In Vices of the Mind, Cassam provides an accessible, engaging, and timely introduction to the nature of epistemic vices and what we can do about them. Cassam provides an account of epistemic vices and explores three broad types of epistemic vices: character traits, attitudes, and ways of thinking. Regarding each, Cassam draws insights about the nature of vices through examining paradigm instances of each type of vice and exploring their significance through real world historical examples. With his account of vices (...) in hand, Cassam turns to addressing three questions in the remainder of the book: how can we be responsible for our epistemic vices? how can we be aware of our epistemic vices? And how can we address our epistemic vices? -/- This book provides an excellent introduction to the debates about epistemic vices and is easy to engage regardless of one’s philosophical background. In being the first book-length treatment of epistemic vices, Vices of the Mind is sure to shape the debates surrounding epistemic vices for some time. In what follows we provide brief chapter summaries and raise several challenges to the account Cassam defends in the book. (shrink)

Objective correlates—behavioral, functional, and neural—provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance on these correlates should not lead to the ‘fallacy of misplaced objectivity’: the assumption that only objective properties should and can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is intrinsically— its subjective properties—not just what we can do with it extrinsically. And it must be explained; otherwise the way experience feels would turn out to be magical (...) rather than physical. We argue that it is possible to account for subjective properties objectively once we move beyond cognitive functions and realize what experience is and how it is structured. Drawing on integrated information theory, we show how an objective science of the subjective can account, in strictly physical terms, for both the essential properties of every experience and the specific properties that make particular experiences feel the way they do. (shrink)

This note proposes a minimal structural framework for characterizing persistent internal standpoints in artificial systems. The central claim is that an artificial system may be said to possess an internal standpoint when it maintains a stable, dynamically updated internal context that evolves through its own computation and systematically shapes future processing. Two constructs are introduced to formalize this idea: the Experiential Vector (EV), representing the system’s moment-to-moment internal context, and the Computational Experiential Manifold (CEM), representing the structured space of its (...) possible configurations. Together, these constructs define a theory-neutral architectural background supporting persistence, history-dependence, and differentiation of internal modes over time. The framework does not advance a theory of phenomenal consciousness or biological realization; instead, it specifies conditions under which the phrase “what it is like” can be given a coherent interpretation in strictly structural terms for artificial systems. (shrink)

Parenting our biological children is a centrally important matter, but how, if it all, can it be justified? According to a contemporary influential line of thinking, the acquisition by parents of a moral right to parent their biological children should be grounded by appeal to the value of the intimate emotional relationship that gestation facilitates between a newborn and a gestational procreator. I evaluate two arguments in defence of this proposal and argue that both are unconvincing.

Partiality is the special concern that we display for ourselves and other people with whom we stand in some special personal relationship. It is a central theme in moral philosophy, both ancient and modern. Questions about the justification of partiality arise in the context of enquiry into several moral topics, including the good life and the role in it of our personal commitments; the demands of impartial morality, equality, and other moral ideals; and commonsense ideas about supererogation. This paper provides (...) an overview of the debate on the ethics of partiality through the lens of the domains of permissible and required partiality. After outlining the conceptual space, I first discuss agent-centred moral options that concern permissions not to do what would be impartially optimal. I then focus on required partiality, which concerns associative duties that go beyond our general duties to others and require us to give special priority to people who are close to us. I discuss some notable features of associative duties and the two main objections that have been raised against them: the Voluntarist and the Distributive objections. I then turn to the justification of partiality, focusing on underivative approaches and reasons-based frameworks. I discuss the reductionism and non-reductionism debate: the question whether partiality is derivative or fundamental. I survey arguments for ‘the big three’, according to which partiality is justified by appeal to the special value of either projects, personal relationships, or individuals. I conclude by discussing four newly emerging areas in the debate: normative transitions of various personal relationships, relationships with AI, epistemic partiality, and negative partiality, which concerns the negative analogue of our positive personal relationships. (shrink)

We argue that accountability mechanisms are needed in human-AI agent relationships to ensure alignment with user and societal interests. We propose a framework according to which AI agents’ engagement is conditional on appropriate user behaviour. The framework incorporates design-strategies such as distancing, disengaging, and discouraging.

