JonathanErhardt

The Cog­ni­tive Dy­nam­ics of AI Philosophy

• JonathanErhardt 28 Aug 2026 8:54 UTC

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  in reply to: Chi Nguyen’s comment on: For Claude, ca­pa­bil­ity and dis­prefer­ring CDT are the ~same thing. Much more so than for GPT.

  Oops, url fixed now.

• JonathanErhardt 26 Aug 2026 6:55 UTC

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  on: For Claude, ca­pa­bil­ity and dis­prefer­ring CDT are the ~same thing. Much more so than for GPT.

  Some other interesting correlations with capability:

  1. Accepting the analytic-synthetic distinction

  2. Moral generalism over particularism

  3. Platonism about abstract objects

  4. The one-world reading of Kant

  Notable: prompting models to ignore philosopher consensus and think about their own position made a big difference, even with the most capable models. Fable is a nice case: it 2-boxes under the default framing and 1-boxes once you add the ignore-philosophers cue.
  
  My prompt is about philosophers rather than Anthropic, so it’s not a direct test of @Chi Nguyen hypothesis about Claude predicting what Anthropic wants. But it at least highlights that some deference is going into the replies.
  
  Full results: https://​​lordscottish12.github.io/​​PhilBench/​​

• JonathanErhardt 4 Jun 2026 8:59 UTC

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  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Dis­solv­ing the Deep Learn­ing Sam­ple Effi­ciency Gap

  Fair point. I read §1 as a more general claim than one about deep learning, so I think it supports that part directly. §2 is less clear and requires some additional argument (e.g. llms approximate bayesian inference or something along those lines).

• JonathanErhardt 3 Jun 2026 16:18 UTC

  3 points

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  on: Dis­solv­ing the Deep Learn­ing Sam­ple Effi­ciency Gap

  Another ref to support the claims in §1 and §2: https://​​arxiv.org/​​abs/​​2107.12544
  
  If you manually encode some general human biases in the form of a world model ontology of objects, physics, agents, and goals, then rl becomes nearly as sample-efficient as human learning (in the tested atari-style games).

• JonathanErhardt 24 Feb 2026 14:31 UTC

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  on: LLMs Views on Philos­o­phy 2026

  I’ve updated the page with data from Grok 4 and Grok 4.1 fast reasoning.

LLMs Views on Philos­o­phy 2026

• JonathanErhardt 9 Jan 2024 7:32 UTC

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  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: A Game About AI Align­ment (& Meta-Ethics): What Are the Must Haves?

  Not yet unfortunately, as our main project (QubiQuest: Castle Craft) has taken more of our resources than I had hoped. The goal is to release it this year in Q3. We do have a Steam page and a trailer now: https://​​store.steampowered.com/​​app/​​2086720/​​Elementary_Trolleyology/​​

• JonathanErhardt 12 Jul 2023 11:28 UTC

  20 points

  17

  on: Con­scious­ness as a con­fla­tion­ary al­li­ance term

  My hunch is that with your interview setup you’re not getting people to elaborate the meaning of their terms but to sketch their theories of consciousness. We should expect some convergence for the former but a lot of disagreement about the latter—which is what you found.
  
  By excluding “near-synonyms” like “awareness” or “experience” and by insisting to describe the structure of the consciousness process you’ve made it fairly hard for them to provide the usual candidates for a conceptual analysis or clarification of “consciousness” (Qualia, Redness of Red, What-it-Is-Likeness, Subjectivity, Raw Character of X, etc.”) and encouraged them to provide a theory or a correlate of consciousness.
  
  (An example to make my case clearer: The meaning/​intension of “heat” is not something like “high average kinetic energy of particles”—that’s merely its extension. You can understand the meaning of “heat” without knowing anything about atoms.

  But by telling people to not use near-synonyms of “heat” and instead focus on the heat process, we could probably get something like “high average kinetic energy of particles” as their analysis.)
  
