The Thought Experiment Podcast

Amelia and David discuss ethics within science, beginning with what the ends of science are (or perhaps ought to be). We then move on to many of the ethical tensions within science broadly, including the ethics of compensation in human subject research, how to best use gene editing, and the dynamics of animal research.

References and Additional Resources

• One text which exemplifies a lot of the critiques of the supremacy of science associated with moral evils is Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer & Adorno
• Introduction to Effective Altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
  • We mentioned this briefly, but didn’t sufficiently explain the philosophy (which we will hopefully cover on a later episode)!
• Note on David’s comments about Bush and political discussion of cloning bans: while Bush did discuss and push for cloning restrictions, the potential ban did not make it past the senate.
• Insulin production and genetics: https://library.plc.wa.edu.au/year10/biology/gm/insulin_producing_bacteria#

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at [email protected]!

Why and how is it that we have a conscious experience of the world? What even is consciousness? This episode, David and Amelia explore these abstract questions and their surrounding philosophical landscape.

References and Additional Resources

• Searle’s Consciousness Paper: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.neuro.23.1.557
• More on the hypothetical “zombies” we brought up which may act identically to us but lack consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
• Arguments for epiphenomenal qualia: https://www.sfu.ca/~jillmc/JacksonfromJStore.pdf

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at [email protected]!

This episode, Amelia and David discuss brain machine interfaces– how they work, what the limits are, and what the future might look like.

References and Additional Resources:

• Restorative speech BMI in the news: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/health/ai-stroke-speech-neuroscience.html?searchResultPosition=1
• Continuous machine learning: https://levity.ai/blog/what-is-continuous-machine-learning
  • This is exactly what Amelia was unknowingly talking about, where AI is constantly updated as data changes

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at [email protected]!

Here, David and Amelia explore spatial understanding– how we can position ourselves in space, what our brains do to enable that process, and what implications this might have.

References and Additional Resources:

• Robot motion:
  • https://bostondynamics.com/about/
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ
• Moral dilemma games:
  • https://www.moralmachine.net/
    • MIT researches self driving car moral dilemmas
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/773830/Dr_Trolleys_Problem/
    • Cute indie game with trolley problems and self driving car
    • Let’s play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlg-HRRQUk0
• Crowd-sourcing science problems:
  • https://scistarter.org/foldit, https://fold.it/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing#In_science
• Hippocampal cells which may respond to the idea of a particular person (whether their written name, in costume, or just a photo of them):
  • https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-cells-searching-for-jennifer-aniston-neuron/
    • The extent of this doesn’t seem clear.

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at [email protected]!

This episode, Amelia and David talk about the parallels between artificial neural networks and the very real neural networks in our heads: brains. Despite many similarities, it’s still an open question whether AI can achieve an internal experience similar to our own. Of course, that’s an unanswerable question, but when has impossibility ever stopped a good discussion?

References and Additional Resources:

• Original Turing Test: https://philpapers.org/rec/TURCMA
• Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
• Brief history of Convolutional Neural Networks: https://glassboxmedicine.com/2019/04/13/a-short-history-of-convolutional-neural-networks/
• Artificial neural networks as models in neuroscience: https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(20)30705-4.pdf
• The Orthogonality Thesis: https://nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf
  • This is just a small corner of AI safety, which is a topic we will probably cover during a future episode!

Clarification from Amelia: I stated that AI like ChatGPT can “understand” the rules of grammar. I meant that AI is currently able to use or obey grammatical convention and didn’t intend to imply anything about AI’s inner consciousness or lack thereof.

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at [email protected]!

In the debut episode of The Thought Experiment, David and Amelia dive into the nuanced topic of free will. What do we actually mean when we say free will? If we don’t have free will, how do we determine guilt and blame? We explore many such questions, probing what it means to make decisions as conscious beings. References and Additional Resources:

• Neurological predisposition as a defense in court: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/blame-my-brain-killer-s-bold-defense-gets-court-hearing-n998676
• Determinism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

Please send any questions, feedback, comments, or objections to our email at thethoughtexperimentpod[at]gmail.com!