Jurgis Karpus

AI is not as conscious as humans: Essentialism in mental state attributions to artificial systems.

Cognition October 1, 2026 Louis Longin, Jurgis Karpus, Nadine Meertens et al.

Artificial systems increasingly behave in ways that resemble humans. But is that sufficient to make us see them as conscious, or as having related mental states? We contrast two broad possibilities. People may rely on a single general principle: the more appropriately an agent responds to its environment, the more conscious it is, whether human or artificial. We call this a functionalist...