The Liberating Conversations Series 2: Getting Minds Right

The series argues that, if our philosophical task is to get minds right, then their terrestrial origins give us compelling reasons to think that computational and functional accounts necessarily fail to capture their most distinctively mental aspects. Such accounts have nevertheless proved remarkably successful in inspiring engineers in their efforts to abstract and mechanise the “skeletal core” of intelligent reasoning. The lectures also seek to clarify how best to understand the natural, biological origins of intentionality and consciousness and the continuity and diversity of minds, while distinguishing what is - and what is not- promising in contemporary enactivist proposals. Building on the preceding discussions, the final lecture shows how we can draw a principled distinction between minded and mindless intelligence, with the latter providing the right framework for understanding artificial intelligence as it exists today.