Mind-Bending Science and AI Rights
21 March 2024 | 2:05 pm

Today I'm leaving the Toronto area (where I gave a series of lectures at Trent University) for the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Cincinnati. A couple of popular op-eds I've been working on were both released today.

The longer of the two (on how to react to weird scientific theories) is behind a paywall at New Scientist (but if you email me I'd be happy to share the final manuscript for personal use). The other (on AI rights) is open access at Time.com.

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How to wrap your head around the most mind-bending theories of reality

From the many worlds interpretation to panpsychism, theories of reality often sound absurd. Here’s how you can figure out which ones to take seriously

By Eric Schwitzgebel

20 March 2024

ARE there vastly many near-duplicates of you reading vastly many near-duplicates of this article in vastly many parallel universes? Is consciousness a fundamental property of all matter? Could reality be a computer simulation? Reader, I can hear your groans from here in California.

We are inclined to reject ideas like these on the grounds that they sound preposterous. And yet some of the world’s leading scientists and philosophers advocate for them. Why? And how should you, assuming you aren’t an expert, react to these sorts of hypotheses?

When we confront fundamental questions about the nature of reality, things quickly get weird. As a philosopher specialising in metaphysics, I submit that weirdness is inevitable, and that something radically bizarre will turn out to be true.

Which isn’t to say that every odd hypothesis is created equal. On the contrary, some weird possibilities are worth taking more seriously than others. Positing Zorg the Destroyer, hidden at the galactic core and pulling on protons with invisible strings, would rightly be laughed away as an explanation for anything. But we can mindfully evaluate the various preposterous-seeming ideas that deserve serious consideration, even in the absence of straightforward empirical tests.

The key is to become comfortable weighing competing implausibilities, something that we can all try – so long as we don’t expect to all arrive at the same conclusions.

Let us start by clarifying that we are talking here about questions monstrously large and formidable: the foundations of reality and the basis of our understanding of those foundations. What is the underlying structure…

[continued here]

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Do AI Systems Deserve Rights?

BY ERIC SCHWITZGEBEL

MARCH 21, 2024 7:00 AM EDT

Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, and author of The Weirdness of the World

“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.

My friend’s son was right. People are falling in love with machines—increasingly so, and deliberately. Recent advances in computer language have spawned dozens, maybe hundreds, of “AI companion” and “AI lover” applications. You can chat with these apps like you chat with friends. They will tease you, flirt with you, express sympathy for your troubles, recommend books and movies, give virtual smiles and hugs, and even engage in erotic role-play. The most popular of them, Replika, has an active Reddit page, where users regularly confess their love and often view that love to no less real than their love for human beings.

Can these AI friends love you back? Real love, presumably, requires sentience, understanding, and genuine conscious emotion—joy, suffering, sympathy, anger. For now, AI love remains science fiction.

[read the rest open access here]


Religious Believers Normally Do and Should Want Their Religious Credences to Align with Their Factual Beliefs
14 March 2024 | 6:10 pm

Next week (at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology) I'll be delivering comments on Neil Van Leeuwen's new book, Religion as Make-Believe. Neil argues that many (most?) people don't actually "factually believe" the doctrines of their religion, even if they profess belief. Instead, the typical attitude is one of "religious credence", which is closer to pretense or make-believe.

Below are my draft comments. Comments and further reactions welcome!

Highlights of Van Leeuwen’s View.

Neil distinguishes factual beliefs from religious credences. If you factually believe something – for example, that there’s beer in the fridge – that belief will generally have four functional features:

(1.) It is involuntary. You can’t help but believe that there’s beer in the fridge upon looking in the fridge and seeing the beer.

(2.) It is vulnerable to evidence. If you later look in the fridge and discover no beer, your belief that there is beer in the fridge will vanish.

(3.) It guides actions across the board. Regardless of context, if the question of whether beer is in your fridge becomes relevant to your actions, you will act in light of that belief.

(4.) It provides the informational background governing other attitudes. For example, if you imagine a beer-loving guest opening the fridge, you will imagine them also noticing the beer in there.

Religious credences, Neil argues, have none of those features. If you “religiously creed” that God condemns masturbators to Hell, that attitude is:

(1.) Voluntary. In some sense – maybe unconsciously – you choose to have this religious credence.

(2.) Invulnerable to evidence. Factual evidence, for example, scientific evidence of the non-existence of Hell, will not cause the credence to disappear.