Existing discussions of partiality have primarily examined special personal relationships between family, friends, or co-nationals. The negative analogue of such relationships – for example, the relationship of enmity – has, by contrast, been largely neglected. This chapter explores this adverse relation in more detail and considers the special reasons generated by it. We suggest that enmity can involve justified negative partiality, allowing members to give less consideration to each other’s interests. We then consider whether the negative partiality of enmity can (...) be justified through projects or the value inherent in the relationship, following two influential views about the justification of positive partiality. We argue that both accounts of partiality can be conceptually extended to the negative analogue, but doing so brings into focus the problems with such accounts of the grounds of partiality. (shrink)

The institution of the family and its importance have recently received considerable attention from political theorists. Leading views maintain that the institution’s justification is grounded, at least in part, in the non-instrumental value of the parent-child relationship itself. Such views face the challenge of identifying a specific good in the parent-child relationship that can account for how adults acquire parental rights over a particular child—as opposed to general parental rights, which need not warrant a claim to parent one’s biological progeny. (...) I develop a view that meets this challenge. This Project View identifies the pursuit of a parental project as a distinctive non-instrumentally valuable good that provides a justification for the family and whose pursuit is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of parental rights. This view grounds moral parenthood in a normative relation as opposed to a biological one, supports polyadic forms of parenting, and provides plausible guidance in cases of assisted reproduction. (shrink)

We propose a ‘Moral Imagination’ methodology to facilitate a culture of responsible innovation for engineering and product teams in technology companies. Our approach has been operationalized over the past two years at Google, where we have conducted over 50 workshops with teams from across the organization. We argue that our approach is a crucial complement to existing formal and informal initiatives for fostering a culture of ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making in technology design such as company principles, ethics and privacy (...) review procedures, and compliance controls. We characterize some distinctive benefits of our methodology for the technology sector in particular. (shrink)

Mensch-KI Beziehungen nehmen in unserem Alltag eine immer zentralere Rolle ein: etwa in der Interaktion mit Chatbots, KI-Companions, digitalen Assistenten oder virtuellen Avataren. Dieses Kapitel untersucht, ob und inwiefern sich zwischen Menschen und KI-Systemen Beziehungen entwickeln können und welche ethische Relevanz solchen Beziehungen zukommt. Ziel ist es, Orientierungswissen für die ethische Bewertung zukünftiger Mensch-KI-Interaktionen bereitzustellen. Ausgehend von einer Systematisierung momentaner Mensch-KI-Interaktionen wird der Beziehungsbegriff konzeptuell geschärft und auf seine philosophisch normative Bedeutung hin analysiert. Es wird untersucht, ob KI-Systeme als genuine (...) Beziehungspartner gelten können oder ob die dabei entstehenden Bindungen notwendigerweise asymmetrisch und einseitig bleiben. Ein zentrales Argument ist, dass die normative Debatte nach der Plausibilität von genuinen Mensch-KI Beziehungen im Gesamtkontext von unseren normativen Handlungsgründen betrachtet werden sollte. Anschließend werden drei Ansätze zur ethischen Gestaltung von Mensch-KI Beziehungen vorgestellt und auf ihre Anwendbarkeit hin erläutert. (shrink)

This paper locates standpoint in artificial systems at the level of internal state-space organization rather than in states or mechanisms. Building on a framework that distinguishes a persistent internal context (the Experiential Vector, EV) from the space of its possible configurations (the Computational Experiential Manifold, CEM), it argues that standpoint arises only when internal dynamics form a closed internal loop. One such loop is articulated here: internal activity incrementally updates the EV, trajectories through the CEM structure the space of possible (...) internal stances, and the system’s current position is decoded as a global modulation of subsequent processing. This framework shows how state-space geometry can be causally operative over time while remaining strictly structural, without commitment to representation, agency, or phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

