In the often strange world of AI research, some people are exploring whether the machines should be able to unionize. In Silicon Valley, there's a small but growing field called model welfare, which is working to figure out whether AI models are conscious and deserving of moral considerations, such as legal rights. Within the past year, two research organizations studying model welfare have popped up: Conscium and Eleos AI Research. Anthropic also hired its first AI welfare researcher last year. Earlier this month, Anthropic said it gave its Claude chatbot the ability to terminate "persistently harmful or abusive user interactions" that could be "potentially distressing."

In this paper we address the issue of grounding for experiential concepts. Given that perceptual demonstratives are a basic form of such concepts, we examine ways of fixing the referents of such demonstratives. To avoid 'encodingism', that is, relating representations to representations, we postulate that the process of reference fixing must be bottom-up and nonconceptual, so that it can break the circle of conceptual content and touch the world. For that purpose, an appropriate causal relation between representations and the world is needed. We claim that this relation is provided by spatial and object-centered attention that leads to the formation of object files through the function of deictic acts. This entire causal process takes place at a pre-conceptual level, meeting the requirement for a solution to the grounding problem. Finally we claim that our account captures fundamental insights in Putnam's and Kripke's work on "new" reference.

Introduction Making sense of theory choice in normal and across extraordinary science is central to philosophy of science. The emergence of machine learning models has the potential to act as a wrench in the gears of current debates. In this paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the main movements that lead to and came out of Putnam's critical and explanatory tendency distinction, argue for the biconditional necessity of the tendencies, and conceptualize that wrench through a machine learning interpretation of my claim. Some preliminary definitions and statements of assumptions are in order. Kuhn's picture of normal versus extraordinary science is presented in his 1962 book "The Structure of Scientific Revolution". In a short caricature of the distinction, normal science takes place within paradigms and extraordinary science takes place across paradigms.

Ocean County, New Jersey Sheriff Michael Mastronardy shares how he launched his own drones to learn more information about the mysterious drones hovering over his state on'Your World.' Government officials have responded to the recent drone sightings near an Air Force base in Ohio on Monday, noting that the incidents appear unrelated to the unusual sightings in the Northeast. The drones were seen near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Greene County over the weekend. Following the sightings, the base closed its airspace for four hours on Saturday. According to its website, Wright-Patterson is "headquarters for a vast, worldwide logistics system, a world-class laboratory research function, and is the foremost acquisition and development center in the U.S. Air Force." In a statement to Fox News, Robert Purtiman, Chief of Public Affairs of the 88th Air Base Wing, confirmed that officials were aware of the drones.

We offer philosophical motivations for a method we call Virtual World Cognitive Science (VW CogSci), in which researchers use virtual embodied agents that are embedded in virtual worlds to explore questions in the field of Cognitive Science. We focus on questions about mental and linguistic representation and the ways that such computational modeling can add rigor to philosophical thought experiments, as well as the terminology used in the scientific study of such representations. We find that this method forces researchers to take a god's-eye view when describing dynamical relationships between entities in minds and entities in an environment in a way that eliminates the need for problematic talk of belief and concept types, such as the belief that cats are silly, and the concept CAT, while preserving belief and concept tokens in individual cognizers' minds. We conclude with some further key advantages of VW CogSci for the scientific study of mental and linguistic representation and for Cognitive Science more broadly.

Computational functionalism posits that consciousness is a computation. Here we show, perhaps surprisingly, that it cannot be a Turing computation. Rather, computational functionalism implies that consciousness is a novel type of computation that has recently been proposed by Geoffrey Hinton, called mortal computation.

What do language models (LMs) do with language? Everyone agrees that they produce sequences of (mostly) coherent sentences. But are they saying anything with those strings or simply babbling in a convincing simulacrum of language use? This is a vague question, and there are many ways of making it precise. Here we will address one aspect of the question, namely, whether LMs' words refer: that is, whether the outputs of LMs achieve "word-to-world" connections. There is prima facie reason to think they do not since LMs do not interact with the world in the way that ordinary language users do. Drawing on insights from the externalist tradition in philosophy of language, we argue that appearances are misleading and that there is good reason to think that LMs can refer.

The "brain in a jar" is a thought experiment of a disembodied human brain living in a jar of sustenance. The thought experiment explores human conceptions of reality, mind, and consciousness. This article will explore a metaphysical argument against artificial intelligence on the grounds that a disembodied artificial intelligence, or a "brain" without a body, is incompatible with the nature of intelligence.[1] The brain in a jar is a different inquiry than traditional questions about artificial intelligence. The brain in a jar asks whether thinking requires a thinker. The possibility of artificial intelligence primarily revolves around what is necessary to make a computer (or a computer program) intelligent.

Rapper, producer and technology entrepreneur will.i.am "The investment that society has put in AI (artificial intelligence) surpasses the investment for HI, which is human intelligence," said Will.i.am during a panel at the Dell Technologies World 2019 Conference on Wednesday. "It's so lopsided that subconsciously we know that we haven't invested in our youth, in our communities. We haven't invested in humanity to keep up with intelligent machines." Will.i.am was joined by Dell Chief Marketing Officer Allison Dew as well as Brynn Putnam, founder and CEO of Mirror, which makes a full-length mirror that doubles as a screen for streaming home workout classes.

Part of the Media Laboratory's heritage (its origins are in the School of Architecture) is a startling receptivity to the arts, especially music and the visual arts, and Brand repeatedly returns to this subject. Even here, intellectualism reigns: It is symptomatic that the lab members' interest in literature seems to be limited to science fiction. This lopsidedness echoes Turkle's complaint that hackers ignore the texture (emotion) of music in favor of its structure (intellect). Not an engineer himself, Brand is not always in a position to critically evaluate what he saw; I was reminded of persons who, on seeing ELIZA, concluded that computerized psychotherapy was just around the corner. As Brand points out, the Media Lab replaces the publish-orperish imperative with demo or die, and anyone who has produced a demo knows something about practical mendacity.