Browsing All posts tagged under »Identity«

Programmable Friends

June 18, 2016 by

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While robots were originally conceived of as laborers, advances in AI and emotional modeling have led to “companion robots” like Aldebaran’s Pepper and Intelligent Systems Co.’s Paro. But a companion is fundamentally unlike a standard worker[1]: labor is by its nature fungible, and companions, if we understand companions as something like friends, are, presumably, non-fungible. Workers […]

Responsibility, Identity and Artificial Beings: Persons, Supra-Persons, and Para-Persons

June 2, 2016 by

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  Thanks to Justin Caouette for inviting me to the blog. I’ll start with a bit that draws ideas from a paper I’m working on for a book on Robot Ethics: The standard criteria for personhood are not obviously inherently impossible for AIs to obtain: they could be self-conscious, they could regard others as persons, they could […]

Two Senses of Individuality

November 2, 2015 by

5

Recently, David Wallace-Wells published “Adventures in the Science of the Superorganism” found here. He uses impressive examples to motivate the problem of biological individuality, such as one twin ingesting the embryo of the other twin in utero, the trillions of gut bacteria that house themselves within us, viruses and diseases that colonize our DNA, and […]

Hey, Neuroscience, Why Can’t We Be Friends? Objections to Substance Dualism (Part 1)

October 7, 2015 by

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For many who’ve taken philosophy courses at the university level (let alone those who teach philosophy), substance dualism appears to be a theory with, dare I say it, no substance. It’s not a “live option.” But, to extend the pun, I think it’s the dismissal, not the theory, that lacks substance. In the introduction to this series of posts, I […]

Tell Me a Story (about how Strawson gets it wrong about stories)

September 17, 2015 by

Comments Off on Tell Me a Story (about how Strawson gets it wrong about stories)

Originally posted on UP@NIGHT:
  Once upon a time I was having dinner at the home of a colleague, a professional philosopher. The conversation took an intriguing turn when my colleague revealed that he had virtually no visual memory. Of course I had known that people remember things and events with varying degrees of…

Personal Identity: Who are you? What am I?

September 26, 2012 by

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Here, I’ll be discussing the problem of personal identity. My aim is to offer a brief historical account of the problem touching briefly on bodily identity followed by Hume’s take on it. ‘Psychological continuity theories’ (PCT) are most popular (Parfit, Noonan, etc.) but I won’t discuss the details of them in this post (maybe future […]

We Built This City

September 7, 2012 by

20

A few weeks ago on The Public Discourse, Professor Anthony Esolen offered a fresh and creative criticism of Barack Obama’s now infamous “you didn’t build that” comment, challenging the President’s political statement with a largely metaphysical argument. However, my fear is that Professor Esolen’s argument may not appropriate a proper eye towards the political building […]

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EDITORS: Alison McConwell; Justin Caouette; Aaron Thomas-Bolduc.

FOUNDING EDITOR: Justin Caouette

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