Consciousness

The philosophy books of 2026 in three words: consciousness, prophecy, artificial state

Look at the year's leading books together and a pattern emerges. Pollan maps consciousness; Véliz argues that prediction is an instrument of power rather than of knowledge; and Lepore puts a name to whatever is displacing the nation-state: the Artificial State.

Fog ahead: we will not know whether machines are conscious in time

The argument of Eric Schwitzgebel's book, out from Cambridge in August, cuts against both camps: consciousness in artificial systems is neither obviously impossible in the near future nor obviously inevitable. The real difficulty is that the moment we have to decide will arrive long before the moment we could know.

Luciano Floridi, Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith

The welfare of the machine: a new Cambridge book asks the question early

Geoff Keeling and Winnie Street's book in the Cambridge Elements series sets out, in orderly fashion, a question with no answer yet: can an artificial intelligence system have welfare, and if it can, what follows for us? One author works at Google — a detail that explains where the book stands.

The argument over the moral status of AI moves into the philosophy journals

A paper in Philosophical Studies asks whether an artificial superintelligence might hold a moral status higher than our own. The division beneath the field is coming into focus: does consciousness depend on biological structure, or on function?

After John Searle: what does the Chinese Room say today?

John Searle, one of the most argued-over figures in the philosophy of language and mind, died on 17 September 2025 at the age of 93. The thought experiment at the centre of the AI debate is still his.

New paper from Chalmers: who are we talking to when we talk to language models?

The philosopher who named the 'hard problem' of consciousness asks whether what we converse with is the model or a character the model is enacting. He does not close the door on machine consciousness.

David Chalmers

Schwitzgebel and Pober: consciousness may not be specific to carbon

A study in Philosophers' Imprint argues that consciousness is 'substrate flexible': it could arise in silicon- or sulphur-based structures that carry enough complexity.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Jeremy Pober