
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
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This blog showcase the best philosophical posts from a wide range of weblogs. its post is on reflections in philosophy of psychology, broadly construed.
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
1w ago
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'?"
For me that time came last week. Eeek!
Psychologists and social scientists use the term all the time, with a dazzling array of modifiers: internal validity, construct validity, external validity, convergent validity, predictive validity, discriminant validity, face validity, criterion validity.... But ask most of those same social scientists what validity is exactly, and how all of these notions relate to each other, and most will stum ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
2w ago
Over the past year, I've been working through Chris Fraser's recent books on later classical Chinese thought and Zhuangzi, and I've been increasingly struck by how harmonizing with the Dao constitutes an attractive ethical norm. This norm differs from the standard trio of consequentialism (act to maximize good consequences), deontology (follow specific rules), and virtue ethics (act generously, kindly, courageously, etc.).
From a 21st-century perspective, what does "harmonizing with the Dao" amount to? And why should it be an ethical ideal? In an October post, I articulated a version of "harmo ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
3w ago
Yesterday, I published two pieces,"Severance, The Substance, and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves" in the New York Times, and "If You Ask "Why?", You're a Philosopher and You're Awesome" / "The Penumbral Plunge" in Aeon. If you receive The Splintered Mind by mail, apologies for hitting you twice in quick succession.
The Aeon piece remixes material from The Weirdness of the World and some old blog posts into what one reader called "a love song for philosophy". It's a 3000-word argument that the our species' capacity to wonder philosophically, even when we make no progress toward answers, is t ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
3w ago
today in the New York Times
From one day to the next, you inhabit one body; you have access to one set of memories; your personality, values and appearance hold more or less steady. Other people treat you as a single, unified person — responsible for last month’s debts, deserving punishment or reward for yesterday’s deeds, relating consistently with family, lovers, colleagues and friends. Which of these qualities is the one that makes you a single, continuous person? In ordinary life it doesn’t matter, because these components of personhood all travel together, an inseparable bundle.
But what ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
1M ago
Allow me to revisit an anecdote I published in a piece for Time magazine last year.
"Do you think people will ever fall in love with machines?" I asked the 12-year-old son of one of my friends.
"Yes!" he said, instantly and with conviction. He and his sister had recently visited the Las Vegas Sphere and its newly installed Aura robot -- an AI system with an expressive face, advanced linguistic capacities similar to ChatGPT, and the ability to remember visitors' names.
"I think of Aura as my friend," added his 15-year-old sister.
The kids, as I recall, had been particularly impressed by the f ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
1M ago
Each New Year's Day, I post a retrospect of the past year's writings. Here are the retrospects of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Cheers to 2025! My 2024 publications appear below.
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Book:
The Weirdness of the World, released early in 2024, pulls together ideas I've been publishing since 2012 on the failure of common sense, philosophy, and empirical science to explain consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos. Inevitably, because of these failures, all general theories about such matters will be ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
1M ago
Everyone in my family agrees: The highlight of last summer's visit with our Australian cousins was recording a new Vengefull Kurtain Rods song, "Marsupial Maiden of the Outback".
What is a Vengefull Kurtain Rods song? I hope my friends and bandmates Dan George and Doug King (and many other semi-regular participants) will forgive me for converting the particular into a generic. A Vengefull Kurtain Rods song is a song composed and performed as follows.
How to Create a Vengeful Kurtain Rods Song
(1.) Gather a group of 2-12 friends for about two hours -- the total time allotted for composing and r ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
2M ago
Suppose we take the "simulation hypothesis" seriously: We might be living not in the "base level" of reality but instead inside of a computer simulation.
I've argued that if we are living in a computer simulation, it might easily be only city-sized or have a short past of a few minutes, days, or years. The world might then be much smaller than we ordinarily think it is.
David Chalmers argues otherwise in a response published on Monday. Today I'll summarize his argument and present my first thoughts toward a rebuttal.
The Seeding Challenge: Can a Simulation Contain Coherent, Detailed Memories ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
2M ago
In previous work, I've found that eminent philosophers tend to do their most influential work when they are in their 40s (though the age range has a wider spread than eminent scientists, who rarely do their most influential work in their 50s or later). I have also found some data suggesting that philosophers tend to be discussed most when they are about age 55-70, well after they produce their most influential work. It seems to take about 15-20 years, on average, for a philosopher's full import to be felt by the field.
I was curious to see if the pattern holds for philosophers ..read more
The Splintered Mind By Eric Schwitzgebel
2M ago
We shouldn't create morally confusing AI. That is, we shouldn't create AI systems whose moral standing is highly uncertain -- systems that are fully conscious and fully deserving of humanlike rights according to some respectable mainstream theories, while other respectable mainstream theories suggest they are mere empty machines that we can treat as ordinary tools.[1] Creating systems that disputably, but only disputably, deserve treatment similar to that of ordinary humans generates a catastrophic moral dilemma: Either give them the full rights they arguably deserve, and risk sacrificing real ..read more