My project for the Sentient Futures Project incubator, which you can view here!
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Can brains suffer?
May 27, 2026One of the misconceptions about illusionism is that it denies the reality of conscious experiences. It is only meant to deny that conscious experiences have special metaphysical properties like pri...
Complexity is a cop-out
Apr 30, 2026I lean illusionist and preference welfarist. Should I be nice to my thermostat? It has a goal (temperature set point) and sends signals to try to achieve that goal. Is it morally wrong to leave my ...
Does illusionism kill sentientism?
Apr 29, 2026The argument
There are no slam dunks against LLM consciousness
Apr 11, 2026I have mixed feelings about Rob Long’s article on LLM consciousness arguments:
Why "A Disproof of LLM Consciousness" fails
Mar 12, 2026It’s been about a month since my last post on Erik Hoel’s paper:
Is it wrong to make fictional characters suffer?
Feb 16, 2026I am sick and very fatigued this week, so the follow up to my Erik Hoel post will have to wait. The following will be messy and informal; it’s what I can muster right now.
In economics, there is a difference between revealed preferences and metapreferences. My revealed preference: when given the choice between salad and chocolate cake, I opt for the chocolate cake. M...
Efficient parrots need "understanding"
Jan 06, 2026In Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Dennett offers this thought experiment. You find two black boxes, A and B, connected by wire. A has two buttons, α and β. B has two lights, red and ...
Happy New Year! On Wednesday, I discussed the symbol-grounding problem:
Three limits on understanding language
Dec 31, 2025A common accusation against LLMs is that they don’t understand what they are saying, that they are merely parroting what they have heard, and that training giant neural nets for next-token predicti...
How do you think *brains* work?
Dec 10, 2025I worry “AI can think, actually” has become my “AI isn’t bad for the environment, actually” and that I’m turning into a phil-mind Andy Masley.1 Except Andy Masley is just empirically correct, where...
Alex Strasser objects to my last article:
Causal Decision Theory Violates Physics
Sep 07, 2025A common objection to one-boxing in Newcomb’s problem: it doesn’t change anything. Once the money is or isn’t in the box, your decision does not magically cause it to appear or disappear. It’s fixe...
Contaminated Worlds Theory
Aug 02, 2025A big challenge for FDT in its current formulation is that it requires modeling counterpossible worlds, not just counterfactual ones:
What Actually Are Preferences?
Jul 29, 20251. The Challenge
A Theory of Forethought, not Hindsight
Jun 13, 20251. One-Minute Intro