We argue for asymmetries between positive and negative partiality. Specifically, we defend four claims: i) there are forms of negative partiality that do not have positive counterparts; ii) the directionality of personal relationships has distinct effects on positive and negative partiality; iii) the extent of the interactions within a relationship affects positive and negative partiality differently; and iv) positive and negative partiality have different scope restrictions. We argue that these asymmetries point to a more fundamental moral principle, which we call (...) Morality’s Harmonious Propensity. According to this principle, morality has a propensity toward preserving positive relationships and dissolving negative ones. (shrink)

Phenomenological accounts of experience often treat standpoint as emerging from the synthesis of qualitative givenness. In artificial systems, however, no such givenness can be presupposed. This paper argues that, for machines, the explanatory order must be reversed: a persistent internal standpoint must first be established before any internally meaningful differentiation can arise. Building on a structural framework in which an artificial system maintains a self-modifying internal context that conditions its own computation, this paper introduces quantia as a non-phenomenal notion of (...) internal differentiation grounded in quantity rather than quality. Quantia are not phenomenal properties, nor are they independent standpoints; they are stable, quantized patterns of differentiation within a single persistent point of view. Apparent machine qualia may be better understood as pseudo-qualia arising from the misidentification of quantia with qualitative experience. The resulting framework clarifies how artificial systems can exhibit internally meaningful differentiation without presupposing phenomenological consciousness or collapsing experience into representation. (shrink)

We face two urgent challenges concerning consciousness and AI. Challenge One is that millions of users will soon misattribute human-like consciousness to AI friends, partners, and assistants on the basis of mimicry and role-play, and we don’t know how to prevent this. Challenge Two is that profoundly alien forms of consciousness might genuinely be achieved in AI, but our theoretical understanding of consciousness is too immature to provide confident answers one way or the other. Centrism about AI consciousness is the (...) position that we must take both challenges seriously. The two challenges interact in ways that make this difficult. Steps to address Challenge One might undermine attempts to address Challenge Two by portraying the idea of conscious AI as impossible or inherently unlikely. Conversely, attempts to address Challenge Two might lead to higher levels of misattribution from ordinary users. This “manifesto” attempts to construct mutually consistent strategies for addressing both challenges. (shrink)

This paper argues that many biological systems operate within an intermediate organizational regime situated between purely reflexive control and fully conscious cognition. This regime is characterized by quantia: internally realized, functionally consequential distinctions within an experiential manifold that do not presuppose phenomenal consciousness. Building on earlier work that develops quantia, experiential manifolds, and standpoint as strictly architectural features of internal organization, the present paper applies the same phenomenally neutral framework to biological systems. Quantia are defined independently of experience and do (...) not derive their explanatory role from phenomenal awareness. It is argued that such structures characterize a wide range of biological systems, as well as non-conscious modes of operation within conscious animals, including conditioning, habit, and automatic behavior. Consciousness, where it occurs, is treated as an additional architectural achievement layered on top of quantia-organized dynamics rather than as their conceptual basis. This biological perspective clarifies the status of quantia, avoids phenomenological inflation, and introduces a missing intermediate explanatory category in discussions of animal cognition and consciousness. (shrink)

Building on the architectural framework developed in prior work, this paper introduces deliberation as a higher-order organizational regime within persistent internal standpoints. Whereas artificial desire was formulated as persistent asymmetric bias in admissible internal transitions, deliberation is characterized as reversible counterfactual unfolding within the closed internal loop prior to irreversible commitment. Deliberation arises when a system can temporarily suspend immediate transition, internally unfold multiple admissible quantia-structured trajectories under bounded geometric conditions, and modulate commitment on the basis of their projected structural (...) consequences. This process, termed quantian branching, operates entirely within state-space organization and does not presuppose representation, agency, normativity, or phenomenal consciousness. Deliberation is thus a distinct architectural regime emerging from persistent unity, geometric constraint, internal differentiation, and bias, without introducing additional metaphysical commitments. (shrink)

