Newcomb’s Paradox of Voting
Election Day, November 3, 2020, is a stressful time for you. Of course, it’s a big day for all Americans, but this time you have an unusually personal stake in the election. That’s because out of some 320 million Americans, you were selected by political pundit and psephologist Nate Silver as the perfect ‘bellwether voter’.
Interview with Daniel Dennett
Interview conducted Tuesday 18th June 2019 by Henry Shevlin. Transcript lightly edited for clarity and flow. Click to listen on Soundcloud or Spotify. Professor Dennett will need no introduction for many of our listeners. A giant of contemporary philosophy with interest in consciousness, freewill, evolution and religion, he’s written some 18 books and scores of
LITERALLY HITLER
Fresh from dropping his children off at school, Mr Jones ambled through the hall into his family’s sitting room, before almost immediately tripping over a toy robot and falling hard to his knees. “Bloody kids! Why can they never put away their toys? I tell you Martha, unless they’re going to learn to be tidier
Advice to a young demon concerning the Rationalist movement (with apologies to CS Lewis)
Preface: As an academic philosopher, I’ve had the pleasure of interacting on multiple occasions with members of ‘the Rationalist Movement’, a contemporary community of thinkers interested in AI, cognitive science, and reasoning that has built up over the years around blogs like LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, and SlateStarCodex. As much as I admire the movement and even identify
The Trials of Salemo
The Conclave of Elders of the city of Salemo considered themselves to be the most humane of consequentialists. While they took the doctrine of the greater good to be sacrosanct, they all swore a common vow never to lose sight of the individual. Yet they faced a perennial problem: every year, when new elected officials
Guest blogs for The Splintered Mind
I’ve recently been doing some guest blogging for Eric Schwitzgebel’s fantastic blog The Splintered Mind. Here are links to the six posts I wrote this summer. (1) Why was sci-fi so slow to discover time travel? Most themes in contemporary science fiction have precursors in earlier mythology and folklore, but time travel doesn’t appear in fiction until
New post on Conceptual Short-Term Memory for iCog blog
My new post for the University of Sheffield’s iCog blog is now online! It discusses some of my recent work on Conceptual Short-Term Memory, and what it can tell us about perception, cognition, and consciousness. For an in-depth exploration of the topic, you can find a more detailed treatment in my recent article at the
Are toddler tantrums a serious ethical issue?
Toddlers often seem to undergo what look like extreme negative emotions, raging, sobbing, and genuinely seeming massively distraught because they, e.g., can’t have a second cookie. Generally speaking, parents don’t feel too awful about these episodes, regarding them as regrettable but inevitable, and sometimes even funny (see, e.g., this link), and something to be
Cynicism about voice technology
I vividly remember the month that I first got Siri on iPhone, not least because I’ve barely used it since the initial novelty wore off. Now, The Economist is getting excited about voice technology, and even has a special report about Siri, Alexa, and the future of natural language voice computing. For my part, I’m