Eric Schwitzgebel on Digital Consciousness and the Weirdness of the World

Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief. His book The Weirdness of the World can be found here.

We talk about:

• The possibility of digital consciousness
  • Policy ideas for avoiding major moral mistakes around digital consciousness
  • Prospects for the science of consciousness, and why we likely won't have clear answers in time
• Why introspection is much less reliable than most people think
  • How and why we invent false stories about our own choices without realising
  • What randomly sampling people's experiences reveals about what we're doing with most of our attention
• The possibility of 'overlapping minds'
• How and why our actions might have infinite effects, both good and bad
  • Whether it would be good news to learn that our actions have infinite effects, or that the universe is infinite in extent
• The best science fiction on digital minds and AI

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