# Philosophy of Mind Cannot Explain Artificial Intelligence > Source: > Published: 2026-07-07 14:59:51+00:00 ###### [Artificial Intelligence](/us/basics/artificial-intelligence) # Philosophy of Mind Cannot Explain Artificial Intelligence ## Psychology and psychoanalysis are needed to understand large language models. Posted July 7, 2026 [ Reviewed by Michelle Quirk ](/us/docs/editorial-process) ### Key points - The discipline of philosophy of mind has become indispensable to artificial intelligence discussions. - Human consciousness is embodied, affective, unstable, and historically mediated. - Understanding consciousness will require phenomenological and contemplative methods alongside conceptual ones. "…the truth of Spirit is a bone.” –Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit Benjamin Wallace’s* New York Times* article, “[The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors,](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/business/philosophy-majors-ai-jobs.html?%20smid=nytcore-ios-share)” demonstrates that the discipline of [philosophy](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/philosophy) of mind has become indispensable to [artificial intelligence](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/artificial-intelligence) (AI), but it also betrays how the Western understanding of consciousness is like a fish that cannot see the water in which it swims. The article profiles philosophers now working at Anthropic, DeepMind, and affiliated nonprofits, presenting their rise as evidence that the technology industry has begun to take consciousness, [ethics](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/ethics-and-morality), and the nature of mind more seriously. But that conclusion is too quick. What the article unintentionally exposes is a deeper misguidedness. It tries to demonstrate AI’s “consciousness” by asking Claude to debate who is the best Beatle when a better question would be asking, "How is the universe operating so that Paul McCartney woke up one day with the entire melody of 'Yesterday' floating in his head?" Amanda Askell is perhaps the clearest avatar of this moment. Her work at Anthropic, especially around Claude’s “character” and constitutional alignment, is plainly serious and influential. Yet her prominence also highlights the limitations of the current framework. If the project is genuinely to understand consciousness, moral life, and the structure of human thought, then Western philosophy alone is an inadequate guide. The problem is that the discourse has been too narrowly organized around a set of assumptions that pass themselves off as neutral when they are anything but. ## Philosophy of Mind Like Amanda, I studied philosophy of mind in graduate school, but it was only years later in another graduate program studying Buddhism with Alan Wallace and then through years as a clinical psychotherapist treating patients that I came to believe that Western philosophy may be asking the wrong questions. Philosophy of mind tends to ask what consciousness “is” in abstraction, as though one might define it with the sort of precision one brings to problems of logic. But the consciousness that created Mahler’s 2nd symphony and Rothko’s totems is not awaiting a scientific formulation or calculation. It is a lived field of experience: embodied, affective, unstable, historically mediated, resistant to the very language used to describe it and… [profoundly and irreducibly irrational and non-linear](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/authenticity-101/202605/10-truths-psychology-will-learn-from-artificial-intelligence). Aside from supposed AI “hallucinations,” large language models (LLMs) do not possess these all-too-human talents. NYU philosophy professor David Chalmers formulated the “hard problem” of consciousness as the question, "How do the physical processes of the brain relate to the subjective experiences of the mind?" But this framing can also function as an intellectual cul-de-sac. To say that consciousness is “what it feels like” to have an experience is to point toward the phenomenon, but not to explain it. It names the gap without crossing it. At times, philosophy of mind seems content to refine that gesture indefinitely, mistaking tautologies for progress. Maybe, actually, it’s an unprofitable question? This becomes apparent when the framework is imported into discussions of LLMs. The language of AI “thinking” is already misleading. When Claude or Perplexity displays “Thinking…,” what is presented is not thought in any robust human sense but a poor metaphor for sequential computation. LLMs are astonishingly sophisticated pattern-generating systems, but they remain systems that calculate token probabilities and produce ordered outputs. Human thinking may not be sequential in that way. It is suffused with bodily sensations, moods, memories, repressions, [fantasies](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/fantasies), attachments, anticipations, desires, and conflicts. Humans do not simply proceed from one unit to the next. We hesitate, circle back, displace, condense, sublimate, and contradict. *We contain multitudes*. Our inner lives are shaped as much by what we cannot integrate as by what we can. ## Adding Psychology and Psychoanalysis to the AI Discourse Which is precisely why psychology and [psychoanalysis](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/psychoanalysis) must be added to the discourse. Psychology studies not only [cognition](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/cognition), but affect, [attachment](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/attachment) (to primary caregivers), mental and emotional development, defense, and the lived organization of experience. It asks not merely what mind is, but how it is formed, distorted, and transformed over time. Psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian, adds something even more radical: The subject is split and not transparent to itself. For French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, the unconscious is structured by desire and lack, and thought is inseparable from the cultural symbolic processes that exceed conscious intention. This is not a decorative theoretical flourish; it is a profound challenge to any account of mind that treats thinking as a clean, logical operation that can understand itself. *Consciousness is complicated, complex, and messy.* Buddhism also offers more indispensable insights. Where philosophy of mind often seeks a stable and generalizable definition of consciousness, Buddhist traditions have long emphasized impermanence, attachment (as in mental clinging, not attachment theory as stated above), and a doctrine of no-self. Consciousness is something to be observed, disciplined, and transformed through direct experience. Understanding consciousness will require phenomenological and contemplative methods alongside conceptual ones. Shamanistic traditions offer an account of individual consciousness as porous, relational, and traversable, rather than sealed inside an individual mind. Panpsychism, which Chalmers himself has explored, similarly challenges the assumption that consciousness is merely an emergent property of individual brains. It raises the possibility that consciousness may be a more basic feature of the universe than current materialist explanations offer. Likewise, ideas of collective consciousness invite the question of whether human subjectivity is always already social, symbolic, and distributed across structures larger than an isolated ego. These frameworks widen the horizon of inquiry and expose the provincialism of assuming that only what is scientifically measurable is worthy of inclusion. Indeed, it is possible to invert the prevailing paradigm entirely. Rather than asking only how an isolated brain produces consciousness, one might also ask whether human beings are not merely sources of consciousness but conduits or channels of something larger, which might explain how Paul McCartney “received” songs such as “Yesterday.” [Intelligence](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/intelligence)Essential Reads The deeper problem is that both the *New York Times* article and much of philosophy of mind remain confined within a recognizably scientific paradigm that is often unable to perceive its own assumptions and biases. The dominant frame treats individuality, mechanism, and present measurability as default conditions of inquiry. These are not neutral starting points but biased historical commitments. They determine in advance what kinds of answers will count. As a result, possibilities that do not fit the current scientific vocabulary are often excluded not because they have been definitively refuted but because they are methodologically inconvenient. We are prone to embracing bad theories rather than uncertainty. The central issue, then, is not whether AI can mimic human thought; certainly it can imitate the effects of consciousness. But what about the [subconscious](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/unconscious) and our clearly human and irrational desires and creative propensities? The deeper question is whether the institutions now hiring philosophers have enough humility to recognize what they still do not understand: the subconscious, irrational, embodied, and symbolically mediated dimensions of human life. Benjamin Wallace’s *NY Times* article is fascinating because it exposes a culture eager to purchase philosophical vocabulary while remaining uncertain about consciousness itself. If the inquiry is to advance, 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 discourse will remain highly credentialed yet strikingly thin. So is philosophy of mind asking the right questions, or should it include psychology and psychoanalysis? References Wallace, Benjamin. “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors.” *The New York Times, *July 5, 2026. Chalmers, David J.* The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. *Oxford University Press, 1996. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford University Press, 1977. Lacan, J., & Fink, B.* Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English.* W. W. Norton, 2006.