Way back in April 2006, I launched The Splintered Mind. Happy 20th birthday, blog of mine! In 2006, academic blogs were cool. After the rise of Facebook and Twitter, most died. Recently, there's been something of a revival on Substack (where I now mirror this blog), but it's nothing like the old days, when checking...

I offer for your consideration the following ethical motto: Do your thing. I admit: This motto doesn't sound very ethical. What if "your thing" is murdering babies for fun? Even ignoring extreme cases, what if your thing is just watching reruns of I Love Lucy? That also doesn't seem ethically good (though I've...

I've just started reading Kim Stanley Robinson's acclaimed climate-science utopia, The Ministry for the Future. How might society plausibly get it right and avert the climate disaster toward which we seem to be headed? (So far in the novel things aren't looking good, but I gather that will change.) I was struck by a...

Last week I submitted my latest book manuscript to Cambridge University Press (for their "Element" series of books about 100 pages long): AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview -- because you haven't heard nearly enough about AI and consciousness recently, of course! [winky face] Maybe you'll appreciate my...

It's confusing. You applied to a PhD program in philosophy in the U.S. You haven't been admitted. You haven't been rejected. You're in limbo. Let me explain and offer some advice. Yield-Based vs. Seats-Based Admissions Yield-based. Some departments -- the ones with wise high-level administrators -- aim for a target...

It's a philosophical truism that human conscious experience is unified: If you're at a bar, hearing music, tasting beer, and feeling pleasantly relaxed, those experiences don't occur merely side by side. They are joined together into an integrated whole, an experience of music-with-beer-with-relaxation. I'm not sure...

Most AI systems can be precisely copied. Suppose this is also true of future conscious AI persons, if any exist. Backup and fissioning should then be possible, transforming the significance of identity and death in ways our cultural and conceptual tools can't currently handle. Suppose that two humanlike AI neighbors...

A philosophical discussion arc is a curve displaying how frequently a term appears in philosophical journal abstracts, titles, and keywords (compared to a representative universe of common philosophy words). A couple of weeks ago, I posted discussion arcs from the 1940s-2020s for several topics and historical...

Philosophy should be among the most diverse of the academic disciplines. Instead, it is among the least diverse. Philosophical reflection is an essential part of the human condition, of interest to people of all cultures, races, classes, social groups, and body types. Who doesn’t care whether we have immaterial...

Let's define a discussion arc in philosophy as a curve displaying how frequently a term appears in philosophical journal abstracts, titles, and keywords. Discussion arcs can reveal trends over time, as they come and go. For example, "ordinary language" was a popular topic of discussion in the 1960s: [click to...

Our understanding of the nature of consciousness derives mainly from our understanding of the nature of consciousness in our favorite animal (us, of course). But the features of consciousness in our favorite animal might be specific to that animal rather than universal. Let's consider two such features and whether...