(3.) Guides actions only in limited contexts. For example, it doesn’t prevent you from engaging in the condemned behavior in the way a factual belief of the same content presumably would.

(4.) Doesn’t reliably govern other attitudes. For example, if you imagine others engaging in the behavior, it doesn’t follow that you will imagine God also condemning them.

Although some people may factually believe some of their religious doctrines, Neil holds that commonly what religious people say they “believe” they in fact only religiously creed.

Neil characterizes his view as a “two map” view of factual belief and religious credence. Many religious people have one picture of the world – one map – concerning what they factually believe, and a different picture of the world – a different map – concerning what they religiously creed. These maps might conflict: One might factually believe that Earth is billions of years old and religiously creed that it is less than a million years old. Such conflict need not be rationally troubling, since the attitudes are different. Compare: You might believe that Earth is billions of years old but imagine, desire, or assume for the sake of argument that it is less than a million years old. Although the contents of these attitudes conflict, there is no irrationality. What you imagine, desire, or assume for the sake of argument needn’t match what you factually believe. There are different maps, employed for different purposes. On Neil’s view, the same holds for religious credence.

There’s much I find plausible and attractive in Neil’s view. In particular, I fully support the idea that if someone sincerely asserts a religious proposition but doesn’t generally act and react as if that proposition is true, they can’t accurately be described as believing, or at least fully believing, that proposition.

However, I think it will be more productive to focus on points of disagreement.

First Concern: The Distinction Is Too Sharp.

Neil generally speaks as though the attitudes of factual belief and religious credence split sharply into two distinct kinds. I’m not sure how much depends on this, but I’m inclined to think it’s a spectrum, with lots in the middle. Middling cases might especially include emotionally loaded attitudes where the evidence is not in-your-face compelling. Consider, for example, my attitude toward the proposition my daughter has a great eye for fashion. This is something she cares about, an important part of how she thinks of herself, and I sincerely and enthusiastically affirm it. Is this attitude voluntary or involuntary? Well, to some extent it is a reaction to evidence; but to some extent I suspect I hold on to it in part because I want to affirm her self-conception. Is it vulnerable to counterevidence? Well, maybe if I saw again and again signs of bad fashion taste, my attitude would disappear; but it might require more counterevidence than for an attitude in which I am less invested. It’s somewhat counterevidence resistant. Does it guide my inferences across contexts? Well, probably – but suppose she says she wants to pursue a career in fashion, the success of which would depend on her really having a great eye. Now I feel the bubbling up of some anxiety about the truth of the proposition, which I don’t normally feel in other contexts. It’s not a religious credence certainly, but it has some of those features, to some degree.

Another case might be philosophical views. I’m pretty invested, for example, in my dispositionalist approach to belief. Is my dispositionalism vulnerable to evidence? I’d like to hope that if enough counterevidence accumulated, I would abandon the view. But I also admit that my investment in the view likely makes my attitude somewhat counterevidence resistant. Did I choose it voluntarily? I remember being immediately attracted to it in graduate school, when two of my favorite interlocutors at the time, Victoria McGeer and John Heil, both described dispositionalism about belief as underappreciated. I felt its attractions immediately and perhaps in some sense chose it, before I had fully thought through the range of pro and con arguments. In general, I think, students quickly tend to find philosophical views attractive or repellent, even before they are familiar enough with the argumentative landscape to be able to effectively defend their preferred views against well informed opponents; and typically (not always) they stick with the views that initially attracted them. Is this choice? Well, it’s more like choice than what happens to me when I open the fridge and simply see whether it contains beer. If religious credences are chosen, perhaps philosophical attitudes are in a similar sense partly chosen. There might be a social component, too: People you like tend to have this philosophical view, people you dislilke tend to have this other one. As for widespread cognitive governance: There’s a small literature on the question of whether the views philosophers endorse in the classroom and in journal articles do, or do not, govern their choices outside of philosophical contexts. I suspect the answer is: partly.

I also suspect that typical religious credences aren’t quite as voluntary, evidentially invulnerable, and context constrained as would be suggested by a sharp-lines picture. Someone who religiously creeds that God condemns masturbators might feel to some extent correctly that that position is forced upon them by their other commitments and might be delighted to find and respond to evidence that it is false. And although as Neil notes, citing Dennett, they might engage in the activity in a way that makes little sense if they literally think they are risking eternal Hell, people with this particular credence might well feel nervous, guilty, and like they are taking a risk which they hope God will later forgive. If so, their credence affects their thinking in contexts beyond Sunday – and maybe generally when it’s relevant.

