Teaching

This course is an advanced introduction to the philosophy of mind. We will explore classical philosophical questions concerning the relationship between the mental and the physical, the nature of consciousness, the roots of general intelligence, the formats of mental representation, the relationship between perceptual experience and the external world, and the constitution of persons.

We will approach these questions through the lens of the current revolution in AI, asking how new developments in machine learning and neurobiology illuminate—or challenge—traditional conceptions of the mind.

This course is an introduction to the central ethical issues raised by recent developments in artificial intelligence and data science. We will examine the ethics of AI across three dimensions: human cognition, society, and governance.

Topics include cognitive outsourcing, brain–computer interfaces and cerebral organoids, algorithmic fairness and bias, misinformation, explainability, alignment, and safety. Throughout the course, we will emphasize how our ordinary experience as users of generative AI tools raises major challenges for moral decision-making.

In a lifetime of eighty years, we spend at least six years dreaming—let alone daydreaming. What is the philosophical significance of that psychological fact? What can we learn from the spontaneous conscious episodes that arise during distraction and meditation?

Our conscious experience is filled with noisy mental states commonly grouped under the heading “altered states of consciousness”: dreaming, mind-wandering, meditating, and sometimes hallucinating. This interdisciplinary introduction to philosophy of mind examines altered states through the lens of neural algorithms, including predictive coding, in order to ask what they reveal about us and about the artificial cognitive technologies our societies are developing, such as AI systems and virtual-reality engines.

Just as paradoxes reveal the hidden structure of logical systems, altered states of consciousness reveal the hidden structure of the mind. The course draws on AI research, Indian philosophy—especially Buddhism—and neurobiology.

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Madness has been acknowledged since the dawn of humanity, but its systematic medicalization is a relatively recent phenomenon. In this course, we examined the philosophy and history of mental disorder through competing conceptions, from the standard psychiatric picture to the more recent neurodiversity movement.

Rather than seeking only a taxonomy of statistically abnormal behaviors, our question was more fundamental: what is it for someone to have a mental disorder, and does having one make a person intrinsically worse off? To answer this question, we examined normative concepts such as health, well-being, rationality, and disability.

We also addressed contemporary challenges to mental health, including generative AI and “AI psychosis,” the attention economy, and the burnout society, alongside new opportunities such as the use of psychedelics in therapy and the so-called psychedelic renaissance.

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