Joe Carlsmith is a writer, researcher, and philosopher. He works at Anthropic on the character/constitution/spec for Claude. Before that, he was a senior advisor at Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving).
We talked about:
ForeCast is Forethought’s interview podcast. You can see all our episodes here.




On the first day, God said "Let there be particles and let them have spatiotemporal positions, charge, mass, and spin."
Then according to dualists and inflationary physicalists, on the second day God said "Let certain ensembles of particles have the further property of consciousness, not reducible to the physical properties of the particles."
Then according to egocentrists, on the third day God said, "Let one conscious ensemble of particles have the further property of being the I, the center, the subject looking out on this vast show."
And then according to anti-reductionists about personal identity, on the fourth day God said, "Let there be a further fact about how the ensemble that is the I right now is connected with the ensembles that will be the I at later times. Let them form a persistent stream, a life."
Whew! What a workout for the Creator!