Senior Research Associate and incoming Programme Director of the Kinds of Intelligence project at the Leverhulme Centre of the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. I am also a Course Co-Lead for Cambridge’s AI Ethics & Society MSt.
Academic interests spanning a wide array of subjects in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, AI ethics, and animal cognition. Areas of specialisation include consciousness, creative intelligence, generality, and grounds for moral status in artificial systems and non-human animals. Supervisors: Peter Godfrey-Smith (dissertation advisor) and Tim Bayne (BPhil advisor)
We scrutinize publications in automated scientific discovery using deep learning, with the aim of... more We scrutinize publications in automated scientific discovery using deep learning, with the aim of shedding light on problems with strong connections to philosophy of science, of physics in particular. We show that core issues of philosophy of science, related, notably, to the nature of scientific theories; the nature of unification; and of causation loom large in scientific deep learning. Therefore advances in deep learning could, and ideally should, have impact on philosophy of science, and vice versa. We suggest lines of further research, and highlight the role ‘theory-driven’ AI could have in future developments of the field.
Wang's definition of Artificial Intelligence is developed via careful and thorough abstractio... more Wang's definition of Artificial Intelligence is developed via careful and thorough abstractions from human intelligence. Motivated by the goal of building a definition that will be genuinely useful for AI researchers, Wang ultimately provides an agent-centric definition that focuses on systems operating with insufficient knowledge and resources. The definition captures many key components of intelligence, but we suggest that task success could play a slightly larger role. This brings the definition closer in line with our use of the term with animals and human experts, and also further aligns the definition's associated research framework with the subfield of deep reinforcement learning aimed at general intelligence.
There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by subjects' cognitive states... more There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by subjects' cognitive states such as expectations and beliefs. In this paper, we explore one specific form of such influence, namely placebo analgesia, and examine its relevance for a debate in philosophy of mind and cognitive science the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. In short, this refers to the epistemologically problematic influence of a subject's beliefs, expectations, and desires on their perceptual experience. We begin by summarising the cognitive penetration debate, and single out as particularly important a form of cognitive influence on experience that we term Radical Cognitive Penetration. We go on to argue at least some cases of placebo analgesia constitute compelling instances of Radical Cognitive Penetration and are resistant to debunking explanations. Nonetheless, we urge caution in extrapolating from the cognitive penetration of pain experience to broader conclusions about the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. Instead, we suggest that the cognitive penetration of pain experience raises distinctive psychological, epistemological, and ethical issues of its own.
Abstract: The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has lo... more Abstract: The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has long been prominent in philosophical debates about the nature of art, genius, and the imagination. The scientific investigation of creativity in humans is also well established, and there has been increasing interest in the question of whether the concept can be rigorously applied to non-human animals. In this paper, I argue that such applications face serious challenges of both a conceptual and methodological character, reflecting deep controversies within both philosophy and psychology concerning how to define and apply the concept of creativity. After providing a brief review of some of the leading theories of creativity (Section 2) and discussing some of the strongest putative cases of creative intelligence in non-human animals (Section 3), I examine some of the more worrisome difficulties faced by attempts to use these theories to answer the question of whether animals are truly creat...
The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has long been pr... more The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has long been prominent in philosophical debates about the nature of art, genius, and the imagination. The scientific investigation of creativity in humans is also well established, and there has been increasing interest in the question of whether the concept can be rigorously applied to non-human animals. In this paper, I argue that such applications face serious challenges of both a conceptual and methodological character, reflecting deep controversies within both philosophy and psychology concerning how to define and apply the concept of creativity. After providing a brief review of some of the leading theories of creativity (Section 2) and discussing some of the strongest putative cases of creative intelligence in non-human animals (Section 3), I examine some of the more worrisome difficulties faced by attempts to use these theories to answer the question of whether animals are truly creative (Secti...
