Two Minds Blog

By fall 2024, most schools and universities have gotten just far enough in their understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) to officially forbid its use. The problem, most professors say , is plagiarism -- the practice of presenting another person's work as your own. This is, on its face, nonsense. Courts have already determined that the products of AI are not copyrightable because there is no human author , and legal experts predict that courts will also find AI is not a "person" and cannot be held liable for its actions. (There's more disagreement about who should  be liable for adverse products of AI, though -- the user? the original programmer? the company that makes money from the tool?). The whole point of AI is that it can process reams of existing data, identify patterns, and use those patterns to produce something new . The student using AI to write a term paper therefore is not plagiarizing in the usual sense of the word; instead, they are employing a no...

As usual, I am ending the year by taking a look back at where we have been on the Two Minds Blog in 2024, with some updates on recent topics. I wrote a few posts about unusual forms of consciousness, two of them drawing on the work of philosopher  Eric Schwitzgebel . My most recent was about the psychology of octopi , who have a fascinating nervous system that's distributed among their 8 arms and allows the arms to operate semi-autonomously. You can read more about cephalopod consciousness here, and below is a great diagram  of the octopus nervous system from Instagram: I also wrote about the possibility (originally suggested by Schwitzgebel ) that the United States is literally conscious . That piece came out right after the election, and was relatively popular -- I think because it suggested some concrete steps that we might be able to take to calm things down in our national awareness. I wrote about dissociative identity disorder , which is the experience of having multip...

  Consider the octopus: Around 300 species of this animal inhabit Earth's oceans, ranging in size from under 1 pound (the star-sucker pygmy octopus) to perhaps 600 pounds with an armspan of 30 feet (a monster-sized  giant Pacific octopus reported by a Canadian commercial diver in the 1950s; 300 pounds and 20 feet is probably more typical). The octopus has no solid parts except for its beak, and can therefore compress its body and arms into extremely small or narrow places. That allows it to take advantage of various dens where it spends its time, which can be anything from a tide pool to a deep-sea rock crevice. The octopus has eyes, but its primary sensory mechanism is a mix of touch and chemical-based smell or taste, both of which are communicated via the suckers on its arms. The eyes even have a lens-focusing "camera" mechanism similar to that of vertebrates, even though they evolved down a completely separate evolutionary path. Octopi are generally seen as intelligen...

We think of the Intuitive system as representing emotion, or impulse, or other negative attributes. But Plato and Aristotle also attributed positive functions such as love, empathy, duty, and honor to the Intuitive Mind. These examples show us that the Intuitive Mind isn't just one thing. Rather than describing it as a system, it may be more accurate to describe the Intuitive Mind as a set  of systems.  Evans and Stanovich (2009) suggested that Intuitive Mind activities have the common characteristic of autonomy , meaning that they are self-executing without a person paying any conscious attention to them. (This is clearly different from Narrative Mind activities, which require ongoing focus to maintain them). Some examples of autonomous mental processes are: jumping when you hear a loud noise (instinctive behavior), turning off your alarm when you wake up (Pavlovian learned behavior), checking for coins in the vending machine change drop (Skinnerian reinforced behavior), rem...

Robot football players at a Valparaiso University College of Engineering event I have been thinking lately about robots, which creates an interesting asymmetry: They almost certainly have not been thinking about me. Nevertheless, I find that I often respond  to robots as though they have thoughts about me, or about their own personal goals, or about the world in which they exist. That tendency suggests an interesting aspect of human psychology, connected to our social minds . We are hard-wired to care what other people think about us, and we very easily extend that concern to robots. Here's a recent article about how the language-learning app Duolingo, which features an owl-shaped avatar (a kind of robot), uses "emotional blackmail" to keep application users engaged:  https://uxdesign.cc/20-days-of-emotional-blackmail-from-duolingo-4f566523e3c5  This bird-shaped bit of code tells users things like "you're scaring me!" and "I miss you" if they haven...

Whichever side of the aisle we were on, the 2024 election results surprised many of us. A lot of people I talk to are simply wondering "what does this mean?" We wonder, as we would in any election, what the results mean for our future. We wonder what it means about our neighbors, whether the things we want are the same things that they want. And because questions of character were important for many people in this particular election, we wonder what it means about ourselves — as in this question that I keep hearing: "Is this really who we are now?" These are deep, existential types of questions, so it's no wonder that many people are struggling to make sense of them. One way to consider the situation is to take seriously the idea (from Eric Schwitzgebel ) that America itself is a conscious entity. Schwitzgebel’s technical argument is about complexity -- America has a structure with a high level of organization, integration among its parts, specialization of func...