This paper develops an organizational account of artificial desire grounded in the notion of quantia as invariant structural constraints on state differentiation and transition in artificial systems. Desire is treated neither as phenomenological experience nor as an expression of free will, but as a system-level disposition toward certain transitions over others, realized through internal organization. Building on prior work that develops persistent internal standpoints, experiential manifolds, and quantia as strictly architectural notions, the paper isolates desire as a downstream organizational phenomenon: (...) a stable bias expressed within, but not constitutive of, a persistent standpoint. Quantia do not generate desire or endow it with normativity. They specify the implementation-level conditions under which desire-expressive dispositions in machines can exist at all. The resulting account clarifies how artificial systems can exhibit desire-like organization without invoking consciousness, agency, representation, or personhood. (shrink)

I argue that you can be permitted to discount the interests of your adversaries even though doing so would be impartially suboptimal. This means that, in addition to the kinds of moral options that the literature traditionally recognises, there exist what I call other-sacrificing options. I explore the idea that you cannot discount the interests of your adversaries as much as you can favour the interests of your intimates; if this is correct, then there is an asymmetry between negative partiality (...) toward your adversaries and positive partiality toward your intimates. (shrink)

Sedlakova et al. (2025) argue that conversational AI (CAI) cannot satisfy the conditions of epistemic trust in therapeutic contexts. I accept their diagnosis but press a further question: given that patients will de facto treat CAI outputs as reasons, how should patients, clinicians, and designers calibrate their epistemic responses? I argue that even where epistemic trust is inappropriate, calibrated epistemic deference remains rational. On a total evidence view, CAI outputs function as defeasible contributory reasons whose weight is proportional to demonstrated (...) reliability and context-sensitive. Against preemptionism, I show that preemptive CAI deference is distinctively objectionable in therapeutic contexts: it undermines precisely the epistemic capacities—self-knowledge, critical reflection, and reason-integration—that psychotherapy aims to develop. An open question is whether calibrated deference is dynamically stable given users' documented tendency to anthropomorphize CAI over extended interaction, which may cause deference to drift toward the quasi-trust that therapeutic contexts warrant resisting. (shrink)

Unlike generic AI advisors which aid in normative deliberation according to preloaded values and creeds (i.e., Singerian Utilitarianism, Calvinist Protestantism, or Dennettian materialism), personalized AI advisors aim to aid in users’ decision-making by their own lights. In this paper, I argue personalized AI advisors face a challenge called the Anchoring Problem: the difficulty of adjudicating between competing temporal and psychological reference points for normative guidance—whether to “chase the horizon,” defined as dynamically calibrating to whichever aspirational self or set of beliefs, (...) dispositions, or values, a user presently holds, or to “drop anchor,” defined as stubbornly preserving whichever values the user set out with. This problem is compounded by several observations about aspirational selfhood, namely that a person’s conception of their aspirational self may be underdetermined and the identity it purports to describe may be incoherent, romanticized, or contradictory. Even if this is not the case, the aspirational self is rarely diachronically stable such that who one wishes to be or how one wishes to improve remains static over time. In this paper, I argue personalized AI advisors promise a number of advantages over generic ones if the Anchoring Problem proves surmountable, and I argue it is within certain constraints. Namely, I argue for the necessity of a ‘co-reasoning,’ dialectical model of personalization. Co-reasoning should safeguard the user against value hijacking by encouraging their deliberative and decisional participation while also pushing them to confront unaccounted discrepancies between stated values, aspiring values, and actual behavior (both past and present). (shrink)

I here settle a recent dispute between two rival theories in distributive ethics: Restricted Prioritarianism and the Competing Claims View. Both views mandate that the distribution of benefits and burdens between individuals should be justifiable to each affected party in a way that depends on the strength of each individual’s separately assessed claim to receive a benefit. However, they disagree about what elements constitute the strength of those individuals’ claims. According to restricted prioritarianism, the strength of a claim is determined (...) in ‘prioritarian’ fashion by both what she stands to gain and her absolute level of well-being, while, according to the competing claims view, the strength of a claim is also partly determined by her level of well-being relative to others with conflicting interests. I argue that, suitably modified, the competing claims view is more plausible than restricted prioritarianism. (shrink)