T he concept of intelligence is both nebulous and potentially dangerous: historically, it has bee... more T he concept of intelligence is both nebulous and potentially dangerous: historically, it has been weaponised in various ways. Twentieth-century eugenicists, for example, deployed early psychometric measures of intelligence as a means to oppress socially marginalised groups or ethnic minorities. Undeterred by these controversies, however, employers, educators and developmental psychologists continue to use measures of intelligence to assess cognitive potential and track individual progress. ...................................................... “We should be open to the possibility that our intuitive notion of intelligence may not pick out a single neatly defined cognitive capability.” ......................................................
intermodal levels” (2010a). Burge himself takes such states to be “preconceptual” (Burge, 2014a),... more intermodal levels” (2010a). Burge himself takes such states to be “preconceptual” (Burge, 2014a), and as examples, he cites “[p]sychological maps for navigation and perhaps certain representations of magnitudes”, as well as representations “formed through learning or other processing in longterm memory (modal or amodal).” Applying this again to the case of seeing the car outside, it might the case that these post-perceptual processes contribute to my representing of the car as being at a certain place in my local environment, for example. It is also perhaps illuminating at this point to note briefly that Burge points to Susan Carey’s notion of core cognition as an example of these states (Carey, 2009), though he does not endorse her specific theory without qualification. While a proper treatment of Carey’s account
There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstanc... more There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstances an artificial intelligence would deserve moral consideration. This paper explores a particular type of moral status that the author terms psychological moral patiency, focusing on the epistemological question of what sort of evidence might lead us to reasonably conclude that a given artificial system qualified as having this status. The paper surveys five possible criteria that might be applied: intuitive judgments, assessments of intelligence, the presence of desires and autonomous behavior, evidence of sentience, and behavioral equivalence. The author suggests that despite its limitations, the latter approach offers the best way forward, and defends a variant of that, termed the cognitive equivalence strategy. In short, this holds that an artificial system should be considered a psychological moral patient to the extent that it possesses cognitive mechanisms shared with other beings...
Most people will grant that we bear special moral obligations toward at least some nonhuman anima... more Most people will grant that we bear special moral obligations toward at least some nonhuman animals that we do not bear toward inanimate objects like stones, mountains, or works of art (however priceless). These moral obligations are plausibly grounded in the fact that many if not all nonhuman animals share important psychological states and capacities with us, such as consciousness, suffering, and goal-directed behavior. But which of these states and capacities are really critical for a creature’s possessing moral status, and how can we determine which animals do in fact have them? In this paper, I examine three main approaches to answering these questions. First are what I term consciousness-based approaches that tackles these questions by first asking which animals are conscious. Second are affective-state approaches that focus on identifying behavioural and physiological signatures of states like pain, fear, and stress. Finally, I consider what I call preference-based approaches...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
The science of consciousness has made great strides in recent decades. However, the proliferation... more The science of consciousness has made great strides in recent decades. However, the proliferation of competing theories makes it difficult to reach consensus about artificial consciousness. While for purely scientific purposes we might wish to adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude, we may soon face practical and ethical questions about whether, for example, agents artificial systems are capable of suffering. Moreover, many of the methods used for assessing consciousness in humans and even non-human animals are not straightforwardly applicable to artificial systems. With these challenges in mind, I propose that we look for ecumenical heuristics for artificial consciousness to enable us to make tentative assessments of the likelihood of consciousness arising in different artificial systems. I argue that such heuristics should have three main features: they should be (i) intuitively plausible, (ii) theoretically-neutral, and (iii) scientifically tractable. I claim that the concept of general...
We scrutinize publications in automated scientific discovery using deep learning, with the aim of... more We scrutinize publications in automated scientific discovery using deep learning, with the aim of shedding light on problems with strong connections to philosophy of science, of physics in particular. We show that core issues of philosophy of science, related, notably, to the nature of scientific theories; the nature of unification; and of causation loom large in scientific deep learning. Therefore advances in deep learning could, and ideally should, have impact on philosophy of science, and vice versa. We suggest lines of further research, and highlight the role ‘theory-driven’ AI could have in future developments of the field.
Wang's definition of Artificial Intelligence is developed via careful and thorough abstractio... more Wang's definition of Artificial Intelligence is developed via careful and thorough abstractions from human intelligence. Motivated by the goal of building a definition that will be genuinely useful for AI researchers, Wang ultimately provides an agent-centric definition that focuses on systems operating with insufficient knowledge and resources. The definition captures many key components of intelligence, but we suggest that task success could play a slightly larger role. This brings the definition closer in line with our use of the term with animals and human experts, and also further aligns the definition's associated research framework with the subfield of deep reinforcement learning aimed at general intelligence.
