Consciousness: what it is, where it comes from — and whether machines can have it. @LiadMudrik reviews books by by Me (The Four Realms of Existence), Daniel Dennett (I've Been Thinking) and Kevin Mitchell (Free Will) nature.com/articles/d4158…

Now published: “A construct-first approach to consciousness science”, with Peter Fazekas and Morten Overgaard sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Can physics solve the problem(s) of consciousness? In our latest book review for Science Magazine, Chaz Firestone and I weigh in. (Spoiler: certainly not without help!) science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

We're approaching the end of Year 4 of my 'Foundations of Animal Sentience' project, so it's a good moment for a roundup of what the team has done this year (a thread with open access links). (1/14) 👇🧵

If in the future we don't know whether robots are conscious, should we give them 50% of the moral consideration due to a human being if we think it's 50% likely that they have humanlike consciousness? Today's post expresses doubts about that approach: schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/01/creden…

📄Now preprinted - Part I of a two-part philosophical introduction to language models co-authored with Cameron Buckner! This first paper offers a primer on language models and an opinionated survey of their relevance to classic philosophical issues. 1/5 arxiv.org/abs/2401.03910

Excellent new paper by Josh Myers "The epistemic role of vividness" - philpapers.org/rec/MYETER

Creating something out of nothing: Symbolic and non-symbolic representations of numerical zero in the human brain biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

descartes lectures on "large language models and the philosophy of mind" in tilburg july 29-31 (alas the lectures are not by descartes, just by me). plus a workshop on the same topic to which anyone can apply. descarteslectures2024.wordpress.com/registration/

Here is a CFP for the "Phenomenality and Access" workshop with Prof. Ned Block (Ned Block) and Prof. Martine Nida-Rümelin, which I'm co-organizing. The workshop is scheduled for May 27-28 2024 in Prague (CZ). Please feel free to share! emw.flu.cas.cz

Next week, I will be blogging at The Brains Blog (fediscience.org/@Brains) about my book Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Action, Attention and Intention. To mark the event, OUP has kindly made the first chapter available for FREE... academic.oup.com/book/46088/cha…

I look forward to speaking at the 12th Annual Marshall M. Weinberg Symposium University of Michigan on Friday, alongside researchers whose work I deeply admire – Yejin Choi, Melanie Mitchell, and Paul Smolensky. More information including link to the livestream: lsa.umich.edu/weinberginstit…

1/ The NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program and Wild Animal Welfare Program are thrilled to be hosting a conference on the emerging science of animal consciousness on Friday April 19! This event will be free and open to all, both in person and online. sites.google.com/nyu.edu/mindet…

This will be fantastic - don't miss it. 8yrs after the founding of Animal Sentience, the first journal dedicated to the topic, it's time to review progress, map out agreements and disagreements, and lay out the next steps. Register now to be part of it! sites.google.com/nyu.edu/mindet…

Only 3 days left to submit to this (the deadline for abstracts is March 31). More info: emw.flu.cas.cz

New paper coming out in The BJPS: "Validity drifts in psychiatric research". The paper is about measurement validity. I develop the notion of 'validity drift' and apply it to psychiatric research on depression, and fear and anxiety disorders. philpapers.org/rec/MICVDI

This week at The Junkyard: A post by Kevin Lande junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2024/4/27…

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Very excited to have a Neuroview piece on infant consciousness in the Neuron Neuron special issue on consciousness. Claudia Passos-Ferreira, Can we detect consciousness in newborn infants? Neuron authors.elsevier.com/a/1j5Yo_KOmxK7…