Second Concern: Much of Neil’s Evidence Can Be Explained by Weak Belief.

Reading the book, I kept being niggled by the idea that much (but not all) of the evidence Neil marshals for his view could be explained if religious people factually believe what they say they believe, but don’t factually believe it with high confidence. On page 226, Neil articulates this thought as the “weak belief” explanation of the seeming irrationality of religious attitudes.

Weak belief can’t be the whole story. Even a 60% confidence in eternal damnation ought to be enough to choke off virtually any behavior, so if the behavior continues, it can’t be a rational reaction to low confidence.

Still, Neil makes much out of the fact that Vineyard members who claim in religious contexts that a shock they experienced from their coffeemaker was a demonic attack will also repair their coffeemaker and describe the shock in a more mundane way in non-religious contexts (p. 78-80). People who engage in petitionary prayer for healing also go to see the doctor (p. 86-88). And people often confess doubt about their religion (p. 93-95, 124-125). Such facts are perhaps excellent evidence that such people don’t believe with 100% confidence that the demon shocked them, that the prayer will heal them, and that the central tenets of their religion are all true. But these facts are virtually no evidence against the possibility that people have ordinary factual belief of perhaps 75% confidence that the demon shocked them, that the prayer will heal, and that their religion is true. Their alternative explanations, backup plans, and expressions of anxious doubt might be entirely appropriate and rational manifestations of low-confidence factual belief.

Third Concern: If There Are Two Maps, Why Does It Feel Like They Shouldn’t Conflict?

Consider cases where religious credences conflict with mainstream secular factual belief, such as the creationist attitude that Earth is less than a million years old and the Mormon attitude that American Indians descended from Israelites (p. 123-124). There is no rational conflict whatsoever between believing that Earth is billions of years old or that American Indians descended from East Asians and desiring that Earth is not billions of years old and that American Indians did not descend from East Asians. Nor is there any conflict between mainstream secular factual beliefs and imagining or assuming for the sake of argument that Earth is young or that American Indians descended from Israelites. For these attitude pairs, we really can construct two conflicting maps, feeling no rational pressure from their conflict. Here’s the map displaying what I factually believe, and here’s this other different map displaying what I desire, or imagine, or assume for sake of the present argument.

But it doesn’t seem like we are, or should be, as easygoing about conflicts between our religious attitudes and our factual beliefs. Of course, some people are. Some people will happily say I factually think that Earth is billions of years old but my religious attitude is that Earth is young, and I feel no conflict or tension between these two attitudes. But for the most part, I expect, to the extent people are invested in their religious credences they will reject conflicting factual content. They will say “Earth really is young. Mainstream science is wrong.” They feel the tension. This suggests that there aren’t really two maps with conflicting content, but one map, either representing Earth as old or representing Earth as young. If they buy the science, they reinterpret the creation stories as myths or metaphors. If they insist that the creation stories are literally true, then they reject the scientific consensus. What most people don’t do is hold both the standard scientific belief that Earth is literally old and the religious credence that Earth is literally young. At least, this appears to be so in most mainstream U.S. religious Christian cultures.

A one-map view nicely explains this felt tension. Neil’s two maps view needs to do more to explain why there’s a felt need for religious credence and factual belief to conform to each other. I raised a version of this concern in a blog post in 2022, developing an objection articulated by Tom Kelly in oral discussion. Neil has dubbed it the Rational Pressure Argument.

Neil’s response, in a guest post on my blog, was to suggest that there are some attitudes distinct from belief that are also subject to this type of rational pressure. Guessing is not believing, for example, but your guesses shouldn’t conflict with your factual beliefs. If you factually believe that the jar contains fewer than 8000 jelly beans, you’d better not guess that it actually contains 9041. If you hypothesize or accept in a scientific context that Gene X causes Disease Y, you’d better not firmly believe that Gene X has nothing to do with Disease Y. Thus, Neil argues, it does not follow from the felt conflict between the religious attitude and the factual belief that the religious attitude is a factual belief. Guesses and hypotheses are not beliefs and yet generate similar felt conflict.

