Fission-Fusion AI: Concepts of Cognition and Ethics in AI - Ethics in AI Lunchtime Research Seminars Week 5

Status: This talk is in preparation - details may change

This invited talk will explore with participants the ways in which changing understandings of human cognition holds implications for ethics in AI. ‘Fission-fusion’ describes the merging and diverging of the concepts, entities and processes that together compose our minds, selves and world (Anderson 2015, 2023). What are the implications for AI of insights into the entanglement of our minds and selves with the world? I will outline definitions and debates in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science on 4E Cognition (the embodied, embedded, enacted and extend cognition) on which the fission-fusion framework builds, and analyse their implications for our development of ethical forms of AI.I will argue that research from across the arts and humanities, spanning classical antiquity to our contemporary world, invites a recalibration of our understanding of what composes intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Key concepts I propose and focus on are ‘freedom of thought’ and ‘value distribution’ (Anderson 2025).