Stephen Petersen

Professor of Philosophy

Dr. Stephen Petersen joined the Niagara University philosophy department in 2006, after receiving his PhD from the University of Michigan. His specialties are in the intersection of philosophy of AI, philosophy of mind, formal epistemology, and philosophy of science. Dr. Petersen has taught Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, Logic, Epistemology, the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Language, the Philosophy of Science, and Metaphysics.

Dr. Stephen Petersen’s research centers on a strongly naturalistic approach to good thinking. How can physical creatures—biological or artificial—think better? Recent work has centered on two main issues: first, the philosophy and ethics of artificial intelligence, especially the problem of the risk posed by artificial superintelligence and value alignment. This involves some familiarity with the technical issues in machine learning, as well as with a range of philosophical problems like normative ethics, metaethics, moral psychology, and mental content. Second, a theory of patterns based in algorithmic information theory, with an aim toward formalizing inference to the best explanation.

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October 5, 2020

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10,737

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≈ 1 hour

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In Defence of the Hivemind Society

The idea that humans should abandon their individuality and use technology to bind themselves together into hivemind societies seems both farfetched and frightening—something that is redolent of the worst dystopias from science fiction. In this article, we argue that these common reactions to the ideal of a hivemind society are mistaken. The idea that humans could form hiveminds is sufficiently plausible for its axiological consequences to be taken seriously. Furthermore, far from being a dystopian nightmare, the hivemind society could be desirable and could enable a form of sentient flourishing. Consequently, we should not be so quick to deny it. We provide two arguments in support of this claim—the axiological openness argument and the desirability argument—and then defend it against three major objections.

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David Lyreskog

Merging Minds

A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing and swarming technologies promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks across domains, ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications. As these tools continue to improve, we are prompted to monitor how they may affect our society on a broader level, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, responsibility, and other key concepts of our moral landscape.