11 found
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  1. Functionalism, integrity, and digital consciousness.Derek Shiller - 2024 - Synthese 203 (2):1-20.
    The prospect of consciousness in artificial systems is closely tied to the viability of functionalism about consciousness. Even if consciousness arises from the abstract functional relationships between the parts of a system, it does not follow that any digital system that implements the right functional organization would be conscious. Functionalism requires constraints on what it takes to properly implement an organization. Existing proposals for constraints on implementation relate to the integrity of the parts and states of the realizers of roles (...)
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  2. The Problem of Other Attitudes.Derek Shiller - 2017 - American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2):141-152.
    Non-cognitivists are known to face a problem in extending their account of straightforward predicative moral judgments to logically complex moral judgments. This paper presents a related problem concerning how non-cognitivists might extend their accounts of moral judgments to other kinds of moral attitudes, such as moral hopes and moral intuitions. Non-cognitivists must solve three separate challenges: they must explain the natures of these other attitudes, they must explain why they count as moral attitudes, and they must explain why the moral (...)
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  3. A Primitive Solution to the Negation Problem.Derek Shiller - 2016 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (3):725-740.
    It has recently been alleged that expressivism cannot account for the obvious fact that normative sentences and their negations express inconsistent kinds of attitudes. I explain how the expressivist can respond to this objection. I offer an account of attitudinal inconsistency that takes it to be a combination of descriptive and normative relations. The account I offer to explain these relations relies on a combination of functionalism about normative judgments and expressivism about the norms governing them. It holds that the (...)
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  4. Interactionism for the discerning mind?Derek Shiller - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (4):931-946.
    Jaegwon Kim has developed an argument that interactionist dualists cannot account for the causal relations between minds and brains. This paper develops a closely related argument that focuses instead on the causal relations between minds and neurons. While there are several promising responses to Kim’s argument, their plausibility relies on a relatively simple understanding of mind–brain relations. Once we shift our focus to neurons, these responses lose their appeal. The problem is that even if mind–brain causal pairing can be explained (...)
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  5. Implementational Considerations for Digital Consciousness.Derek Shiller - manuscript
  6. In Defense of Artificial Replacement.Derek Shiller - 2017 - Bioethics 31 (5):393-399.
    If it is within our power to provide a significantly better world for future generations at a comparatively small cost to ourselves, we have a strong moral reason to do so. One way of providing a significantly better world may involve replacing our species with something better. It is plausible that in the not‐too‐distant future, we will be able to create artificially intelligent creatures with whatever physical and psychological traits we choose. Granted this assumption, it is argued that we should (...)
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  7. The unity of moral attitudes: recipe semantics and credal exaptation.Derek Shiller - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4):425-446.
    This paper offers a noncognitivist characterization of moral attitudes, according to which moral attitudes count as such because of their inclusion of moral concepts. Moral concepts are distinguished by their contribution to the functional roles of some of the attitudes in which they can occur. They have no particular functional role in other attitudes, and should instead be viewed as evolutionary spandrels. In order to make the counter-intuitive implications of the view more palatable, the paper ends with an account of (...)
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  8. Hidden Qualia.Derek Shiller - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (1):165-180.
    In this paper, I propose that those who reject higher-order theories of consciousness should not rule out the possibility of having conscious experiences that they cannot introspect. I begin by offering four arguments that such non-introspectible conscious experiences are possible. Next, I offer two arguments for thinking that we actually have such experiences. According to the first argument, it is unlikely that evolution would have furnished us with a faculty of introspection that worked flawlessly. According to the second argument, there (...)
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  9. Chance and the Dissipation of our Acts’ Effects.Derek Shiller - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (2):334-348.
    ABSTRACT If the future is highly sensitive to the past, then many of our acts have long-term consequences whose significance well exceeds that of their foreseeable short-term consequences. According to an influential argument by James Lenman, we should think that the future is highly sensitive to acts that affect people’s identities. However, given the assumption that chancy events are ubiquitous, the effects that our acts have are likely to dissipate over a short span of time. The sets of possible futures (...)
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  10.  31
    Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest. [REVIEW]Derek Shiller - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3):664-666.
    Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest. By CarruthersPeter.
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  11.  30
    The unexplainable: Elly Vintiadis and Constantinos Mekios eds.: Brute Facts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 288 pp, £50.00/$60.00 hb. [REVIEW]Derek Shiller - 2020 - Metascience 29 (1):51-54.
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