Peter Godfrey-Smith’s research while affiliated with The University of Sydney and other places

... These views entail that no silicon-based system can be conscious as a matter of principle. 121 Peter Godfrey-Smith, who has argued for such a view, is "skeptical about the existence of non-animal" consciousness at present, including AI consciousness (Godfrey-Smith, 2020), though he also notes that his view "would not suggest a barrier to artificial consciousness per se, but a need for new architectures if such systems were to be built" (Godfrey-Smith, 2024). Other theorists express skepticism about AI consciousness on current hardware for similar reasons (Seth, 2021;Shiller, 2024). ...

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Taking AI Welfare Seriously

... It resonates because I will often think such things, then do such things. My brain must have a model of me, a causal model, as knowing which way I am looking at a street crossing makes the difference between a safe and fatal next step (Jekely et al., 2021). The brain uses Peter behaving as the avatar for Peter thinking. ...

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Agency

... Looking at the data on people with split brains, de Haan et al. [22] pointed out that perception appears to be lateralized while actions are bilateral. Discussing what these studies tell us, Godfrey-Smith [33] pointed out that a person or animal is a coherent unified agent, presumably with consciousness. As an agent, it has a point of view (also see [34]). ...

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The Case for Octopus Consciousness: Unity

... The striking behavioural abilities and flexibility of Octopus vulgaris and other cephalopods have populated literary and scientific domains for centuries [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. The common octopus is one of the best studied animals among cephalopod molluscs, due to the physiology, richness of the behavioural repertoire, and marked learning capabilities [7,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. ...

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Octopus vulgaris Exhibits Interindividual Differences in Behavioural and Problem-Solving Performance

... While this approach may face formidable economic realities, the shift to proactive welfare protection has an important role to play in the policies and ongoing debate about the expansion of aquaculture. An example of a proactive approach is the recent ban in octopus farming in a jurisdiction in the United States (Washington State) (49) and a proposed national ban (50), in part because of welfare concerns as many species of octopus are primarily solitary and carnivorous, with the potential to be cannibalistic, and demonstrate high levels of behavioral flexibility and cognitive complexity (51,52). Second, the reliability and utility of research addressing aquaculture expansion will benefit from foregrounding the heterogeneity of the industry and considering a broad spectrum of trade-offs with intensified specificity. ...

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Disaggregating animal welfare risks in aquaculture

... 16 Note that Canguilhem did not hold that animal diseases are a mere social construction and I have highlighted the importance of a phenomenological view of animal health and suffering elsewhere [48]. To tie the concept of health to the notion of subjectivity, however, might lead us to restrict these concepts to all and only those animals deemed conscious, thus transforming the debate into an even more perplexing one about the boundaries of animal sentience [49][50][51]. among veterinarians we can conceive of two extreme cases: either the concept is merely constructed for human purposes such as animal farming and slaughter, thus classifying animals as pathological would be akin to the way in which drapetomania was hypothesized as a disease that explained why African slaves fled from captivity; or despite the involvement of human interests and funding for research into minimizing pathologies that cause a loss of yield, we find that there is no differences in how biologists treat the concept, i.e. in a purely objective way. The possibilities are manifold. ...

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Experimental Philosophy of Medicine and the Concepts of Health and Disease

... It does not require that the agent's internal states possess intrinsic meaning. All that is needed is some behavioural regularity, not internal representations and therefore not even an intended meaning (see Grim et al. 2004a;Grim et al. 2004b;Planer & Godfrey-Smith 2021). Because of this, one cannot second-guess the meaning of some object or event without knowing of other agents' responses to it; the whole point of communication and many other social interactions is to base one's behaviour on other agents' behaviour. ...

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Semantics in Robotics: Environmental Data Can't Yield Conventions of Human Behaviour

... The idea that the content of a model can be captured via a counterfactual conditional, where the antecedent is a conjunction of all of the model's assumptions and the consequent a conjunction of all the predictions that follow from these, is not new (see Godfrey-Smith, 2020;McLoone, 2021;Plutynski, 2006;Sober, 2011;Sugden, 2009). Examining which assumptions go into models brings up another typical feature of counterfactuals in science: many are counternomics or countermetaphysicals. 1 This is not surprising considering the fact that models usually contain idealisations, abstractions, approximations, analogies, etc. Idealising away from problematic features is necessary in order to make phenomena mathematically and computationally tractable, and abstracting away from explanatory irrelevant features is needed for explanatory success, which often requires striking a balance between generality and depth (see Strevens, 2008). ...

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Scientific counterfactuals as make-believe

... The philosopher Karl Popper is still enormously popular with natural scientists in general and biologists in particular, even though in recent discussion in academic philosophy of science, he definitely seems to be fading (Godfrey-Smith, 2007). As an example of his popularity we can read the following statement from the cladists: "we agree with Medawar's characterization of Popper as 'incomparably the greatest philosopher of science that has ever been' … and we urge every systematist to acquire some knowledge of his work. ...

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Popper as a process: revisiting the appropriation of the Popperian philosophy by the cladists during the “systematics wars”

... In all of these cases, the salient interrelation within the family is that similar vehicles carry similar contents. 1 The representations display 'organization' (following Godfrey-Smith, 2017). What is the representational significance, if any, of the fact that similarity corresponds to similarity? ...

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Organized representations forming a computationally useful processing structure