That might be so. But the Rational Pressure Argument still creates a challenge for Neil’s two map view. Guessing and hypothesizing are different attitudes from factual belief, but they use the same map. My map of the jelly bean jar says there are 4000-8000 jelly beans. I now stick a pin in this map at 7000; that’s my guess. My map of the causes of Disease Y doesn’t specify what genes are involved, and because of this vagueness, I can put in a pin on Gene X as a hypothesized cause. The belief map constrains the guesses and hypotheses because the guesses and hypotheses are specifications within that same map. I don’t have a separate and possibly conflicting guess map and hypothesis map in the way that I can have a separate desire map or imagination map.

I thus propose that in our culture people typically feel the need to avoid conflict between their religious attitudes and their factual beliefs; and this suggests that they feel pressure to fit their religious understandings together with their ordinary everyday and scientific understandings into a single, coherent map of how the world really is, according to them.


Thanks for the awesome book, Neil! I philosophically creed some concerns, but I invite you to infer nothing from that about my factual beliefs.


The Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness
8 March 2024 | 6:10 pm

Suppose you encounter something that looks like a rattlesnake.  One possible explanation is that it is a rattlesnake.  Another is that it mimics a rattlesnake.  Mimicry can arise through evolution (other snakes mimic rattlesnakes to discourage predators) or through human design (rubber rattlesnakes).  Normally, it's reasonable to suppose that things are what they appear to be.  But this default assumption can be defeated -- for example, if there's reason to suspect sufficiently frequent mimics.

Linguistic and "social" AI programs are designed to mimic superficial features that ordinarily function as signs of consciousness.  These programs are, so to speak, consciousness mimics.  This fact about them justifies skepticism about the programs' actual possession of consciousness despite the superficial features.

In biology, deceptive mimicry occurs when one species (the mimic) resembles another species (the model) in order to mislead another species such as a predator (the dupe).  For example, viceroy butterflies evolved to visually resemble monarch butterflies in order to mislead predator species that avoid monarchs due to their toxicity.  Gopher snakes evolved to shake their tails in dry brush in a way that resembles the look and sound of rattlesnakes.

Social mimicry occurs when one animal emits behavior that resembles the behavior of another animal for social advantage.  For example, African grey parrots imitate each other to facilitate bonding and to signal in-group membership, and their imitation of human speech arguably functions to increase the care and attention of human caregivers.

In deceptive mimicry, the signal normally doesn't correspond with possession of the model's relevant trait.  The viceroy is not toxic, and the gopher snake has no poisonous bite.  In social mimicry, even if there's no deceptive purpose, the signal might or might not correspond with the trait suggested by the signal: The parrot might or might not belong to the group it is imitating, and Polly might or might not really "want a cracker".

All mimicry thus involves three traits: the superficial trait (S2) of the mimic, the corresponding superficial trait (S1) of the model, and an underlying feature (F) of the model that is normally signaled by the presence of S1 in the model.  (In the Polly-want-a-cracker case, things are more complicated, but let's assume that the human model is at least thinking about a cracker.)  Normally, S2 in the mimic is explained by its having been modeled on S1 rather than by the presence of F in the mimic, even if F happens to be present in the mimic.  Even if viceroy butterflies happen to be toxic to some predator species, their monarch-like coloration is better explained by their modeling on monarchs than as a signal of toxicity.  Unless the parrot has been specifically trained to say "Polly want a cracker" only when it in fact wants a cracker, its utterance is better explained by modeling on the human than as a signal of desire.

Figure: The mimic's possession of superficial feature S2 is explained by mimicry of superficial feature S1 in the model.  S1 reliably indicates F in the model, but S2 does not reliably indicate F in the mimic.

[click to enlarge and clarify]

This general approach to mimicry can be adapted to superficial features normally associated with consciousness.

Consider a simple case, where S1 and S2 are emission of the sound "hello" and F is the intention to greet.  The mimic is a child's toy that emits that sound when turned on, and the model is an ordinary English-speaking human.  In an ordinary English-speaking human, emitting the sound "hello" normally (though of course not perfectly) indicates an intention to greet.  However a child's toy has no intention to greet.  (Maybe its designer, years ago, had an intention to craft a toy that would "greet" the user when powered on, but that's not the toy's intention.)  F cannot be inferred from S2, and S2 is best explained by modeling on S1.

Large Language Models like GPT, PaLM, and LLaMA, are more complex but are structurally mimics.