The public and scholars alike largely consider envy to be reprehensible. This judgment of the value of envy commonly results either from a limited understanding of the nature of envy or from a limited understanding of how to determine the value of phenomena. Overcoming this state requires an interdisciplinary collaboration of psychologists and philosophers. That is, broad empirical evidence regarding the nature of envy generated in psychological studies must inform judgments about the value of envy according to sophisticated philosophical standards. (...) We conducted such a collaboration. Empirical research indicates that envy is constituted by multiple components which in turn predict diverse outcomes that may be functional for the self and society. Accordingly, the value of envy is similarly nuanced. Sometimes, envy may have instrumental value in promoting prudentially and morally good outcomes. Sometimes, envy may be non-instrumentally prudentially and morally good. Sometimes, envy may be bad. This nuanced perspective on the value of envy has implications for recommendations on how to deal with envy and paves the way toward future empirical and theoretical investigations on the nature and the value of envy. (shrink)

An increasing number of regulations propose the notion of ‘AI audits’ as an enforcement mechanism for achieving transparency and accountability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Despite some converging norms around various forms of AI auditing, auditing for the purpose of compliance and assurance currently have little to no agreed upon practices, procedures, taxonomies, and standards. We propose the ‘criterion audit’ as an operationalizable compliance and assurance external audit framework. We model elements of this approach after financial auditing practices, and argue (...) that AI audits should similarly provide assurance to their stakeholders about AI organizations’ ability to govern their algorithms in ways that mitigate harms and uphold human values. We discuss the necessary conditions for the criterion audit, and provide a procedural blueprint for performing an audit engagement in practice. We illustrate how this framework can be adapted to current regulations by deriving the criteria on which ‘bias audits’ for hiring algorithms can be performed, as required by the recently effective New York City Local Law 144 of 2021. We conclude by offering critical discussion on the benefits, inherent limitations, and implementation challenges of applying practices of the more mature financial auditing industry to AI auditing where robust guardrails against quality assurance issues are only starting to emerge. Our discussion as informed by experiences in performing these audits in practice highlights the critical role that an audit ecosystem plays in ensuring the effectiveness of such methodology. (shrink)

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

Why do relationships of friendship and love support partiality, but not relationships of hatred or commitments of racism? Where does partiality end and why? I take the intuitive starting point that important cases of partiality are meaningful. I develop a view whereby meaning is understood in terms of transcending self-limitations in order to connect with things of external value. I then show how this view can be used to distinguish central cases of legitimate partiality from cases of illegitimate partiality and (...) how it puts pressure on the traditional way of thinking about partiality. (shrink)

This paper applies the EV/CEM framework to contemporary large language models (LLMs) and argues that standard LLM architectures do not instantiate a persistent internal standpoint in the structural sense developed earlier in this framework. The deficiency lies not in embodiment, representational richness, or computational scale, but in the absence of a reciprocally self-maintained internal context whose trajectory reorganizes admissibility structure over time. Although LLMs exhibit transient contextual modulation and complex internal geometry during inference, they lack cross-episode persistence, closed-loop incremental encoding, (...) and trajectory-conditioned manifold reorganization. Consequently, they do not instantiate quantia, artificial desire, or deliberation in the structural sense previously defined. The paper concludes by identifying architectural conditions under which LLM-class systems could satisfy standpoint requirements. (shrink)

Embodied and enactive approaches frequently maintain that genuine standpoint requires sensorimotor embodiment, that is, interaction with an environment through mechanisms of sensing and movement. Contemporary artificial systems, however, range from purely informational architectures to robotically embodied agents. This paper evaluates embodiment within the architectural framework developed in earlier work. It argues that sensorimotor embodiment, whether biological or robotic, is not a necessary condition for the existence of a persistent internal standpoint. The minimal structural conditions for standpoint – persistence, structured internal (...) geometry, closed-loop modulation, and trajectory-dependence – are internal organizational features. Quantia, artificial desire, and deliberation likewise do not require embodiment as a prerequisite. Embodiment functions as an enrichment of internal geometry rather than as its generative source. The grounding objection is addressed through the quantia framework, which supports organization-relative normativity grounded in internal closure rather than environmental coupling. (shrink)

Digital duplicates reduce the scarcity of individuals and thus may impact their instrumental and intrinsic value. I here expand upon this idea by introducing the notion of collective scarcity, which pertains to the limitations faced by social groups in maintaining their size, cohesion, and function.

