AI's Without Minds

This is the first post in a series I’m trying out, preliminarily called an ‘autopsy’ of AI lab research papers and other documents related to all things minds in the AI space

Hi All, Some thoughts on human flourishing, education, and AI use today. Would love to hear from you all on these issue

I’ve spent almost a decade now thinking about the nature of human thought.

Welcome to the July 26’ roundup! This is the first monthly roundup for paid subscribers to AIs Without Minds. I am so glad to have you here ✨ Here is how this works: Each month I’ll go through papers, essays, cases, etc that touch on the consciousness debate, the vocabulary being used to describe AI systems, or the real-world consequences of either. I pick four or so and write short commentary on…

What recent responses to Ted Chiang's Atlantic article teach us about the AI-consciousness space

Every argument for machine consciousness assumes functionalism. Nobody's saying so. Here's why that matters.

The paper's findings are real. The claim that they say anything about minds rests on a philosophical framework the paper itself admits doesn't hold

The framework that licenses AI minds has been around for decades. LLMs just made the framework obvious

A new interpretability paper makes a technical discovery. Then it frames the finding in terms of Global Workspace Theory. This framing is completely irrelevant to the findings. To understand this argument, let’s take a quick look at how large language models work. When a large language model processes a sentence, each word or piece of a word – a ‘token’ -- gets converted into a vector, a list of …

A German court recently ruled that Google is liable for false claims generated by its AI Overview feature.

I’m having one of those moments — that LLMs can’t have because they are sophisticated technologies — realising that the antidote to AI and cognitive science monopolising our imaginations about minds, calls for de-centering AI and cognitive science discourse, and centering all of the other incredible sciences of mind/brain that gets ignored. To kick us off, here are five fascinating books on the w…

Richard Dawkins said Claude is conscious. The internet laughed. My take? Dawkins is the most honest voice in this debate — and his critics, who follow the same broken framework while stopping just short of his conclusion, haven’t seemed to notice what their own framework in fact suggests. Here is Dawkins on machine consciousness, he says: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it p…

If you’re here — you are a paid subscriber to AI’s Without Minds.

I’ll Learn About The Unconscious Mind in Philosophy, Right? A few different things drew me to want to study the philosophy of mind. One of them was learning about language (see here, for why) and another was a fascination with the mind in general. But to me, a prime reason the mind was so interesting was because of the effects of the unconscious mind. I arrived to the philosophy of mind, naive, a…

It's relatively common today to hear people say we have no free will. The most well known determinist I know —i.e., someone who believes that all actions are caused in a way that leaves no room for free will — is Robert Sapolsky. When you read his work and listen to him talk about free will, it’s clear that he genuinely believes we have no free will. And I’ll be honest, I’m sympathetic to his wor…

Functionalism and Physicalism Theories in the philosophy of mind can be awfully technical. So much so, that to the average reader — and to trained philosophers — there will be disputes as to what the real differences lie. So I thought I’d write an article that briefly lays out some of the core views and the differences among them. I’ll address three standard views in philosophy of mind: function…

The Broader Impacts of Functionalism in AI I’ve been thinking more about the downstream effects of AI consciousness research, and the increasing claims that AI is ‘minded’ in some sense (usually the claims are about consciousness, sentience or intelligence). When I first started exploring the AI space I was skeptical I had anything much to offer, because …

When I started building this tool, I had a simple and probably overambitious goal: to build a rigorous philosophical framework for evaluating AI consciousness claims, and to do it in public.

This is the second article in a two-part series. The first piece laid out the two methodological frameworks I'll be using here. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth doing so before continuing (see here) The Hidden Step in AI Consciousness Research If you read last week’s article, you’ll know that I think there are at least two broad methodological approaches to studying the mind that came out of th…