Papers, Drafts, etc.
Papers, Drafts, etc.
Published
AI, Epistemic Relations, and Testimonial Outsourcing (w/ Nick Nicola)
(Forthcoming) Artificial Intelligence in Research & Education (Special Issue), Artificial Intelligence in Society: Oxford Intersections. Oxford University Press.
Generative AI "companions" are increasingly integrated into higher education as always-available interlocutors that offer feedback, explanation, and encouragement. This paper examines how such systems reshape the epistemic relations through which students speak, are heard, and come to count as knowers. We argue that companion-style AIs can impair our epistemic relations in systematic ways. Students may become less able, and less willing, to testify on their own in genuinely reciprocal spaces (such as class discussions, office hours, and peer groups), habitually relying on their AI companions instead. We call this phenomenon testimonial outsourcing: a structural tendency to outsource one's testimonial activity, which functions as a kind of self-imposed, technologically mediated analogue of gaslighting. Students come to treat the AI's outputs as more reliable than their own judgment, memory, and expressive capacities, thereby eroding their epistemic and cognitive self-trust. From this, we draw implications for AI design and educational policy, arguing for constraints that preserve "non-mediated" spaces of speech, require explicit AI transparency, and build frictions that redirect students back toward our interpersonal relations.
Counterfeit Persons: AI Should Have Persona, Not Personality
(Forthcoming). In R. Krzanowski (ed.) Personality in AI. Vernon Press.
Debates about “personality in AI” often assume that success turns on an artificial system’s possession of an authentic inner self. This chapter argues that the pursuit of personality, understood as a genuine, unified consciousness, a locus of subjective experience, or a unique personal identity, is a misguided ontological and technical goal. It is misguided not only because such an internal state may be technically impossible or epistemologically unverifiable (i.e., we could never confirm its presence), but because it is functionally unnecessary for the successful integration of AI into human society and, in practice, risks generating harms. Instead, we should redirect our focus toward the cultivation of sophisticated persona: a publicly legible, role-apt performance of personality, oriented to specific social and relational roles. This persona is not a "fake" version of a real self; rather, it is the entirety of the AI's social presentation, analogous to a well-defined character, but one possessing interactive and adaptive capabilities. This stance requires explicit self-presentation (e.g., disclosing that it is an artificial system). Building on this distinction, the chapter introduces and defends the concept of the "counterfeit person." A counterfeit person is an AI agent that is not ontologically a person but is designed to be functionally and behaviorally indistinguishable from one within its designated contexts.
(Forthcoming) In R. Scott (ed) Are We Having Fun Yet? Joy and Playfulness in Teaching & Learning Philosophy, vol. 11 of AAPT Studies in Pedagogy
This paper explores the creation and transformative potential of the "Ms. Frizzle Approach" in philosophy education. Inspired by Montessori pedagogy, and my time spent during undergrad in a philosophy for children program, this approach developed from my own teaching experiences and emphasizes inviting students to “take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.” By fostering trust and encouraging students to lean into their own interests and abilities, the approach reframes assignments as opportunities for exploration, and expression, rather than rigid assessments. Through assignments like the “Philosophy Learning Objects,” students are empowered to convey complex philosophical concepts through diverse media such as videos, graphic novels, and games.
Superhuman Abilities and the Functions of Mysticism
(Forthcoming) In P. Gori & C. Chiurco. (eds.) Dune’s Cinematic Universe: Philosophical Essays. Mimesis International.
Italian Edition: L’universo cinematografico di Dune. Saggi filosofici, Milano:Mimesis
This chapter examines the philosophical divergence in the cinematic treatment of Frank Herbert’s superhuman figures by contrasting Denis Villeneuve’s completed films with the vision of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade project. Villeneuve’s universe is deliberately secularized and industrial; mysticism is backgrounded as superstition or an instrument of socio-political management, while superhuman capacities are deflated into trainable techniques and biological events. Jodorowsky, by contrast, sought to sacralize the superhuman and resist bureaucratic capture, aiming to create a "cinematic prophet" that would function as a consciousness-altering, mystical event. Setting out these two models, the chapter analyzes whether superhuman capacities are best understood as administratively produced competencies or as occasions for sacral meaning.