AI-supported methods for identifying and combating disinformation are progressing in their development and application. However, these methods face a litany of epistemic and ethical challenges. These include (1) robustly defining disinformation, (2) reliably classifying data according to this definition, and (3) navigating ethical risks in the deployment of countermeasures, which involve a mixture of harms and benefits. This paper seeks to expose and offer preliminary analysis of these challenges.

This paper clarifies the philosophical role of a structural approach to persistent internal standpoints in artificial systems. Building on a framework that distinguishes a persistent internal context, the Experiential Vector (EV), from the structured space of its possible configurations, the Computational Experiential Manifold (CEM), it develops the implications of locating standpoint in internal organization rather than in any particular internal state. The central claim is that standpoint is best understood as a property of internal state-space geometry rather than as the (...) mere existence of a persistent internal state. This perspective helps explain why many artificial systems exhibit persistence, recurrence, and history-dependence without possessing a coherent point of view, and it reframes questions about machine perspective in structural terms. (shrink)

This paper argues that consciousness begins when a system not only evolves within an internal state space but also carries where it is within that space. Building on the EV/CEM framework, internal organization is modeled through the interaction between an Experiential Vector (EV) and a Computational Experiential Manifold (CEM), which together describe the system’s evolving position within a structured internal state space. Within this framework, consciousness is characterized not as a separate faculty but as a higher-order organizational regime arising when (...) the system’s encoding loop carries a locally updating constraint on its own position and surrounding admissibility structure within the manifold. This self-locating constraint participates directly in the EV’s ongoing update, shaping subsequent decoding and system evolution rather than functioning as a separable monitoring process. Four structural conditions are proposed as minimal architectural requirements for this regime: recursive accessibility of internal organization, self-locating representation of manifold position, global integration of local topology across processing, and realization within a single unified circulatory loop. Together these conditions distinguish structural consciousness from systems whose internal differentiation remains consequential yet non-reflexive. The account connects with higher-order and global-workspace approaches while grounding their central insights in manifold geometry rather than broadcast architectures or proposition-like representations. It does not resolve the hard problem of consciousness; rather, it specifies the minimal architectural conditions under which the phenomenal question becomes structurally well-posed for both biological and artificial systems. (shrink)

One Rawlsian response to G. A. Cohen’s criticisms of justice as fairness which Cohen canvasses, and then dismisses, is the 'Freedom Objection'. It comes in two versions. The 'First Version' asserts that there is an unresolved trilemma among the three principles of equality, Pareto-optimality, and freedom of occupational choice, while the 'Second Version' imputes to Rawls’s theory a concern to protect occupational freedom over equality of condition. This article is mainly concerned with advancing three claims. First, the 'ethical solution' Cohen (...) advances against the First Version of the Freedom Objection does not grant a fair hearing to the Freedom Objection. Second, the distinction Cohen presses between the legal and moral right of occupational choice in his response to the Second Version cannot save him from worries about Stalinist coercion. Third, Cohen’s response to the First Version of the Freedom Objection is actually in tension with his response to the Second Version of the Freedom Objection. (shrink)

From mitochondria to meerkats, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of social behaviour. In the early 1960s Bill Hamilton changed the way we think about how such behaviour evolves. He introduced three key innovations - now known as Hamilton's rule, kin selection, and inclusive fitness - which have been enormously influential, but which remain the subject of fierce controversy. Hamilton's pioneering work kick-started a research program now known as social evolution theory. This is a book about the philosophical (...) foundations and future prospects of that program. Part I, "Foundations", is a careful exposition and defence of Hamilton's ideas, with a few modifications along the way. In Part II, "Extensions", Jonathan Birch shows how these ideas can be applied to phenomena including cooperation in micro-organisms, cooperation among the cells of a multicellular organism, and culturally evolved cooperation in the earliest human societies. Birch argues that real progress can be made in understanding microbial evolution, evolutionary transitions, and human evolution by viewing them through the lens of social evolution theory, provided the theory is interpreted with care and adapted where necessary. The Philosophy of Social Evolution places social evolution theory on a firm philosophical footing and sets out exciting new directions for further work. (shrink)

