Susan Schneider

Susan Schneider is the NASA-Baruch Blumberg Chair at the Library of Congress and NASA, the director of the AI, Mind and Society ("AIMS") Group at the University of Connecticut, and a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. Schneider has been featured on television shows on The History Channel, Fox News, BBC World News, PBS and The National Geographic Channel, and in the feature film, Supersapiens: the Rise of the Mind.She writes opinion pieces for venues such as the New York Times, The Financial Times and Scientific American..

Schneider's work has been mentioned by numerous publications including The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Smithsonian, Big Think, Inverse, Discover Magazine, Science Magazine, Motherboard, Slate, and Nautilus.

Philosophy of mind

Schneider writes about the philosophical nature of the mind and self, especially from the vantage point of issues in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and astrobiology. Topics include radical brain enhancement, spacetime emergence, superintelligence, the nature of life, whether minds are in some sense programs, panpsychism and the nature of persons.

In her book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Schneider urges that AI will inevitably take intelligence in new directions, but it is up to us to carve out a path forward that ensures that sentient beings flourish. As AI technology turns inward, attempting to reshape the brain, as well as outward, potentially building machine minds, it is important to beware. We will be playing with “tools” we do not understand how to use: the mind, the self, and consciousness. Schneider argues that an insufficient grasp of these philosophical topics could undermine the use of AI and brain enhancement technology, facilitating the demise or suffering of conscious beings. To flourish, humans must grasp the philosophical issues lying beneath the AI algorithms.

In her work on the mind-body problem, she argues against physicalism, maintaining a monistic position and offering, in a series of papers, several novel anti-physicalist arguments. In the domain of astrobiology, Schneider contends that the most intelligent alien beings we encounter will be "postbiological in nature", being forms of artificial intelligence, that they would be superintelligent, and that we can predict what the shape of some of these superintelligences would be like. Her reason for the claim that the most intelligent aliens will be "postbiological" is called the "short window observation." The short-window supposition holds that by the time any society learns to transmit radio signals, they're likely just a few hundred years from upgrading their own biology.

In an earlier technical book on the computational nature of the brain with MIT Press, Schneider examines the viability of different computational theories of thinking.A PhD student of Jerry Fodor, she argues for various revisions to the "language of thought" or symbol processing approach, and urges that the brain is a hybrid computational system. She defends a view of the nature of the mental symbols (where such are the basic vocabulary items in the language of thought). She then used this conception of symbols, together with certain work on the nature of meaning, to construct a theory of the nature of concepts. The basic theory of concepts is intended to be ecumenical, having a version that applies in the case of connectionism, as well as versions that apply to both the prototype theory and definitions view of concepts.

Books

• The Language of Thought: a New Philosophical Direction, MIT Press, 2011.
• The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, (with Max Velmans), eds., Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2006.
• Science Fiction and Philosophy, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
• Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Princeton University Press], 2019.