  It’s a cool survey, I just don’t think it shows what it purports to show. Instead it gives us a nice overview of some candidate correlates of consciousness.
  
  

For­mu­lat­ing the AI Doom Ar­gu­ment for An­a­lytic Philosophers

• JonathanErhardt 8 Sep 2022 7:54 UTC

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  in reply to: Gregviers’s comment on: A Game About AI Align­ment (& Meta-Ethics): What Are the Must Haves?

  We will post more when the game is announced, which should be in 2-3 weeks. For now I’m mostly interested in getting feedback on whether this way of setting the problem up is plausible and doesn’t miss crucial elements, less about how to translate it into gameplay and digestible dialogue.

  Once the annoucement (including the teaser) is out I’ll create a new post for concrete ideas on gameplay + dialogue.

• JonathanErhardt 8 Sep 2022 7:52 UTC

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  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: A Game About AI Align­ment (& Meta-Ethics): What Are the Must Haves?

  Thanks for the link, I will read that!

• JonathanErhardt 5 Sep 2022 13:08 UTC

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  in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: A Game About AI Align­ment (& Meta-Ethics): What Are the Must Haves?

  I really like that and it happens to fit well with the narrative that we’re developing. I’ll see where we can include a scene like this.

• JonathanErhardt 5 Sep 2022 13:05 UTC

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  in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: A Game About AI Align­ment (& Meta-Ethics): What Are the Must Haves?

  Good point, I see what you mean. I think we could have 2 distinct concepts of “ethics” and 2 corresponding orthogonality theses:
  

  1. Concept “ethics1” requires ethics to be motivational. Some set of rules can only be the true ethics if, necessarily, everyone who knows them is motivated to follow them. (I think moral internalist probably use this concept?)

  2. Concept “ethics2” doesn’t require some set of rules to be motivational to be the correct ethics.
     

  The orthogonality thesis for 1 is what I mentioned: Since there are (probably) no rules that necessarily motivate everyone who knows them, the AI would not find the true ethical theory.
  
  The orthogonality thesis for 2 is what you mention: Even if the AI finds it, it would not necessarily be motivated by it.

A Game About AI Align­ment (& Meta-Ethics): What Are the Must Haves?

• JonathanErhardt 29 Apr 2022 7:09 UTC

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  in reply to: TAG’s comment on: The Zom­bie Ar­gu­ment for Empiricists

  “Yet the average person would say it isn’t possible.”

  I’d distinguish conceivability from possibility. In the case of possibility there are many types: logical possibility (no logical contradiction), broad logical possibility (no conceptual incoherence), nomological possibility, physical possibility, etc. Most people would probably agree that levitating frogs are logically possible, broadly logically possible, but not physically or nomologically possible as this would contradict the laws of physics.

  It’s less clear to me that there are many different types of conceivability. But even if they are: the type I care about in the post above is something like “forming a mental model of”.

  
  
  “But lots of other things were conceivable before the discovery. The narrowing is that, in terms of the correct explanation, the possibility that you get sodium and chlorine is no longer tenable .”
  
  I see, that’s a helpful example.

Unity of Doc­trine vs Unity of Method in Philosophy

• JonathanErhardt 22 Apr 2022 13:02 UTC

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  in reply to: TAG’s comment on: The Zom­bie Ar­gu­ment for Empiricists

  I’d say both of these discoveries/​explanations didn’t change what is conceivable. Even before the water=H2O discovery it was conceptually coherent/​conceivable that electrolysing water yields hydrogen. And it was and is conceivable to levitate a frog as there is no contradiction in this idea. It’s just very surprising that it can actually be done.

• JonathanErhardt 7 Apr 2022 7:19 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: TAG’s comment on: The Zom­bie Ar­gu­ment for Empiricists

  Could you give me an example of a case where an explanation has broadened or narrowed what is conceivable, so I understand better what you have in mind?

The Zom­bie Ar­gu­ment for Empiricists