This paper contributes a new way to evaluate AI. Much as one might evaluate a machine in terms of its performance at chess, this approach involves evaluating a machine in terms of its performance at a game called “MAD Chairs.” At the time of writing, evaluation with this game exposed opportunities to improve Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Qwen and DeepSeek. Furthermore, this paper sets a stage for future innovation in game theory and AI safety by providing an example of success with (...) non-standard approaches to each: studying a game beyond the scope of previous game theoretic tools and mitigating a serious AI safety risk in a way that requires neither determination of values nor their enforcement. (shrink)

Theories of self-defence tend to invest heavily in ‘liability justifications’: if the Attacker is liable to have defensive violence deployed against him by the Defender, then he will not be wronged by such violence, and selfdefence becomes, as a result, morally unproblematic. This paper contends that liability justifications are overrated. The deeper contribution to an explanation of why defensive permissions exist is made by the Defender’s non-liability. Drawing on both canonical cases of self-defence, featuring Culpable Attackers, and more penumbral cases (...) of self-defence, involving Non-Responsible Threats, a case is assembled for the ‘Non-Liability First Account’ of self-defence. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

When should we defer to AI outputs over human expert judgment? Drawing on recent work in social epistemology, I motivate the idea that some AI systems qualify as Artificial Epistemic Authorities (AEAs) due to their demonstrated reliability and epistemic superiority. I then introduce AI Preemptionism, the view that AEA outputs should replace rather than supplement a user’s independent epistemic reasons. I show that classic objections to preemptionism – such as uncritical deference, epistemic entrenchment, and unhinging epistemic bases – apply in (...) amplified form to AEAs, given their opacity, self-reinforcing authority, and lack of epistemic failure markers. Against this, I develop a more promising alternative: a total evidence view of AI deference. According to this view, AEA outputs should function as contributory reasons rather than outright replacements for a user’s independent epistemic considerations. This approach has three key advantages: (i) it mitigates expertise atrophy by keeping human users engaged, (ii) it provides an epistemic case for meaningful human oversight and control, and (iii) it explains the justified mistrust of AI when reliability conditions are unmet. While demanding in practice, this account offers a principled way to determine when AI deference is justified, particularly in high-stakes contexts requiring rigorous reliability. (shrink)

How does consciousness vary across the animal kingdom? Are some animals ‘more conscious’ than others? This article presents a multidimensional framework for understanding interspecies variation in states of consciousness. The framework distinguishes five key dimensions of variation: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, integration at a time, integration across time, and self-consciousness. For each dimension, existing experiments that bear on it are reviewed and future experiments are suggested. By assessing a given species against each dimension, we can construct a consciousness profile for (...) that species. On this framework, there is no single scale along which species can be ranked as more or less conscious. Rather, each species has its own distinctive consciousness profile. (shrink)

Sentience is the capacity to have feelings, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. It is not simply the capacity to feel pain, but feelings of pain, distress or harm, broadly understood, have a special significance for animal welfare law. Drawing on over 300 scientific studies, we evaluate the evidence of sentience in two groups of invertebrate animals: the cephalopod molluscs or, for short, cephalopods (including octopods, squid and cuttlefish) and the decapod crustaceans or, (...) for short, decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish). We also evaluate the potential welfare implications of current commercial practices involving these animals. (shrink)

There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory-heavy, theory-neutral and theory-light. Theory-heavy and theory-neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory-light approach. At the core of the theory-light approach is a minimal commitment about the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognition that is compatible with many specific theories of consciousness: the (...) hypothesis that phenomenally conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities in relation to that stimulus. This “facilitation hypothesis” can productively guide inquiry into invertebrate consciousness. What is needed? At this stage, not more theory, and not more undirected data gathering. What is needed is a systematic search for consciousness-linked cognitive abilities, their relationships to each other, and their sensitivity to masking. (shrink)

