David Chalmers

David J. Chalmers, What we talk to when we talk to language models - PhilPapers When we talk to large language models, who or what is our interlocutor? First, I address some issues about how best to characterize the interlocutor in terms of mental states. Second, ...

a new paper on mind, computation, and identity in large language models. with inspiration from raymond carver (title) and severance (thought experiments).

i'll be talking about this on saturday at the eleos AI conference on AI consciousness and welfare in berkeley.

philpapers.org/rec/CHAWWT-8

Inside the mind of a newborn baby What if newborn babies are more aware than we ever imagined? Philosopher and psychologist Claudia Passos Ferreira shares groundbreaking neuroscience showing that newborn babies — and possibly even lat...

claudia passos ferreira's great #TED2025 talk is now online! find out all about consciousness in newborn babies!

YouTube video by NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness Public Event: 25 Years of Consciousness | ASSC 26, June 2023

the long-awaited video recording of the "25 Years of Consciousness" public event at the ASSC conference in NYC in june 2023 has been released: www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6DH....

i have a few thoughts on the other site (sorry!) at x.com/davidchalmer....

i'm definitely not worthy but i submit to you

we're advertising 2-3 postdoctoral positions to work at NYU on artificial consciousness and related topics at the intersection of AI and the philosophy of mind (possibly including AI mentality, AI interpretability, and AI welfare). deadline is march 30! philjobs.org/job/show/28878

Propositional Interpretability in Artificial Intelligence Mechanistic interpretability is the program of explaining what AI systems are doing in terms of their internal mechanisms. I analyze some aspects of the program, along with setting out some concrete c...

a draft paper (for an invited talk at AAAI next month) with a philosophical analysis of work on mechanistic interpretability, with special attention to methods for propositional interpretability.

arxiv.org/abs/2501.15740

three excellent symposia on my book reality+ have just come out. two are mainly on the simulation hypothesis, one is mainly on VR. for all the articles and replies see consc.net/papers/reali....

non-paywalled reply: consc.net/papers/simse...

they invited me for this summit but the timing didn't work for me. i'll make it back to santiago one of these days!

alas my non-doppelganger is much better looking!

yes, CF has seemed a well-run organization over the years. they did invite me for 2025 but i said no -- perhaps that got mixed up in their records. even so the deepfake promotion method is a little bizarre! i spotted one other in the series: x.com/congresofutu...

i think the deepfake is based on this pic from my TED talk in 2014, when i was perhaps better groomed than usual, but the guy i turn into is off the charts.

i know X is getting overrun with deepfakes, but this was unexpected. (no, that's not me after the first frame, and i'm not speaking at the 2025 congreso futuro.)

x.com/congresofutu...

roombas are my go to example to test theories of AI minds. they have beliefs (well, maps), desires (well, goals), plans (well, schedules), embodiment, and more. what else could you ask for?

David J. Chalmers, Does thought require sensory grounding? From pure thinkers to large language mode... Does the capacity to think require the capacity to sense? A lively debate on this topic runs throughout the history of philosophy and now animates discussions of artificial intelligence. Many have ...

my APA presidential address on "does thought require sensory grounding? from pure thinkers to large language models" is now published. i argue for no: so, even if LLMs lack sensory grounding, this doesn't entail that they can't think or understand.

on X, i asked: who endorses the AGI scaling hypothesis: roughly, that scaling current systems and methods will lead to human-level AGI?

since bluesky is philosopher-heavy, let me also ask here: which philosophers endorse or have expressed sympathy with the hypothesis, or with something nearby?

you've probably met bill ruddick at NYU, who had dinner with russell in the 1950s and knew anscombe and austin too. i don't know if you met michael dummett who briefly met wittgenstein. i'm not sure if i've met anyone who met ramsey though in principle it should be possible.

Neuron Q&A: David J. Chalmers

or, a philosopher encounters neuroscience

www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S...

google search will find them for you!

i never met mary midgley, but she once got me good:

$1 Million Berggruen Philosophy Prize Awarded to Patricia Hill Collins – Berggruen Institute

as a jury member, i'm delighted that this year's berggruen prize for philosophy and culture has been awarded to patricia hill collins.