Mind and brain
3 open questions · 5 papers · 2014–2026 · oldest first
Start here
What minds are, whether a machine could have one, and what changes them.
Ours, not the authors'.
Where the field disagrees
How to read this part.
Each question below is one the field is arguing about now. Under it are the views, one sentence each, in our words, and the people whose dated claims sit under each one, in theirs. Learn the arguments before the answers: being able to say why two serious people disagree is most of understanding a field. Nobody is filed under a view; their claims are, so somebody can appear under two. Tap a view to check it against the exact words.
Can a machine be conscious?
An old question that got loud again in October 2026: is anything we have built conscious, and could it ever be?
- Today's AI is not conscious, is not sentient and cannot suffer
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A machine lacks what consciousness is made of: life, a body, an inner loop that binds it in time
François CholletGergely OroszNoah SmithAnil SethNick CaveNick Lane
- Nobody knows what consciousness is, so whether a machine has it is unclear even in principle
- Settling it needs a measurement, and the measurements do not exist yet
- What a machine does and what it is owed can be argued without knowing what it feels
- Nothing ties consciousness to carbon, so a machine can have it
- The frontier models may already have some form of experience
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Consciousness is something a physical system does, real even though it is not fundamental
Sunil PaiSamuel HammondStephen WolframSara WalkerSean CarrollJames Gleick
- Feeling evolved to do a job: it tells an organism how it is doing and decides where reasoning stalls
What makes psychotherapy work?
They all treat people for a living and disagree about which part of the hour does the work.
- The person delivering the therapy matters more than the method, and what they do is a skill that can be seen and trained
- The evidence behind the recommended methods is narrower than the label on them suggests
- Nothing lands until the nervous system settles, so the body comes before the insight
- What the clinician supplies is containment and a name for the thing, and that is itself the treatment
- Change arrives when somebody sees the pattern they are repeating and recoils from it
Does empathy make us better?
- Empathy is the core skill for anyone who leads or makes things for other people
- Empathy is a poor guide: it narrows to the few and the near, and people overrate their own
- Caring from a step away works better than feeling what others feel
- It can be learned, and some ways of building it work far better than others
Who to read first
The voices we picked out on these 3 questions, then anyone else on record about several of them. The number is how many of the questions they are on, not a ranking of who is right.
- François Chollet
- Scott D. Miller
- Paul Graham
- Noah Smith
- Jonathan Shedler
- Satya Nadella
- Anil Seth
- Terry Real
- Paul Bloom
- Nick Lane
- Arielle Schwartz
- Nick Cave
- Samuel Hammond
- Tyler Cowen
Ways of thinking this field uses
Mental models that keep turning up in these arguments. Our pick; each page holds the claims behind it, in the words of whoever said them.
- The map is not the territory Every model, word or plan is a simplified map of reality; useful when its structure matches, misleading when mistaken for the thing itself.
- Cognitive biases Your mind jumps to conclusions and defends them; look for the evidence against you and use checklists.
- Active ingredients, not brands What makes a treatment work is the process it sets in motion and the person delivering it, not the name on the box. Compare the mechanism and the practitioner, not the brand.
- What counts as evidence A label like evidence-based can describe what was studied rather than what works. Who was compared with what, and how long the treatment ran, decide what a trial can show.
The shape of the field
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2014
Robin Carhart-Harris · in the archive · 4 korrents
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2019
REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics
Karl Friston, Robin Carhart-Harris · in the archive · 5 korrents
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2022
Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change (with 1 co-authors)
Adam Mastroianni · in the archive · 4 korrents
People badly misjudge how Americans' opinions on big social issues have shifted over decades, usually thinking there's been far more change toward liberal views than the polls actually show.
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2025
The Rumpelstiltskin effect: therapeutic repercussions of clinical diagnosis (with 1 co-authors)
Awais Aftab · in the archive · 3 korrents
Just putting a medical name on someone's suffering can ease it all by itself, no pills or therapy needed—like in the fairy tale where guessing the name frees you.
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2026
Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood (with 6 co-authors)
Anil Seth · in the archive · 3 korrents
Integrated information theory tries to measure consciousness by taking basic features of experience as its starting point and turning them into a number any physical system can be scored on.
5 of these 5 papers are in this archive, with quotes you can check — those are the linked ones. The rest are here so the timeline is the field's shape rather than ours: they carry no quote, no link and no claim beyond their title, authors and year, and the one-line notes are ours, about what each paper did rather than what anyone believes.
What you can read here
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Robin Carhart-Harris · 3 Feb 2014 · 4 korrents
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2 REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics
Karl Friston, Robin Carhart-Harris · 20 Jun 2019 · 5 korrents
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3 Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change (with 1 co-authors)
Adam Mastroianni · 7 Mar 2022 · 4 korrents
People badly misjudge how Americans' opinions on big social issues have shifted over decades, usually thinking there's been far more change toward liberal views than the polls actually show. These mistakes can lend support to policies people might reject if they knew the real history of opinions, and can even turn imaginary trends into real ones. It reports survey results matching people's guesses about long-term attitude shifts against actual polling data, and finds the errors stem from a shared stereotype that today is much more liberal than the past.
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4 The Rumpelstiltskin effect: therapeutic repercussions of clinical diagnosis (with 1 co-authors)
Awais Aftab · 22 Aug 2025 · 3 korrents
Just putting a medical name on someone's suffering can ease it all by itself, no pills or therapy needed—like in the fairy tale where guessing the name frees you. This means diagnosis itself can act as a treatment, so doctors should watch for its help and harm and researchers should study it directly. It is an argument describing a neglected phenomenon, drawing on folk tales, patient reports and studies of labels and placebos, and calling for proper investigation.
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5 Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood (with 6 co-authors)
Anil Seth · 13 Apr 2026 · 3 korrents
Integrated information theory tries to measure consciousness by taking basic features of experience as its starting point and turning them into a number any physical system can be scored on. Much of the criticism aimed at it attacks things it does not actually claim, though it has real problems of its own: the number has never actually been computed for a real system, only stood in for, and it does not yet fit the physics we have. It is a position paper separating the fair objections from the unfair ones, and arguing the theory would need rewriting in terms of continuous fields to sit alongside fundamental physics.
Where to go next