AI-powered platforms for mental health delivery are scaling rapidly into contexts previously governed by trained human practitioners—without empirically grounded frameworks to guide their ethical deployment, manage adverse effects risk, or address the structural design failures that make them harmful to vulnerable populations. This constructivist grounded theory study examined how expert...
Abstract Technology is feared to foster alienation, and may even come to control us through superintelligence. Yet this fear is exacerbated by a reductionist assumption that humans are defined mentally by their intelligence. Human consciousness is broader than intelligence, but how does it actually function? This article will suggest that these two problems of technological alienation and...
Recent proposals in neuroscience and philosophy suggest that coarse-grained computational functionalism may suffice for artificial consciousness. However, I argue that even if such accounts are right, there is no reason to assume that consciousness so realised would, by default, be valenced. On a naturalistic conception of value, valence—the affective quality of subjective...
As artificial agents display increasingly sophisticated emotion-like behaviors, frameworks for assessing whether such systems risk instantiating consciousness remain limited. This contribution asks whether synthetic emotion-like control can be implemented while deliberately excluding architectural features that major theories associate with access-like consciousness. We propose architectural...
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...
Abstract This discussion paper argues that brain–computer interface (BCI) technology provides empirical evidence for substrate-independent consciousness. Beginning from physicalist premises, I draw on neuroscientist Jon Lieff’s research showing consciousness operates at molecular levels where biological and mechanical distinctions dissolve. Examining ordinary speech reveals consciousness...
This paper critically analyses the “attention economy” within the framework of cognitive science and techno-political economics, as applied to both human and machine interactions. We explore how current business models, particularly in digital platform capitalism, harness user engagement by strategically shaping attentional patterns. These platforms utilize advanced AI and massive data...
Ai & SocietyOctober 28, 2025Omer Chomski2 citations
Abstract Meditation has been a cornerstone of Buddhism for millennia, yet its adoption in Western culture increasingly intertwines spirituality with digital technologies. Neuro-meditation devices, which employ neurofeedback and brain stimulation to enhance meditative states, are now promoted as tools that democratize meditation by flattening its learning curve and enabling real‐time progress...
Many think that a specific aspect of phenomenal consciousness-valenced or affective experience-is essential to consciousness's moral significance (valence sentientism). They hold that valenced experience is necessary for well-being, or moral status, or psychological intrinsic value (or all three). Some think that phenomenal consciousness generally is necessary for non-derivative moral...
In philosophy of mind, zombies are imaginary creatures that are exact physical duplicates of conscious subjects for whom there is no first-personal experience. Zombies are meant to show that physicalism-the theory that the universe is made up entirely out of physical components-is false. In this paper, I apply the zombie thought experiment to the realm of morality to assess whether moral agency...
In the past few years, the subject of AI rights-the thesis that AIs, robots, and other artefacts (hereafter, simply 'AIs') ought to be included in the sphere of moral concern-has started to receive serious attention from scholars. In this paper, I argue that the AI rights research program is beset by an epistemic problem that threatens to impede its progress-namely, a lack of a solution to the...
Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as...
Some thinkers have claimed that expert performance with technology is characterized by a kind of disappearance of that technology from conscious experience, that is, by the transparency of the tools and equipment through which we sense and manipulate the world. This is a claim that may be traced to phenomenological philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but it has been influential in...