fragments of consciousness

The Philosophical Metasurvey

The Philosophical Survey has attracted a very strong response: more than 3000 responses so far, including 920 (47%) from the "target" group of 1972 philosophers from 99 selected departments, with the rest fairly evenly divided between philosophy faculty in other departments, graduate students, and others.  We have also launched a Philosophical Metasurvey in which respondents predict the results of the Philosophical Survey.  Here the idea is to assess the accuracy of philosophers' sociological beliefs about the distribution of views in the field.  So far we have had around 650 responses to the Metasurvey, including around 200 from the target group.

In order to maximize responses, we've extended the deadline for the Survey and Metasurvey to Tuesday December 3.  This will be the final deadline, and we'll start releasing preliminary results soon afterwards.    It is already clear that the results of both are going to be very interesting.

We  encourage anyone who hasn't taken the Survey or Metasurvey to go ahead and take them.  Consider: today's sociology of philosophy is tomorrow's history of philosophy, so by taking the surveys, you'll be part of history!  We especially encourage members of the original target group to take the surveys, in order to increase the maximize the reliability of our results regarding that group.  And if you have taken the Survey but not the Metasurvey, consider taking the Metasurvey too.  We'll send you the results, and will make your responses available to you, so you might consider this a test of the accuracy of your sociological beliefs!

The Philosophical Survey

David Bourget and I have recently launched a new PhilPapers project: the Philosophical Survey.  This is a survey of the philosophical views of members of the philosophy profession and others.  We encourage all professional philosophers, graduate students, and interested others to take part.

The survey contains thirty questions, each giving a choice between 2-4 views on a philosophical issue.  Respondents can indicate that they accept or lean toward one of the options or can give one of a variety of "other" answers.  We have kept the questions as simple as possible, as clarification would be a never-ending process.  The survey also asks for some optional background information.

We have already launched the survey by e-mail to philosophers in 99 leading departments and to users of PhilPapers, and so far we have had responses by around 1000 professional philosophers and 700 others.  We are now opening up the survey publicly so that anyone can take it. The questions focus on issues in analytic philosophy, and will make most sense to those with some experience in the area, but anyone is welcome to take it.  We will publish results for the population of professional philosophers, graduate students, and other groups.

You can take the survey here.  Note that to take the survey, you must either have a PhilPapers account or  create a guest survey account, which will require a valid email address.  If you have received a direct email invitation to take the survey, please use the unique link found in that email instead.  These measures allow us to minimize survey abuse and to maximize the reliability of responses.  For further information about privacy concerns and about the methodology of the survey, see the survey's information page.

Singularity Summit

Ive been in New York for the last two months, teaching at New York University (as I'll do in September-December for the next three years).  There's been too much going on to report on in full, but two conferences are worth mentioning.

In early October I attended the Singularity Summit.  The term "singularity" here means different things to different people, but the core idea is I.J. Good's idea of an "intelligence explosion": if we can create machines more intelligent than us, then they'll be able to create machines more intelligent than them, and there will be a rapid spiral to superintelligence.  There were lots of interesting talks shedding light on this topic from many different directions.

The topic is often dismissed as science fiction, and is not much discussed within the academic mainstream.  Still, I think there's good reason to take seriously the possibility that a singularity will occur one of these days.  So it's worth giving serious attention to the associated practical and philosophical questions.  In fact, it's a place where philosophical issues (concerning consciousness, personal identity, and ethics, for example) take on great practical concern.

In my talk I gave a brief philosophical analysis of the argument for an intelligence explosion, and explored various practical and philosophical questions about the consequences: How can we maximize the chances of a benign outcome?  How we might upload into a post-singularity environment?  Will the results of uploading be conscious?  Will we survive the process?   I see that a video of the talk is now available, and there are discussions of the talk on various blogs (see also more videos, more summit discussion, and my photos from the summit).  Of course there is much more to say about the topic, and I plan to write up the talk as a more in-depth paper one of these days.  The materials on the websites of the Singularity Institute and of Eliezer Yudkowsky are also worth checking out. 

More recently, there was a terrific workshop on Action, Perception, and Consciousness at NYU this past weekend.  My session involved a talk by Hakwan Lau on neurobiological and philosophical models of consciousness, with comments by Ned Block, David Rosenthal, and me.  The session was filmed and will eventually be online as part of the second Online Consciousness Conference, early next year.  In the meantime I've put a few photos from the workshop online.