5 papers in the library · 21 citations · publishing 2016-2026
arXiv Preprint Archive July 6, 2026 Tom McClelland
Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting resources on insentient machines. The intractability of questions around AI...
Ai & Society May 1, 2026 Tom McClelland
AI has displayed notable originality across the worlds of art, science and gaming. But is it right to say that such machines are creative? This question is bound up with other challenging questions about the capacities of artificial systems. Human creativity typically involves some conscious experience of the creative project. If consciousness is necessary for creativity, then a case could be...
arXiv Preprint Archive December 17, 2024 Tom McClelland
Could an AI have conscious experiences? Any answer to this question should conform to Evidentialism - that is, it should be based not on intuition, dogma or speculation but on solid scientific evidence. I argue that such evidence is hard to come by and that the only justifiable stance on the prospects of artificial consciousness is agnosticism. In the current debate, the main division is...
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness July 9, 2020 Tom McClelland 16 citations
Self-Representationalists hold that conscious mental states are conscious in virtue of suitably representing themselves, and that awareness of a mental state is achieved by representing oneself as being in that state. Where Higher-Order Representationalists claim that awareness of a mental state is conferred by a distinct mental state that represents it, Self-Representationalists instead argue...
Synthese 2016 Tom McClelland 5 citations
Kriegel's self-representationalist (SR) theory of phenomenal consciousness pursues two projects. The first is to offer a positive account of how conscious experience arises from physical brain processes. The second is to explain why consciousness misleadingly appears to be irreducible to the physical i.e. to 'demystify' consciousness. This paper seeks to determine whether SR succeeds on the...