Minds and Machines
August 18, 2026
Uwe Peters
Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT) can communicate in strikingly humanlike ways. This has prompted many chatbot users to attribute psychological properties, including consciousness, to these systems. However, there is little scientific evidence that current AI chatbots are conscious. How, then, should we understand people’s consciousness attributions to chatbots? Are...
Minds and Machines
March 19, 2026
Jannis Friedrich, Martin H. Fischer
Predictive processing posits that prediction-error minimization underlies all perception, action, and cognition. Yet, despite its considerable popularity and explanatory scope, it is unclear how this enables higher-level cognitive abilities, such as representing and reasoning over abstract concepts. We combine insights from predictive processing, structural representations and grounded...
Minds and Machines
November 11, 2025
Sara Incao, Alessandra Sciutti, Shaun Gallagher
2 citations
Cognitive architectures are simplified models of complex neural and behavioral processes, designed to equip artificial agents with flexibility and adaptive behavior. To enhance context-awareness and autonomy in humanoid robots, it is essential to address the role of temporality. The temporal dimension extends far beyond its association with memory, encompassing the continuity of self and...
Minds and Machines
January 16, 2023
Jonny Lee
7 citations
Enactivism advances an understanding of cognition rooted in the dynamic interaction between an embodied agent and their environment, whilst new mechanism suggests that cognition is explained by uncovering the organised components underlying cognitive capacities. On the face of it, the mechanistic model’s emphasis on localisable and decomposable mechanisms, often neural in nature, runs contrary...
Minds and Machines
May 3, 2022
Danaja Rutar, Wanja Wiese, Johan Kwisthout
3 citations
Abstract Whilst the topic of representations is one of the key topics in philosophy of mind, it has only occasionally been noted that representations and representational features may be gradual. Apart from vague allusions, little has been said on what representational gradation amounts to and why it could be explanatorily useful. The aim of this paper is to provide a novel take on gradation of...