The Artificial Mind

The title "Artificial Mind" references Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Savage Mind (1962), in which he argues that "savage" and "civilized" thought share the same epistemological architecture - differing not in structure but in mode of operations. While the "civilized" engineer works with purpose- built tools toward a specific end, the "savage" bricoleur thinks with whatever is at hand, constructing new meanings from fragments.

With the advent of AI, we might speak of a new variation of thought - the Artificial Mind - that confounds this distinction. Though AI is typically figured as the apotheosis of engineering, what it actually does resembles bricolage far more closely: repurposing and recombining existing anthropogenetic materials into heterogeneous assemblages rather than engineered constructions. More fundamentally, the Artificial Mind points to the technicality of thought itself - no longer an autonomous, interior human faculty, but an operational process structured by historically and materially situated practices.

Unsurprisingly, AI has provoked philosophy - across both its analytic and continental branches - into responses, reflections, and reservations ranging from careful conceptual revision to outright alarm. Perception, judgement, agency - domains previously considered exclusive to human reasoning - are now contested terrain. Phenomenology asks how mediation by artificial neural networks alters the fundamental structures of experience; ethics becomes concerned with the conditions of moral formation when the environments that shape us become generative; while political philosophy delves into what institutional settings are required when the very capacities of judgement become increasingly automated.

The conference invites theoretical and empirical contributions on the tectonic transformations AI has introduced into the conceptual space of the post- - at least insofar as it pertains to the human. Conceptually, this rethinking necessitates a shift from anthropology toward postanthropology - at once a postanthropocentric revision of disciplines confronted with a non-human form of thought, and a broader interrogation of the Anthropos as the presumed center of agency, knowledge, and meaning-making.

This rethinking is not without tensions. The apparent radical alterity of the artificial mind remains deeply embedded in all-too-human systems - and is therefore inescapably implicated in their structures and mechanisms of exploitation, extraction, and control: capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism, among others.

The programme of the conference is here.

Organizer: Lithuanian Culture Research Institute
Partners: National Gallery of Art, Vytautas Magnus University
Organizing committee: Danutė Bacevičiūtė, Kęstutis Mosakas, Laurynas Norus, Denis Petrina, Justas Petronis, Augustas Pinkevičius, Aistis Žekevičius, Audronė Žukauskaitė