Phenomenology and artificial intelligence: introductory notes

The new developments in the field of artificial intelligence raise many different philosophical questions that can profoundly change our thinking about various mental concepts, such as what it means to be a conscious subject, how perception works, how humans interact with their environment via their bodies, and so on (cf.Andler, 2006;Froese & Ziemke, 2009).Interestingly, the recent 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics Award was attributed John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton for their work on artificial neural networks, which are considered the foundations of the many machine learning techniques that are being used today.The interesting take is that Hopfield's motivation to develop his method was to actually describe and understand how the human brain works (specifically, how memories are stored and retrieved), using several mental concepts and mental analogies to describe how the algorithm worked (Hopfield, 1982).Oddly enough, these new developments -from machine learning tools to deep learning algorithms and generative AI models -have not been the primary focus of philosophical deliberation (with some exceptions, such as Buccella & Springle, 2022), even though more traditional AI has certainly been considered in the past by several theorists such as Dreyfus (1972Dreyfus ( , 1992)), who contended that computers lack embodied capabilities related to our lived experience of the world, Ihde (1990) who claimed that technology is not neutral but shapes our subjective experience of the world, or Gallagher (2005), who argues that the embodied cognition paradigm,