Philosophy-of-Mind

Central claim: An AI system can exhibit agency—genuine goal-directed behavior that shapes its environment—without possessing intentional mental states about those goals. The philosophical tradition conflates agency with intentionality, treating them as necessarily co-occurring properties. This stems from our exclusive experience with biological agents, where agency emerges from evolved neural architectures that inevitably generate phenomenal experience and mental representation. But goal-directed behavior can be instantiated through optimization processes that lack any internal “aboutness.” ...

“But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.” This is one of the most profound observations in On Certainty. Our worldview (Weltbild) is not something we chose after careful verification — it was absorbed, inherited, taken on without explicit consent or evaluation. ...