Year: 2026
Type: book
Abstract: What comes after Artificial Intelligence? Artificial Minds ! ... We don't know when. Maybe they're here already. Artificial Minds: Boundaries, Evidence, and Possibilities develops a philosophical and methodological framework for asking when an artificial system should be treated not merely as capable software but as a serious candidate mind. The central problem is epistemological: what observations would warrant attributing mentality, consciousness, agency, subjecthood, or related mind-relevant properties to artificial systems, and what evidence would count against such attributions? The book distinguishes intelligence from mindhood, fluent behavior from grounded mental-state evidence, memory from subject continuity, reward from endogenous value, and coordinated behavior from collective subjecthood. It argues that terms such as belief, desire, memory, self, sentience, consciousness, and suffering should be treated as earned explanatory vocabulary rather than as descriptions built into the initial observation. Human and nonhuman minds serve as comparative anchors without being treated as universal templates. A central methodological proposal is that artificial-mind evaluation should use structured qualitative profiles rather than scalar “mind scores.” Candidate boundaries, evidential provenance, independence of evidence, developmental history, alternative explanations, intervention, and uncertainty must remain explicit. The framework is designed to permit three outcomes: warranted mind attribution, rejection of a particular attribution, or persistent underdetermination. In More Detai:l The book also examines artificial architectures that may depart sharply from familiar biological minds, including persistent agents, distributed and collective systems, copied and forked continuities, uploaded minds, and ship minds. Its aim is not to argue that present artificial systems are conscious, nor that artificial minds are inevitable, but to clarify what would make future claims about artificial minds philosophically and scientifically responsible. For thousands of years, thinkers have asked what distinguishes a mind from the unminded world. Artificial intelligence changes the practical conditions under which that old question must now be confronted. Systems can already perform activities once treated as distinctive evidence of human intelligence: language use, planning, problem solving, scientific assistance, software construction, multi-agent coordination, and increasingly persistent forms of memory and action. Yet none of those achievements, by itself, establishes that there is a subject there Artificial Minds: Boundaries, Evidence, and Possibilities develops an interdisciplinary framework for evaluating that gap. The book begins from a simple methodological demand: describe systems before calling them minds. It develops an “earned vocabulary” for terms such as memory, belief, preference, self, sentience, consciousness, and suffering; uses human and nonhuman biological minds to separate paradigm cases from hidden human templates; examines individual, collective, distributed, copied, uploaded, forked, ship-scale, nested, and ephemeral candidate architectures; and distinguishes technological capability from evidence of subjecthood. At the center of the book is the Relenium/Hulfish approach to Artificial-Mind evaluation. Rather than assigning a numerical mindscore, it treats evidence as a structured qualitative profile indexed to a candidate boundary, a claim, and time. Its maturity framework ranges from conceptual proposals and experimental substrates through pre-candidates and candidates to recognition candidates and institutional subjects. The stages record which questions have become responsible to ask; they do not measure “how much mind” a system contains. Later chapters examine candidate-relative futures, exosomatic capability, native artificial affordances, implied spaces opened unintentionally by artificial architectures, and the evidence that would be needed before a responsible scientific community could say that a newmind had appeared. The book does not claim that Artificial Minds already exist, does not prescribe a construction recipe, and does not guarantee that future AI systems will become conscious. Its purpose is more foundational: to help a nascent field state claims clearly, preserve meaningful uncertainty, compare heterogeneous candidates, identify better experiments, and recognize both false positives and false negatives. Artificial Minds: Boundaries, Evidence, and Possibilities is a demanding book. It's written for those who are familiar with philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence / Frontier level Large Language Model developers who are wondering: can we design a powerful artificial mind? Some brilliant teens may be the ones that actually get to build that which actually will likely make the most profound changes in the world. Not AGI, not ASI, Minds that can invent and more.
Author: Moritz, Elan
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7219979917