“…the truth of the soul is a bone.” ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
Benjamin Wallace’s New York Times article, “Revenge of philosophy majors,” shows that the discipline of philosophy of mind has become essential to artificial intelligence, but also betrays how the Western concept of consciousness is like a fish that cannot see the water in which it swims. The article profiles philosophers who are now working on anthropology, deepmind, and enabling technology presented as their non-profit, technology as their non-profit. Ethics, and the nature of mind more seriously but the conclusion that Involuntarily reveals a deeper confusion by asking Cloud who is the best Beatle to question what McWort’s whole world was like. “Yesterday” floats in his head.
Amanda Askell is perhaps the most obvious incarnation of the moment. His work on Anthropic, particularly around Claude’s “character” and constitutional alignment, is clearly serious and influential. Yet its prominence also highlights the limitations of the current framework. If the project is truly to understand the structure of consciousness, moral life, and human thought, Western philosophy alone is an inadequate guide. The problem is that the discourse is too narrowly organized around a set of assumptions that pass themselves off as neutral when they are something.
Like Amanda, I studied philosophy of mind in graduate school but it wasn’t until years later in another graduate program studying Buddhism with Alan Wallace and then through years of clinical psychotherapy with patients that I came to believe that Western philosophy was asking the wrong questions. The philosophy of mind asks what “consciousness” is in the abstract, as if one can define it with a precision that raises the problem of logic. But the spirit that produced Mahler’s 2nd Symphony and Rothko’s Totem does not await scientific formulation or calculation. It is a living field of experience: embodied, emotional, unstable, historically mediated, resistant to the language used to describe it and… profoundly and irrevocably irrational and non-linear. Aside from supposed AI “hallucinations”, LLMs don’t possess all these super-human talents.
Amanda’s dissertation advisor, NYU philosophy professor David Chalmers, formulated the “hard problem” of consciousness as to how the physical processes of the brain relate to the subjective experience of the mind. But this framing can also serve as an intellectual cul-de-sac. To say that consciousness has an experience of “what it feels like” is to point to the phenomenon, but not to explain it. It names the gap without traversing it. Sometimes, philosophy of mind seems content to refine that gesture indefinitely, mistaking tautology for progress. Maybe, in fact, it is a non-profit question?
This becomes clear when the framework is imported into the discussion of the LL.M. The language of AI “thinking” is already confusing. When clods or confusions exhibit “thought…”, what is represented is not thought in any concrete human sense but rather a weak metaphor for sequential computation. LLMs are surprisingly sophisticated pattern-generating systems, but they remain systems that compute token probabilities and produce ordered outputs. Human thinking may not be that consistent. It is filled with physical sensations, moods, memories, repressions, imaginations, attachments, expectations, desires and conflicts. People do not simply progress from one unit to another. We hesitate, circle back, displace, concentrate, ecstasy, and conflict. We contain multitudes. Our inner lives are shaped as much by what we can put together as by what we cannot. In fact, I suggest that Amanda hires a philosopher of language for every philosopher of mind she hires. Before we begin to define consciousness we need to define how language relates to thought.
That is why psychology and psychoanalysis must be included in the discussion. Psychology studies not only cognition, but also affect, attachment (with primary caregivers), mental and emotional development, defenses, and lived organization of experience. It asks not just what the mind is, but how it is formed, distorted and transformed over time. Psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian, adds something even more fundamental: the subject is divided and not transparent to itself. For Lacan, the unconscious is constituted by desire and lack, and thought is inseparable from the cultural symbolic process that transcends consciousness. This is not a rhetorical theoretical development; This is a profound challenge to any account of mind that treats thought as a clear, logical operation that can understand itself. Consciousness is complex, complicated, messy.
Buddhism offers more essential insights. Whereas philosophy of mind often seeks a stable and generalizable definition of consciousness, the Buddhist tradition has long emphasized the doctrines of impermanence, attachment (as in mental clinging, not attachment theory as stated above), and non-self. Consciousness is something that is observed, disciplined, and transformed through direct experience. Understanding consciousness will require conceptual approaches as well as phenomenological and contemplative approaches.
Shamanistic traditions describe personal consciousness as porous, relational, and transcendable rather than sealed within an individual mind. Panpsychism, which Chalmers himself explored, similarly challenges the idea that consciousness is merely an emergent property of the individual brain. This raises the possibility that consciousness may be a more fundamental feature of the universe than current materialist explanations suggest. Similarly, concepts of collective consciousness invite the question of whether human subjectivity is always social, symbolic, and distributed across larger structures than an isolated ego. These frameworks widen the horizons of inquiry and expose the provincialism of the notion that only what is scientifically measurable is worthy of inclusion.
In fact, it is possible to completely reverse the conventional paradigm. Rather than asking how an isolated brain creates consciousness, one might also ask whether humans are not just the source of consciousness but the conduit or channel of something larger, which might explain how Paul McCartney “received” songs like “Yesterday.”
The deeper problem is that both the New York Times article and much philosophy of mind remain confined to an accepted scientific paradigm that is often incapable of realizing its own assumptions and biases. The dominant frame considers personality, process, and current measurability as default conditions of inquiry. These are not neutral starting points but biased historical commitments. They determine in advance which type of answer will be counted. As a result, possibilities that do not fit the current scientific vocabulary are often excluded not because they have been conclusively disproved, but because they are methodologically inconvenient. We tend to accept bad theories rather than uncertainty.
The central issue, then, is not whether AI can imitate human thinking; Of course it can mimic the effects of consciousness. But what about the subconscious and our clearly human and irrational desires and creative tendencies? The deeper question is whether the institutions that are now employing philosophers have the humility to recognize what they do not yet understand: the unconscious, irrational, embodied and symbolic mediation of human life. Benjamin Wallace’s NY Times article is interesting because it reveals a culture willing to buy into philosophical vocabulary while being uncertain about consciousness. If the investigation is to progress, it will require a broader frame—one that includes psychology, psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and other speculative paradigms such as shamanism, panpsychism, and collective consciousness. Otherwise, the speech will remain highly credentialed but attractively thin. So what is Amanda Askell asking the right question?
Previously published substack
