Many policies and ethical guidelines recommend developing “trustworthy AI”. We argue that developing morally trustworthy AI is not only unethical, as it promotes trust in an entity that cannot be trustworthy, but it is also unnecessary for optimal calibration. Instead, we show that reliability, exclusive of moral trust, entails the appropriate normative constraints that enable optimal calibration and mitigate the vulnerability that arises in high-stakes hybrid decision-making environments, without also demanding, as moral trust would, the anthropomorphization of AI and thus (...) epistemically dubious behavior. The normative demands of reliability for inter-agential action are argued to be met by an analogue to procedural metacognitive competence (i.e., the ability to evaluate the quality of one’s own informational states to regulate subsequent action). Drawing on recent empirical findings that suggest providing reliability scores (e.g., F1-scores) to human decision-makers improves calibration in the AI system, we argue that reliability scores provide a good index of competence and enable humans to determine how much they wish to rely on the system. (shrink)

One routinely undergoes a noetic feeling (also called “metacognitive feeling” or “epistemic feeling”), the so-called “feeling of knowing”, whenever trying to recall a person’s name. One feels the name is known despite being unable to recall it. Other experiences also fall under this category, e.g., the tip-of-the-tongue experience, the feeling of confidence. A distinguishing characteristic of noetic feelings is how they are crucially related to the facts we know, so much so that the activation of semantic memory can easily result (...) in the production of noetic feelings – a regularity that memory research has often exploited. And yet little is known about the mechanism that produces noetic feelings. Is it solely brain-based or does it depend upon the extracerebral body for its production of feelings? To arrive at an answer, various studies in metamemory research will be analyzed to determine what ought to be made of the mechanism responsible for noetic feelings. I argue that evidence suggests that it relies upon extracerebral processes, in particular cardiovascular processes, the result being support for an embodied view of metacognition. (shrink)

Elijah Chudnoff’s case for irreducible cognitive phenomenology hinges on seeming to see the truth of a mathematical proposition (Chudnoff 2015). In the following, I develop an augmented version of Chudnoff’s case, not based on seeming to see, or intuition, but based on being in a state with presentational phenomenology of high-level content. In contrast to other cases for cognitive phenomenology, those based on Strawson’s case (Strawson 2011), I argue that the case presented here is able to withstand counterarguments, which attempt (...) to reduce cognitive phenomenology to sensory phenomenology. To support my argument, I present findings from Bowden and Jung-Beeman’s experiments with the Aha! Experience (Bowden & Jung-Beeman 2004), and argue that the Aha! Experience is a species of the experience of understanding presented here. I interpret the results of these experiments to provide further evidence for irreducible cognitive phenomenology. (shrink)

The aim of this project to expose the reasons behind the pandemic of misinformation (henceforth, PofM) by examining the enabling conditions of epistemic agency and the emerging technologies that threaten it. I plan to research the emotional origin of epistemic agency, i.e. on the origin of our capacity to acquire justification for belief, as well as on the significance this emotional origin has for our lives as epistemic agents in our so-called Misinformation Age. This project has three objectives. First, I (...) plan to expose the degree to which epistemic agency is made possible by an under-researched species of emotion called epistemic feelings. Perhaps, the most epistemically significant is the feeling of confidence. In particular, epistemic feelings make epistemic agency possible by making errors in reasoning salient or the potential lack thereof. -/- Second, in order to diagnose the reasons for PofM, I will analyze the emotional basis of epistemic agency in the context of emerging technologies. Epistemic feelings ought to be construed as motivators of epistemic acts, specifically acts following exposure to misinformation spread by social media. For example, a recent study found that subjects on YouTube have a 6.3% probability in five clicks to go from watching innocuous videos to misogynistic videos. Accordingly, one prominent view holds that social media algorithms lead subjects down the proverbial rabbit hole, producing content that elicits strong emotional reactions. -/- But under-researched is the degree to which these emotions are intertwined with epistemic feelings, so that subjects are likely to misjudge the information as correct due to being primed to do so by processing the AI's suggested media. Thus, when this technology is used in epistemic practices, the result is invariably epistemically bad behavior because of how this manner of producing content motivates epistemic acts through the production of erroneous feelings of confidence, which result from the perceived ease of cognitive processing: the content is easy to process and so, the subject confidently misjudges, it is true. As of yet, an account of this cognitive and emotional decision-making process has not been used to analyze how emerging technologies are threatening epistemic agency, and thus our wellbeing as knowers. -/- Finally, I plan to develop therapeutics for PofM by outlining how to reform our collective epistemic practices. Thus, this project complements existing research in virtue epistemology, specifically by articulating the challenges to cultivating epistemic virtues and warding off the vices of the mind. In summation, the project aims to account for how emerging technologies are committing a form of epistemic injustice through the exploitation of cognitive biases and the production of erroneous epistemic feelings, with the overarching goal being a framework for convalescing from the pandemic of misinformation plaguing our age. (shrink)

Upon first hearing sinewaves, all that can be discerned are beeps and whistles. But after hearing the original speech, the beeps and whistles sound like speech. The difference between these two episodes undoubtedly involves an alteration in phenomenal character. O’Callaghan (2011) argues that this alteration is non-sensory, but he leaves open the possibility of attributing it to some other source, e.g. cognition. I discuss whether the alteration in phenomenal character involved in sinewave speech provides evidence for cognitive phenomenology. I defend (...) both the existence of cognitive phenomenology and the phenomenal contrast method, as each concerns the case presented here. (shrink)

The first premise of Schellenberg’s particularity argument reads, “If a subject S perceives a particular α, then S discriminates and singles out α” (2018: 25). But this is false if seeing a ganzfeld is possible (i.e., a homogeneous field without any particulars to discriminate). In response, Schellenberg argues that seeing a ganzfeld is impossible by appealing to the ganzfeld effect (viz. hallucinatory experiences caused by ganzfeld exposure) exclusively as a ‘sense of blindness’. I present two challenges for this line of (...) reasoning. The first concerns the need to account for the long delay before blindness is reported (if it is reported at all) and the second concerns the need to be consistent with potential causes of ganzfeld hallucinations (in general, not exclusive to the sense of blindness). I show how Schellenberg’s particularity argument can meet the first challenge but struggles to meet the second. I present evidence based on considerations related to sensory deprivation and that follow from the predictive processing theory of cognition, which describes seeing a ganzfeld as the cause of ganzfeld hallucinations. If correct, this means that you can see a homogeneous field, and thus we ought to be skeptical of the soundness of Schellenberg’s particularity argument. I conclude with a possible strategy for rehabilitating the particularity argument that reconceptualizes perceptual experience as fundamentally multimodal, constituted by both exteroceptive and interoceptive sensation. (shrink)