There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by subjects' cognitive states... more There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by subjects' cognitive states such as expectations and beliefs. In this paper, we explore one specific form of such influence, namely placebo analgesia, and examine its relevance for a debate in philosophy of mind and cognitive science the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. In short, this refers to the epistemologically problematic influence of a subject's beliefs, expectations, and desires on their perceptual experience. We begin by summarising the cognitive penetration debate, and single out as particularly important a form of cognitive influence on experience that we term Radical Cognitive Penetration. We go on to argue at least some cases of placebo analgesia constitute compelling instances of Radical Cognitive Penetration and are resistant to debunking explanations. Nonetheless, we urge caution in extrapolating from the cognitive penetration of pain experience to broader conclusions about the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. Instead, we suggest that the cognitive penetration of pain experience raises distinctive psychological, epistemological, and ethical issues of its own.
Abstract: The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has lo... more Abstract: The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has long been prominent in philosophical debates about the nature of art, genius, and the imagination. The scientific investigation of creativity in humans is also well established, and there has been increasing interest in the question of whether the concept can be rigorously applied to non-human animals. In this paper, I argue that such applications face serious challenges of both a conceptual and methodological character, reflecting deep controversies within both philosophy and psychology concerning how to define and apply the concept of creativity. After providing a brief review of some of the leading theories of creativity (Section 2) and discussing some of the strongest putative cases of creative intelligence in non-human animals (Section 3), I examine some of the more worrisome difficulties faced by attempts to use these theories to answer the question of whether animals are truly creat...
The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has long been pr... more The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has long been prominent in philosophical debates about the nature of art, genius, and the imagination. The scientific investigation of creativity in humans is also well established, and there has been increasing interest in the question of whether the concept can be rigorously applied to non-human animals. In this paper, I argue that such applications face serious challenges of both a conceptual and methodological character, reflecting deep controversies within both philosophy and psychology concerning how to define and apply the concept of creativity. After providing a brief review of some of the leading theories of creativity (Section 2) and discussing some of the strongest putative cases of creative intelligence in non-human animals (Section 3), I examine some of the more worrisome difficulties faced by attempts to use these theories to answer the question of whether animals are truly creative (Secti...
T he concept of intelligence is both nebulous and potentially dangerous: historically, it has bee... more T he concept of intelligence is both nebulous and potentially dangerous: historically, it has been weaponised in various ways. Twentieth-century eugenicists, for example, deployed early psychometric measures of intelligence as a means to oppress socially marginalised groups or ethnic minorities. Undeterred by these controversies, however, employers, educators and developmental psychologists continue to use measures of intelligence to assess cognitive potential and track individual progress. ...................................................... “We should be open to the possibility that our intuitive notion of intelligence may not pick out a single neatly defined cognitive capability.” ......................................................
intermodal levels” (2010a). Burge himself takes such states to be “preconceptual” (Burge, 2014a),... more intermodal levels” (2010a). Burge himself takes such states to be “preconceptual” (Burge, 2014a), and as examples, he cites “[p]sychological maps for navigation and perhaps certain representations of magnitudes”, as well as representations “formed through learning or other processing in longterm memory (modal or amodal).” Applying this again to the case of seeing the car outside, it might the case that these post-perceptual processes contribute to my representing of the car as being at a certain place in my local environment, for example. It is also perhaps illuminating at this point to note briefly that Burge points to Susan Carey’s notion of core cognition as an example of these states (Carey, 2009), though he does not endorse her specific theory without qualification. While a proper treatment of Carey’s account
There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstanc... more There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstances an artificial intelligence would deserve moral consideration. This paper explores a particular type of moral status that the author terms psychological moral patiency, focusing on the epistemological question of what sort of evidence might lead us to reasonably conclude that a given artificial system qualified as having this status. The paper surveys five possible criteria that might be applied: intuitive judgments, assessments of intelligence, the presence of desires and autonomous behavior, evidence of sentience, and behavioral equivalence. The author suggests that despite its limitations, the latter approach offers the best way forward, and defends a variant of that, termed the cognitive equivalence strategy. In short, this holds that an artificial system should be considered a psychological moral patient to the extent that it possesses cognitive mechanisms shared with other beings...
