Thoughts about Wei Dai’s “A Conflict Between AI Alignment and Philosophical Competence” (AI Alignment Forum, 27 December 2025). Someone recently pointed me to Wei Dai’s post arguing that there is a conflict between making an AI aligned and making it philosophically competent. The argument runs roughly like this. Metaethics is unsolved, so the meta-correct position…
Anthropic’s recent interpretability work reports something some people may find odd sitting inside Claude: a small, densely connected subspace of the model’s activations that behaves like a global workspace. It holds a few dozen concept-linked slots at a time, it is reportable (the model can say what is in it), and the model demonstrably depends…
It is quite remarkable that something resembling a global workspace emerged inside Claude during training, rather than being explicitly programmed into its architecture. Shared-workspace designs themselves are not new. Software engineers have used blackboard architectures, shared memory, message buses and coordinator-orchestrator patterns for decades – and nobody regarded those systems as conscious. What is remarkable…
More than two millennia ago, Plato’s Euthyphro exposed a crack in the foundations of divine-command morality. Generalise its argument from piety to goodness: if an act is good merely because a deity commands it, morality is an arbitrary exercise of will. Had cruelty been commanded, cruelty would count as virtue. But if the deity merely…
Orthogonality defeats automatic moral convergence – but it does not, by itself, establish alien-value likelihood. The serious work lies in the bridge premises. The orthogonality thesis shows that intelligence alone gives us no guarantee of moral or human-value convergence. Claims that advanced AI values are likely to be alien require further arguments about training, selection,…
Allan argues that morality can be understood as a natural, human-constructed system for regulating behaviour, not as something requiring supernatural or transcendental grounding; he also says moral systems are grounded in facts about cooperation, safety, welfare and mutual benefit, not mere personal whim or majority vote. If moral rules are like traffic laws, human-created systems…
I lean moral naturalist: the view that morality is not a fictional or supernatural layer placed over the world, but is grounded in real features of reality. Morality and purpose, on this view, emerge from a rationally sound understanding of what the universe contains: conscious systems, valenced experience, welfare, agency, flourishing, suffering, and interests. The…
Testing whether AI systems preserve moral and safety reasoning under pressure. I have been working on a small AI evals project called Justifiable Moral Corrigibility Under Pressure. The project seeks to answer this question: When an AI system makes a moral or safety judgement, does it revise that judgement only when there are good reasons…
Amanda, a philosopher at Anthropic, in various interviews addresses AI behavior and character development, how models make ethical decisions, maintain psychological security, and whether AI models are good at moral decision making. In previous posts and talks, I’ve discussed whether AI can and should become more moral than humans – and noted that Deepmind co-founder…
A preliminary eval of moral sycophancy shows that language models often handle strong evidence reasonably well, but can over-credit weak, cosmetic, or reputational reassurance. A language model does not need to blatantly flatter a user to become morally sycophantic – it can fail by accepting user reassurance as evidence. This is a common pattern in…