my name is jay. i’m a relapsing ex-philosopher specialising in philosophy of mind & cognitive/evolutionary psychology.
these days i’m especially interested in: conscious/sentient AI (can AI feel things?), affective computing (how to simulate emotion in artificial systems?), & explainable AI (how to understand complex AI systems?), as well as AI governance.
i’m also currently resuming art after a decade-long hiatus. at the moment i’m focusing on figure drawing.
i average between 40-50k minutes/year on spotify, & ≥80% of my music diet is new material.
one of the four books i’m currently reading: taipei by tao lin. described by literary scholars as “an aesthetic experiment in autistic jouissance”. the other three on rotation: house of leaves by mark z. danielewski, a severed head by iris murdoch, & the ministry for the future, by kim stanley robinson.
i’m usually based in tbilisi, georgia, a city which has quickly captured my heart. for the month of july, i will be in yerevan, armenia.
Do you think that consciousness will come for free? I think that it seems like a very complex phenomenon that would be hard to accidentally engineer. On top of this, the more permissive your view of consciousness (veering towards panpsychism), the less ethically important consciousness becomes (since rocks & electrons would then have moral standing too). So if consciousness is to be a ground of moral status, it needs to be somewhat rare.