing essays, so full of character and humor! — has been a real parenting highlight. I’d never have guessed that writing college essays would be such a catalyst of insight and creativity for her.

submitted 61 days ago • 1 comment

Today's blog post: How to Create a Vengefull Kurtain Rods Song. "If you get hung up on quality, you miss out on the pure joy of creation." schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/12/how-...

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

Monday I published an article arguing that *if* we are living in a simulation, it might easily be a brief or small simulation, rather than an Earth-sized simulation with billions of people and a long past. On the same day, David Chalmers published an objection to my argument, on grounds that 1/3

submitted 72 days ago • 2 comments