Most people will grant that we bear special moral obligations toward at least some nonhuman anima... more Most people will grant that we bear special moral obligations toward at least some nonhuman animals that we do not bear toward inanimate objects like stones, mountains, or works of art (however priceless). These moral obligations are plausibly grounded in the fact that many if not all nonhuman animals share important psychological states and capacities with us, such as consciousness, suffering, and goal-directed behavior. But which of these states and capacities are really critical for a creature’s possessing moral status, and how can we determine which animals do in fact have them? In this paper, I examine three main approaches to answering these questions. First are what I term consciousness-based approaches that tackles these questions by first asking which animals are conscious. Second are affective-state approaches that focus on identifying behavioural and physiological signatures of states like pain, fear, and stress. Finally, I consider what I call preference-based approaches...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
The science of consciousness has made great strides in recent decades. However, the proliferation... more The science of consciousness has made great strides in recent decades. However, the proliferation of competing theories makes it difficult to reach consensus about artificial consciousness. While for purely scientific purposes we might wish to adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude, we may soon face practical and ethical questions about whether, for example, agents artificial systems are capable of suffering. Moreover, many of the methods used for assessing consciousness in humans and even non-human animals are not straightforwardly applicable to artificial systems. With these challenges in mind, I propose that we look for ecumenical heuristics for artificial consciousness to enable us to make tentative assessments of the likelihood of consciousness arising in different artificial systems. I argue that such heuristics should have three main features: they should be (i) intuitively plausible, (ii) theoretically-neutral, and (iii) scientifically tractable. I claim that the concept of general...
A central concept for the welfare of humans and animals is felt unpleasantness, that is, the capa... more A central concept for the welfare of humans and animals is felt unpleasantness, that is, the capacity of states like pains, nausea, and anxiety to feel bad to the subject who undergoes them. While there is an extensive literature concerned with how best to characterise felt unpleasantness in psychological terms, only faltering steps have been taken to bridge these accounts with practical assessments of welfare in non-human animals. In this paper, I draw on this literature to spell out an account of felt unpleasantness and apply to it to the question of how we can determine the circumstances in which non-human animals have unpleasant experiences. Among the key claims I make are, first, that felt unpleasantness is a good candidate psychological kind; second, that felt unpleasantness can be understood in motivational terms; and third, that difficulties involved in attributing consciousness to animals should not deter us from developing accounts of animal welfare framed in terms of felt unpleasantness.
Our experience of the world typically makes us aware of a wide variety of properties of objects, ... more Our experience of the world typically makes us aware of a wide variety of properties of objects, ranging from their color and shape to their identity and function. In this paper, I use the notion of categorization to explore these various forms of awareness. I begin by arguing for a tripartite model of categorization that loosely groups our awareness of the properties of objects into three broad classes, namely low-, mid-, and high-level categorization. I relate this tripartite distinction to the current controversies surrounding the perception-cognition distinction, and argue that, of the three classes of categorization, mid-level categorization is of interest. Roughly, this is the process by which we effortlessly and automatically recognize perceived objects as being of given kinds. I go on to consider the question of whether mid-level categorization is best considered a form of perception or cognition, and examine merits and difficulties associated with either approach. Finally, I explore a more radical approach I term the Three Kinds view that takes mid-level categorization to be best understood as a further process intermediate between perception and cognition.
There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by subjects' cognitive states suc... more There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by subjects' cognitive states such as expectations and beliefs. In this paper, we explore one specific form of such influence, namely placebo analgesia, and examine its relevance for a debate in philosophy of mind and cognitive science the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. In short, this refers to the epistemologically problematic influence of a subject's beliefs, expectations, and desires on their perceptual experience. We begin by summarising the cognitive penetration debate, and single out as particularly important a form of cognitive influence on experience that we term Radical Cognitive Penetration. We go on to argue at least some cases of placebo analgesia constitute compelling instances of Radical Cognitive Penetration and are resistant to debunking explanations. Nonetheless, we urge caution in extrapolating from the cognitive penetration of pain experience to broader conclusions about the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. Instead, we suggest that the cognitive penetration of pain experience raises distinctive psychological, epistemological, and ethical issues of its own. (1) Introduction An important long-standing debate in the study of perception concerns the phenomenon of cognitive penetration. In short, this is the putative influence of states like beliefs and desires on the content of our perceptual experience: whether what we see or hear can be influenced by what we believe, expect, or desire to be the case. The very existence of cognitive penetration of perception remains controversial. However, similar questions about the influence of beliefs and desires on experience can be raised for a range of other mental states, notably pain. While it is widely acknowledged that pain experience can be impacted by one's outlook and expectations via placebo effects, there has been little philosophical exploration of how such effects might inform the broader cognitive penetration debate. It thus remains an open question whether there may be relevant similarities between cognitive influences on pain experiences and the putative cognitive penetration of perceptual experience.
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