The Splintered Mind

Just what you wanted! And just in time for National Cherry Popsicle Day! A summary of my 2024 book, The Weirdness of the World, by the author himself. You probably haven’t had time to read the whole thing (I don’t blame you). So here’s a synthesis of what I see as the most central ideas.

Since 2014, I’ve compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent award nominations and “best of” placements over the previous ten years. If you’re curious what magazines tend to be viewed by insiders as elite, check the top of the list. If you’re curious to discover reputable magazines that aren’t as widely known (or aren’t as widely known specifically for their science fiction and fantasy), check the bottom of the list. Below is my list for 2026.

AI and Consciousness, hot off the press at Cambridge University Press and free online until Aug 26! Summary: Our most advanced AI systems might soon – within the next five to thirty years – be as richly and meaningfully conscious as ordinary humans, or even more so, capable of genuine feeling, real self-knowledge, and a wide range of sensory, emotional, and cognitive experiences.

Aloha from Kauai! Here's another snail for your enjoyment. Since I'm still on vacation, here’s a repost with edits from 2011 and from my 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures. [giant African land snail, seen in southern Kauai] I've been told that Kant and Hegel were poor writers whose impenetrable prose style is incidental to their philosophy.

Aloha from Honolulu! I have vacation brain, so I'll do a summer-themed repost. [Photo from the Bishop Museum malacology exhibit] ************************************* Every spring I suffer the Summer Illusion. The following three incompatible propositions all seem to me, in the spring, to be true: (1.) When summer arrives, I'll finally get a bunch of that research done which has been crowded out by my teaching and administrative commitments during the school year.

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. [Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird] Thanks for reading The Splintered Mind! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The literature on superintelligence and AI alignment tends to assume that an intelligent AI will have one set of values, one reward function, and consistent, determinate preferences. But speaking for myself, I’m not as consistent as that. You aren’t either, I suspect.

I don’t want to read your AI-generated email. Lots of reasons why, but here’s the core of it: I want the text to reflect your thoughts. I want to know that you, the human, actually had those ideas and had them authentically enough to express them in exactly the form I see on the page. For personal emails, I want this for personal reasons. For philosophically substantive emails, I want this for evidential reasons.

Here. Comments welcomed, hoped for, treasured. Over the past couple years I’ve been working on a pair of books, AI and Consciousness and Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights. I began circulating AI and Consciousness last fall, and it should appear with Cambridge Elements soon. Both experts’ and non-experts’ comments were extremely helpful in revising. Thanks so much! Thanks for reading The Splintered Mind! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In philosophy of mind, people sometimes say things like the following: If functionalism is true about consciousness, then digital computers could be conscious; all it requires is that they instantiate the right programs. And yes, most functionalists about consciousness do think that. But the claim about digital computer programs does not straightforwardly follow from functionalism alone.

Available here. Abstract: Future AI persons might both (1.) deserve moral consideration and rights fully equal with natural human persons, and (2.) have lifeways so radically different from ours as to break familiar patterns of moral thinking by violating our ordinary background assumptions. This article presents a series of thought experiments about strange AI persons, centering on a two-pronged worry featuring two types of “monster”.