the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: Mind, Meaning, and End Human Exceptionalism

Artificial intelligence has become very good at trespassing. It writes, argues, draws, codes, explains, advises, imitates, and occasionally lies with the calm confidence of a system that cannot feel embarrassment. Perhaps this is only performance. Perhaps performance is exactly where the problem begins. When a system produces the signs of intelligence, creativity, and self-awareness, we are forced to ask whether those signs are empty - or whether our old tests were never as secure as we thought. For centuries, humans have defended their special status by pointing to language, reason, creativity, morality, selfhood, and consciousness. Then machines arrived and began crossing some of those borders cheaply, quickly, and at scale. The result is not simply a technological revolution. It is a philosophical disturbance. The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: Mind, Meaning, and the End of Human Exceptionalism asks what AI reveals about the mind, and what it exposes about the stories humans tell when they try to protect the category "human." It brings today's AI into contact with Turing's imitation game, Searle's Chinese Room, functionalism, biological naturalism, the hard problem of consciousness, embodied cognition, predictive processing, the other minds problem, machine rights, alignment, bias, and the spread of AI into human work and culture. Can a machine understand, or only imitate understanding? Is consciousness tied to biology, or could it arise in another kind of system? If an AI speaks like a person, creates like an artist, reasons like an assistant, and comforts like a friend, what exactly is missing - and how would we know? This book follows the question without pretending it has already been settled. The hardest issue is no longer what machines can do, but whether anything is happening inside.

Pages: 196, Paperback, Independently published