Event Timeslots (1)
Friday
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Our understanding of what minds are is in a moment of deep uncertainty and potential conceptual redrafting. Generative AI (GenAI) is the latest in a series of technical innovations that has challenged our understanding of the nature of mind and cognition (Clowes, Gärtner, and Hipólito 2021) . This course will look at how our scientific and folk-psychological understanding of mind is being reshaped through our creation and interaction with GenAI. We will discuss the mind through a number of interlocking prisms including creativity, memory, self, agency, authorship, social cognition, self-governance, folk-psychology and consciousness. We will compare competing paradigms such as functionalism, the intentional systems approach, illusionism, active inference and (4E) embodied and embedded views of mind and ask what effect the study of GenAI systems or their successors is likely to have on these frameworks.
This course seeks to study the philosophy of mind alongside and in an interlocking way with the philosophical study of GenAI systems. It will mainly be taught through reading current research papers and discussing them in seminars, but it will also employ some direct interaction with the Digital Andy System (DAS). The DAS is a Large Language Model derived from the work of philosopher Andy Clark and partly designed by the lecturer of this course (detailed in Smart, Clowes, and Clark 2025) . It will be available for direct interaction and informed philosophical study and guided reflection as part of the course. In addition, draft chapters will be discussed from Robert Clowes' forthcoming book Brave New Minds: GenAI as Cognitive Ecology.