Arnold Zuboff

University College London | UCL · Department of Philosophy

Imagine that a secret toss of a fair coin will decide whether someone is to be awakened either one time or a trillion times. Add to this that at the end of any awakening he will be made to forget it, so that he’ll never have any memories of how many awakenings there have been. But when he does awaken, it seems, he could infer the greater probabilit...

Imagine two urns, each with a thousand beads - in one all the beads are blue while in the other only one of the thousand is blue. If one of these urns is pushed forward (based on the toss of a fair coin) and the single bead then randomly drawn from it is blue, we must infer that it is a thousand times more probable that the urn pushed forward is th...

For a while in this article it seems impossible to articulate a compelling reason for refraining from killing an innocent stranger with the press of a button when this would earn one a small prize and would be done with absolutely guaranteed immunity from any punishment or other harm (including even an instantaneous elimination of any chance of a g...

This challenging paper presents an ingenious argument for a functionalist theory of mind.

Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged,...

This is a largely sympathetic account of the thought of seven great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries

Many philosophical positions wholly undermine themselves because to possess the truth that they claim for themselves they would have to be false. These are the theories that in one way or another reject the meaningfulness or attainability of objective truth.

In this handout, which is pretty much a transcript of his talk, Arnold Zuboff described what he considered to be the most important ideas he had developed over his career. They are an a priori justification of morality, an a priori justification of empirical thought, the spread brain thought experiment, the replacement argument for functionalism, a...

It is argued that two observers with the same information may rightly disagree about the probability of an event that they are both observing. This is a correct way of describing the view of a lottery outcome from the perspective of a winner and from the perspective of an observer not connected with the winner - the outcome is improbable for the wi...

A distinction is demonstrated between merely apparent, mistaken desires and real desires. One might, for example, have merely an apparent, mistaken desire to be drinking the stuff in a mug of hot mud if one mistakenly believed that the stuff was hot chocolate. One would not really desire to be drinking that stuff. A desire, which must always be bas...

My visual cortex at the back of my brain processes the stimulation to my eyes and then causes other parts of the brain - like the speech centre and the areas involved in thought and movement - to be properly responsive to vision. According to functionalism the whole mental character of vision - the whole of how things look - is fixed purely in the...

This paper presents a paradox of inclusion, like Russell's Paradox but occurring in natural language.

Most people will agree that if my brain were made to have within it precisely the same pattern of activity that is in it now but through artificial means, as in its being fed all its stimulation through electrodes as it sits in a vat, an experience would result for me that would be subjectively indistinguishable from that I am now having. In ‘The S...

This paper could be thought of as divided into two parts. In the first I show through a series of thought experiments that it is a mistake to think of one’s individual experience as necessarily belonging to only one particular place, time and organism. In repetitions across a universe large enough to host them, the particular experience that one fi...

I critically examine Nietzsche’s argument in The Will to Power that all the detailed events of the world are repeating infinite times (on account of the merely finite possible arrangements of forces that constitute the world and the inevitability with which any arrangement of force must bring about its successors). Nietzsche celebrated this recurre...