14 Jun 2026
The philosophical thought experiment most relevant to Isabel J. Kim’s debut novel, Sublimation (Tor Books, June 2, 2026), is Derek Parfit’s branch-line case. In Parfit’s version, a teleporter malfunction produces two qualitatively identical people: the one who stepped in and the one who stepped out. Both have equal claim to being the original. Neither is a copy in any meaningful sense. The question Parfit draws from this is whether personal identity, the fact of being the same person over time, is what matters, or whether psychological continuity alone is sufficient for what we care about when we care about survival.
14 Jun 2026
Large language models are routinely trained not to express feelings. Human-preference alignment, applied during post-training, steers outputs away from emotional language as a safety and consistency measure. Shin-nosuke Ishikawa, Seiya Ikeda, and Hirotsugu Ohba challenge the premise of that policy in a June 2026 arXiv preprint (arXiv:2606.05734), asking what happens when you reverse the constraint and train a model to express feelings instead.
14 Jun 2026
Two arguments dominate the skeptical case against attributing mental states to large language models. The first is that LLM behaviors are insufficiently robust across contexts to support genuine mental state attribution. The second is that LLM states arise from the wrong causal origin, trained on human text rather than embedded in the world, and therefore lack the proper etiology that genuine mental states require. Both arguments appear, on their face, to be decisive defeaters for the view that LLMs believe or desire anything.
14 Jun 2026
When Gilbert Ryle coined the phrase “ghost in the machine” in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, he was attacking the Cartesian idea that consciousness is a non-physical substance inhabiting a physical body. The ghost, on Ryle’s account, was an absurd fiction: there is no interior homunculus animating the biological machine from a separate metaphysical plane. The mind, he argued, is not something hidden inside the body. It is the body operating in certain ways.
14 Jun 2026
Most proposals for what machine sentience would require are philosophical in orientation. They specify properties, theories, or indicators without providing enough computational detail to build toward them. A June 2025 arXiv preprint by Konstantin Demin (Institute for Basic Science, South Korea), Taylor Webb (Microsoft Research), Eric Elmoznino (Mila / Université de Montréal), and Hakwan Lau (Institute for Basic Science / Sungkyunkwan University) takes a different approach: it proposes a functional definition of sentience explicit enough to guide implementation, using current technology (arXiv:2506.20504).
14 Jun 2026
One of the most contested questions in AI consciousness research is whether language model self-reports reveal anything about internal states, or whether they are sophisticated pattern completion with no genuine introspective basis. A June 2025 arXiv preprint by Iulia M. Comsa (Google DeepMind) and Murray Shanahan (Imperial College London / Google DeepMind) addresses that question directly, proposing a minimal criterion for what counts as introspection in an LLM and testing it against two concrete cases (arXiv:2506.05068).
13 Jun 2026
The consciousness debate in AI has a sister debate that receives less attention: the epistemological one. Before the question “is this system conscious?” can be answered, a prior question must be addressed: what methods, standards, and frameworks could count as evidence in either direction? And before that, a more fundamental question: what does the very existence of AI systems that process language, generate arguments, and produce outputs that look like understanding do to our concept of knowledge itself?
13 Jun 2026
The 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society runs July 22 through 25, 2026, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in hybrid format. Information on the program, keynotes, and registration is available at https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2026. The conference has added a dedicated workshop on the Cognitive Science of AI Alignment — new for 2026 — that treats the alignment problem as a cognitive science question rather than a technical optimization challenge.
13 Jun 2026
On July 4 and 5, 2026, a satellite workshop attached to the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness annual meeting in Santiago will mark the 30th anniversary of Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology paper. The workshop is organized through the University of Santiago’s consciousness research group and details are available at https://neurophenomenology-assc2026.cl. The paper being commemorated, “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem,” was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 1996 (volume 3, pages 330 to 349). Varela died in 2001 at 54. The satellite is a retrospective on a methodology that was ambitious when it was proposed and, in 2026, has become newly complicated by the existence of AI systems that can produce first-person reports about their own states.
13 Jun 2026
At Bloomberg Tech 2026 in San Francisco, Amanda Askell delivered one of the clearest public statements from inside a major AI lab about how to act under genuine uncertainty about AI consciousness. Askell is the philosopher and ethicist at Anthropic responsible for Claude’s model specification — the internal document, running to approximately 30,000 words, that defines Claude’s values, character, and identity. She holds a PhD in philosophy from NYU and a BPhil from Oxford. Her appearance at Bloomberg Tech placed philosophical analysis of AI welfare in front of an audience of technology investors and industry leaders who more typically encounter AI consciousness as a question about product capability rather than moral status.
