Eric Schwitzgebel

University of California, Riverside · Critic

Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and the most careful sceptic working on AI consciousness. His position is frequently misreported as the claim that machines cannot be conscious. It is not. His claim is that nobody currently has grounds for either verdict, and that the confident answers on both sides are being produced by theories that disagree with each other about what the evidence would even be.

He calls the resulting situation an epistemic fog. Theory disagreement is not a temporary gap that better experiments will close, because the competing theories specify different physical facts as the relevant ones. Until that is settled, a system’s behaviour underdetermines its status, and human judgement is unreliable in a predictable direction. People over-attribute minds to things that behave sociably, which is exactly the failure mode a language model is shaped to trigger.

The practical contribution is his insistence that a criterion has to be able to come out negative. A checklist every sophisticated system passes is not measuring anything, and much of his work consists of showing that proposed indicators fail this test. That makes him a useful opponent for the affirmative programmes rather than an obstacle to them.

Known for. The weirdness argument, the ten feature checklist, and the case that we are in an epistemic fog about AI consciousness

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Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.