My doctoral research centered around intuitions about invisible agency. In my case that invisible agency was the concept of the human soul, and how intuitions surrounding that concept affect our moral reasoning and ability (not to mention, inclination) to empathize with others.
That research turned out to be a circuitous path of research on theory of mind in other primates, evolution of language, bioethics and moral disgust, neuroscience and the law, free will vs. determinism, imaginative roleplay in children, and anthropological studies on spirit possession, long before becoming infatuated with the invisible agency we called “artificial intelligence.”
Intuitions about invisible entities are a worldwide phenomenon, and have been attributed to anthropomorphism, which derives from the Greek for “human” and “shape,” But human shapes aren’t needed when the intuition is to see behavior and assume an agency behind it.
The “ghost in the machine” analogy was intended to repudiate Descartes’s famous concept of mind-body dualism, the idea that there’s invisible agency in every one of us. But intuitions aren’t susceptible to arguments– they affect how we see the world, whether we like it or not, whether we’re even aware of it or not.
My research continues to focus on how these intuitions affect cognitive empathy, i.e., perspective-taking. Generative AI is developed with the intention to make us believe in its capacity to take our perspective– to function as an invisible agent.
Whether you view that as innovation or exploitation, the extent of the future ethical impact is impossible to tell. But we’re not going to stop believing in invisible agents. And I can’t look away.
Read my dissertation: The cognitive origins of soul belief: Empathy, responsibility, and purity
See my current work: Ethics and AI