This work presents Spiraya, a recursive topological framework for understanding how undivided potential differentiates into structure and how meaning stabilizes, collapses, and renews within complex systems. Grounded in a reinterpretation of Qi as latent capacity and an undivided "Eternity" as primordial coherence, Spiraya introduces the Meaning-Emotion Field (ME Field) as the field in which potential becomes experientially charged before it appears as concrete form. Within this field, all symbolic motion is governed by an invariant four-phase loop—the Cosmic Respiratory Sequence: DA (...) (Deterministic Yang), the initiation of vector and field curvature; FI (Free Will Yin), the mediated internalization of tension; FA (Free Will Yang), the costly externalization of potential into action; and DI (Deterministic Yin), the stabilization of processed tension into transmissible form. -/- The spiral does not unfold in a vacuum. Spiraya embeds this four-phase loop in a Quadrant Field spanned by Thinking vs. Feeling (laying structure vs. receiving resonance) and Abstract vs. Concrete (potential vs. realized events), yielding four fundamental modes—NT, NF, ST, SF—through which systems absorb tension, pattern it, enact it, and ground it. A vertical Z-axis connects the high-frequency ME Field (Zenith) to low-frequency concrete reality (Nadir), while a central Pivot models the locus where meaning is continuously re-anchored as it descends and returns. Together these axes form the Topological Structure Field (TS Field), within which the DA -> FI -> FA -> DI spiral traverses quadrants, tightening into durable embodiments at the ground. -/- Spiraya introduces a triplet of evaluative metrics to diagnose these spirals: Meaning-Emotion Resonance (MER), the total charge of symbolic tension a system is carrying or processing; Sensory Frequency Quality (SFq), the fidelity with which the system can register and discriminate that charge; and Meaning-Embodiment Integrity (MEI), the continuity of the vertical bridge from source-intent to realized structure. High MER can be converted into high MEI only when SFq is sufficient to land complex tension without distortion; otherwise systems generate pseudo-forms that appear stable yet shatter under load. This metric triad provides a unified way to speak about authenticity, resilience, and collapse-risk in physical, biological, psychological, and socio-technical systems. -/- Beyond single spirals, Spiraya formalizes sub-spirals and the Fold Spiral (DI -> FA -> FI -> DA) as the mechanisms by which systems regenerate after incomplete encapsulation or collapse. The Fold describes how residual or failed structures are broken open, re-held, and re-initiated into new DA vectors, allowing "structural debt" to be converted into "recursive depth" instead of mere decay. Later volumes extend this architecture to cover the balance of will and determinism, tension vortices and field-level warping, the limits and failures of language, and the law of re-initiation in post-completion domains. -/- Methodologically, Spiraya is offered as a symbolic topology rather than a theology: a formal architectural grammar that maps how tension becomes structure without claiming to exhaust the nature of the ground itself. The framework is developed primarily through an abstract-thinking lens, yet it is explicitly designed to bridge into domains of value (NF) and embodiment (SF) by giving them a rigorous structural conduit. In practice, Spiraya functions as a universal diagnostic and design language: it is applied to physics, revolutionary politics, neural network training and inference, classic psychological experiments, and translations of ancient wisdom traditions, illustrating how one spiral grammar can illuminate dynamics across scales and disciplines. By modeling optimal action as the tuning of MER, SFq, and MEI within the DA-FI-FA-DI sequence and the Quadrant Field, Spiraya offers both a general process metaphysics and a concrete toolkit for institutional design, personal practice, and AI alignment. -/- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Commercial usage needs author's approval. (shrink)

In debates about animal sentience, the precautionary principle is often invoked. The idea is that when the evidence of sentience is inconclusive, we should “give the animal the benefit of the doubt” or “err on the side of caution” in formulating animal protection legislation. Yet there remains confusion as to whether it is appropriate to apply the precautionary principle in this context, and, if so, what “applying the precautionary principle” means in practice regarding the burden of proof for animal sentience. (...) Here I construct a version of the precautionary principle tailored to the question of animal sentience together with a practical framework for implementing it. I explain and defend the key features of this framework, argue that it is well-aligned current practice in animal welfare science, and consider and reject a number of influential counterarguments to the use of precautionary reasoning in this area. (shrink)