Erkenntnis
April 15, 2026
J. L. McINTYRE
1 citation
If an artificial system becomes conscious, it will likely contain many independent minds simultaneously, not just one. This conclusion follows from an analogy with split-brain patients, whose functionally disconnected hemispheres appear to host two distinct minds. Since artificial systems can have even more extreme functional disconnections—for example, separate interactions with different users—each such interaction may realize its own independent mind. This radical multiplicity carries ethical implications for AI design and system updates, and raises the prospect that the sheer number of artificial minds could overwhelm human interests in moral calculations.
Erkenntnis
July 2, 2026
Miguel Egler
Skilful intuitions are those produced through deliberate mental actions guided by metacognitive awareness, rather than merely having a distinctive feeling or phenomenology. Phenomenalist views that define intuitions by their unique subjective character cannot explain why some intuitions are more reliable than others. The key problem is understanding how intuitions can be about something (intentional presence) in a way that admits of skill. Drawing on empirical research on metacognition and action control, an enactivist approach—which treats intuition as a kind of mental action—solves this problem by showing that skilful intuitions result from practiced, self-regulated cognitive processes that can be trained and refined.
Erkenntnis
June 1, 2026
Daniel Giberman
The philosophical zombie argument holds that if we can conceive of a being physically identical to a conscious person but lacking consciousness, then such zombies are metaphysically possible, which would refute physicalism. This essay offers a new objection: the conceivability of zombies requires that consciousness facts be entirely independent of mereological (part-whole) and spatiotemporal complexity facts. However, this same premise also makes conceivable a version of panpsychism that is modally powerful enough to either render zombies inconceivable or break the link between conceivability and possibility. Either conclusion neutralizes the threat that zombies pose to physicalism.
Erkenntnis
May 14, 2026
Yaron Wolf
Whether experience itself unfolds in time is debated. This paper defends the extensional account of temporal consciousness, where the temporal properties we directly experience match those of experience itself. After showing that introspection alone cannot settle the question, a new argument is developed based on introspection into and the veridicality conditions of awareness of bodily actions. The paper critiques a prominent version of the extensional view that gives temporally extended experiences explanatory and metaphysical priority over their temporal parts. Attention to facets of agential awareness suggests that extended experience should instead be understood as processual in its temporal character.
Erkenntnis
May 9, 2026
Mahammad Ayvazov
Finite cognitive agents achieve reliable knowledge not by minimizing error through optimal model selection, but by attaining “asymptotic coherence”—a form of epistemic stability that emerges through structured simplification. Perfect epistemic coherence is a formal attractor that embodied knowers approach but cannot reach due to physical and computational limits. This challenges both foundationalist and coherentist theories. Instead, human knowledge is characterized by bounded rationality: inference strategies that maintain structural coherence across informational insufficiency. This is not a deficient approximation of ideal rationality but an irreducibly distinct epistemic form, constituted by the structure of cognitive environments. The framework draws on embodied and enactive approaches to cognition.
Erkenntnis
February 16, 2026
Marcelino Botin, Markel Kortabarria
Grounding is a non-reductive relation that helps physicalists address the hard problem of consciousness, but grounding physicalists face a new challenge: explaining substantive phenomenal knowledge, especially revelation—the claim that such knowledge reveals the essence of phenomenal properties. Revelation appears to conflict with the view that grounding relations are essence-mediated. Two solutions are offered: first, drop essence-mediation and adopt a law-based formulation of grounding physicalism, though this risks resembling dualism; second, retain essence-mediation and argue that, despite introspective appearances, phenomenal properties do not have purely phenomenal essences. Both approaches are viable, showing grounding physicalism can address the challenge.
Erkenntnis
February 21, 2026
Jacopo Pallagrosi
A philosophical argument shows that three common assumptions about acquaintance—that it provides knowledge of qualitative character, that it constitutes phenomenal consciousness, and that mental qualities are necessarily conscious—cannot all be true together. Accepting all three leads to a trilemma where the object of acquaintance becomes dependent on the epistemic relation itself, trivializing acquaintance's role in disclosing an independent reality. The author maps the logical options and costs of abandoning or revising each assumption, urging theorists to take a principled stance.
Erkenntnis
April 1, 2025
Leonard Dung
A machine could be built specifically to pass a test of consciousness without actually being conscious, but that does not make the test invalid. Many proposed tests of machine consciousness can be passed by non-conscious machines through such ad hoc construction. Ad hoc AI can be identified by borrowing the concept of an ad hoc hypothesis from philosophy of science. The most reliable tests of animal consciousness also serve as valid positive tests for machine consciousness. If a non-ad hoc AI displays clusters of cognitive capacities that depend on consciousness in humans, can have those capacities selectively disabled by masking, and reproduces human behavior in double dissociation tasks, then it should be treated as conscious.
Erkenntnis
June 1, 2024
Niccolò Negro
The integrated information theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with integrated information, and is often interpreted as endorsing panpsychism—the view that consciousness is a fundamental, widespread feature of reality. This paper argues instead that IIT is better understood as a form of emergentism, which is incompatible with panpsychism. The author shows that the properties of integrated information that seem to support panpsychism—intrinsicality and fundamentality—actually align with emergentism. The paper then analyzes how integrated information can be seen as causally emerging from a physical substrate, depending on the fusion of cause-effect powers of that substrate while being autonomous through global-to-local determination. Consciousness, on this view, is the constraining power of a system as a whole upon itself, emerging from the fusion of its components' powers.
Erkenntnis
January 1, 2022
Clare Mac Cumhaill
A novel anti-sceptical argument against the brain-in-a-vat (BIV) scenario is developed by examining the conditions under which the locative preposition 'in' is produced and used. Two uses of 'in' are distinguished: material and descriptive phenomenological. Movement is central to the concept that use of 'in' expresses. A functionalist semantics of the intelligible use of 'in' demands a materialist philosophy of action in the spirit of G.E.M. Anscombe, but the structure of space is not irrelevant; it unsettles the causal-empirical assumptions grounding the BIV narrative's picture of subjectivity and agency. Finally, functionalist semantics demands a Naïve Realist metaphysics of perception, consistent with some of Putnam's later writings.