Suppose you ask ChatGPT-4 "What is the capital of California?" and it responds "The capital of California is Sacramento."  The relevant superficial feature, S2, is a text string correctly identifying the capital of California.  The best explanation of why ChatGPT-4 exhibits S2 is that its outputs are modeled on human-produced text that also correctly identifies the capital of California as Sacramento.  Human-produced text with that content reliably indicates the producer's knowledge that Sacramento is the capital of California.  But we cannot infer corresponding knowledge when ChatGPT-4 is the producer.  Maybe "beliefs" or "knowledge" can be attributed to sufficiently sophisticated language models, but that requires further argument.  A much simpler model, trained on a small set of data containing a few instances of "The capital of California is Sacramento" might output the same text string for essentially similar reasons, without being describable as "knowing" this fact in any literal sense.

When a Large Language Model outputs a novel sentence not present in the training corpus, S2 and S1 will need to be described more abstractly (e.g., "a summary of Hamlet" or even just "text interpretable as a sensible answer to an absurd question").  But the underlying considerations are the same.  The LLM's output is modeled on patterns in human-generated text and can be explained as mimicry of those patterns, leaving open the question of whether the LLM has the underlying features we would attribute to a human being who gave a similar answer to the same prompt.  (See Bender et al. 2021 for an explicit comparison of LLMs and parrots.)

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Let's call something a consciousness mimic if it exhibits superficial features best explained by having been modeled on the superficial features of a model system, where in the model system those superficial features reliably indicate consciousness.  ChatGPT-4 and the "hello" toy are consciousness mimics in this sense.  (People who say "hello" or answer questions about state capitals are normally conscious.)  Given the mimicry, we cannot infer consciousness from the mimics' S2 features without substantial further argument.  A consciousness mimic exhibits traits that superficially look like indicators of consciousness, but which are best explained by the modeling relation rather than by appeal to the entity's underlying consciousness.  (Similarly, the viceroy's coloration pattern is best explained by its modeling on the monarch, not as a signal of its toxicity.)

"Social AI" programs, like Replika, combine the structure of Large Language Models with superficial signals of emotionality through an avatar with an expressive face.  Although consciousness researchers are near consensus that ChatGPT-4 and Replika are not conscious to any meaningful degree, some ordinary users, especially those who have become attached to AI companions, have begun to wonder.  And some consciousness researchers have speculated that genuinely conscious AI might be on the near (approximately ten-year) horizon (e.g., Chalmers 2023; Butlin et al. 2023; Long and Sebo 2023).

Other researchers -- especially those who regard biological features as crucial to consciousness -- doubt that AI consciousness will arrive anytime soon (e.g., Godfrey-Smith 2016Seth 2021).  It is therefore likely that we will enter an era in which it is reasonable to wonder whether some of our most advanced AI systems are conscious.  Both consciousness experts and the ordinary public are likely to disagree, raising difficult questions about the ethical treatment of such systems (for some of my alarm calls about this, see Schwitzgebel 2023a, 2023b).

Many of these systems, like ChatGPT and Replika, will be consciousness mimics.  They might or might not actually be conscious, depending on what theory of consciousness is correct.  However, because of their status as mimics, we will not be licensed to infer that they are conscious from the fact that they have superficial features (S2-type features) that resemble features in humans (S1-type features) that, in humans, reliably indicate consciousness (underlying feature F).

In saying this, I take myself to be saying nothing novel or surprising.  I'm simply articulating in a slightly more formal way what skeptics about AI consciousness say and will presumably continue to say.  I'm not committing to the view that such systems would definitely not be conscious.  My view is weaker, and probably acceptable even to most advocates of near-future AI consciousness.  One cannot infer the consciousness of an AI system that is built on principles of mimicry from the fact that it possesses features that normally indicate consciousness in humans.  Some extra argument is required.

However, any such extra argument is likely to be uncompelling.  Given the highly uncertain status of consciousness science, and widespread justifiable dissensus, any positive argument for these systems' consciousness will almost inevitably be grounded in dubious assumptions about the correct theory of consciousness (Schwitzgebel 2014, 2024).

Furthermore, given the superficial features, it might feel very natural to attribute consciousness to such entities, especially among non-experts unfamiliar with their architecture and perhaps open to, or even enthusiastic about, the possibility of AI consciousness in the near future.

The mimicry of superficial features of consciousness isn't proof of the nonexistence of consciousness in the mimic, but it is grounds for doubt.  And in the context of highly uncertain consciousness science, it will be difficult to justify setting aside such doubts.

None of these remarks would apply, of course, to AI systems that somehow acquire features suggestive of consciousness by some process other than mimicry.



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