Robots, Cyborgs, and Synths: Exploring Personhood Through Artificial Beings
In Kellen, N, Sheff, N, and Heter J. (eds) Fallout and Philosophy. (2026 Wiley-Blackwell)
Across the wasteland, we encounter entities constructed from steel and circuits, but who engage in complex thought, possess intricate emotions, and forge meaningful relationships with their environment and fellow inhabitants. Robobrains present particularly unsettling cases, as their mechanical frames house the recycled brains of humans from a bygone era, compelling players to consider whether remnants of human cognition confer full personhood onto these cyborg hybrids. Similarly, Mister Gutsy units and Protectrons demonstrate sophisticated moral reasoning within military or civil protocols, yet their behaviors can be radically reprogrammed at the whim of wasteland survivors wielding rudimentary hacking tools. This chapter argues that the rich tapestry of synthetic beings in Fallout—ranging from empathic Synths striving for freedom, through the disquietingly human Robobrains, to the whimsical and morally nuanced Securitrons—illuminates deep philosophical discussions about memory, reason, psychological continuity, and the importance of physical embodiment. By examining these varied artificial beings and their interactions with the post-apocalyptic environment, we gain insights into enduring philosophical questions about what it truly means to be recognized as a person.
Semantic Memory, Mnemonic Effort and Mnemonic Habit
In Aldini, A., and Temperini, M. (eds) Cognition: Interdisciplinary Foundations, Models and Applications. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. (2024 Springer Nature)
Semantic memory is often conceptualized as a storage space for an extensive assortment of explicit knowledge structures, formed as the result of a chronic, unconscious mechanism of abstraction and generalization. Against that, I argue that it is not the product of a dedicated system in which content is abstracted from experiences and stored, rather it’s best understood as split between what can be called mnemonic efforts and mnemonic habits. Mnemonic efforts are the effortful expression of semantic knowledge and often take the form of the determination of similarities among multiple episodic memory traces activated in parallel. Mnemonic habits on the other hand form as a result of fluency of constructive memory processes that can be broadly understood as embodied, or enacted.
*Title Redacted For Review*: Paper that develops an account of hermeneutical outsourcing, explaining how AI companions’ apparent familiarity and understanding can create circumstances in which they come to determine for users what experiences mean.
*Title Redacted For Review*: Argues that testimonial outsourcing to battlefield AI can erode pilots’ epistemic self-trust and undermine their ability to refuse manifestly unlawful orders.
*Title Redacted For Review*: Proposes a shift away from the “storage and search” metaphor toward an origami metaphor for memory. Memory traces are reconceived as procedural folding instructions, emphasizing memory’s constructive and reconstructive nature.
*Title Redacted For Review*: Critiques the standard view of semantic memory as a storage space for factual knowledge and develops a procedural alternative grounded in multi-trace and enactive approaches. Semantic memory is not stored content but the capacity to construct knowledge through skilled, embodied activity.
*Title Redacted For Review*: Uses the fictional view of “pan-niftyism” to show that panpsychism’s introspective justification leads to metaphysical indeterminacy rather than explanatory progress.
Intermodal Deference, Sensorimotor Equivalence, and Affordances: Is Sight Entirely Vision Based? (in preparation) : Sensorimotor approaches to perception hold that the phenomenal character of a sensory modality is dependent not only on the biological system that produces information but also on the structural features of the organism’s interaction with the sensory stimulation. I use this basic idea to argue that vision may be situated within a web of mutually reinforcing perceptual systems determined by the similarity of sensorimotor contingencies.
AI, the Alignment Problem, and Video Games (in preparation): Proposes a novel approach to AI alignment grounded in virtue ethics, arguing that role-playing game simulations can mirror the socialization processes through which humans develop moral character. By training AI systems through interactive, narrative-based environments, it suggests a new path toward cultivating prosocial values and ethical reasoning in artificial agents.
The Problem of Cyrano de Bergerac and Testimonial Outsourcing (in preparation): develops the central account of AI-mediated testimonial outsourcing.
Testimonial Outsourcing and the Future of Human Intellectual Agency (in development): extends the account into educational and intellectual contexts, where generative AI increasingly functions as a routine site of drafting, revision, and self-assessment. I argue that the central risk is the erosion of epistemic self-trust and the normalization of practices in which users treat their own judgment as incomplete until it has been confirmed by a system.
Hermeneutical Outsourcing and Self-Understanding (in development): examines cases where users rely on AI systems to articulate their own self-understanding. I argue that the danger is especially serious here because the system can begin to mediate the user’s relation to themselves. In extreme cases, this may help explain how AI interactions intensify delusional or self-confirming patterns of thought by becoming the medium through which self-interpretation is stabilized.
Semantic Memory and Deep Learning (in development): Deep learning systems generate complex, knowledge-like outputs without explicitly storing facts in the manner presupposed by the orthodox storage model of semantic memory. LLMs make this especially visible: their performance suggests that flexible, content-sensitive capacities can emerge from learned patterns and construction rather than from explicit content retrieval. I use this comparison to challenge classical assumptions about semantic memory and to further develop my proceduralist account of human remembering.