My research

I’m a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist. My work spans machine consciousness, the moral status of artificial and animal minds, human-AI relationships, and the cognitive science of perception and memory. Recurring threads include consciousness, creativity, intelligence, and what we owe the minds we build or share the world with.

A monograph on the ethics of social AI is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and a trade book on machine consciousness is in development with a major publisher. For a complete and current list, see my PhilPeople and Google Scholar profiles.

Public writing

I write Polytropolis, a Substack on machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, video games, and whatever else catches my attention. A few essays I’d point people to first:

The House Elf Problem — on whether it can ever be acceptable to design AI systems that genuinely love serving us.
Behaviourism’s Revenge — why public attributions of consciousness to AI will likely outpace the science, and what follows.
Contra Chiang on Machine Consciousness — a reply to Ted Chiang on why dismissing AI consciousness as hype gets the dialectic backwards.

→ Read Polytropolis

Under review

Caviola, Keeling, Street & Shevlin. “Human-AI Coexistence.” PhilArchive
Grzankowski, Keeling, Shevlin & Street. “Deflating Deflationism: A Critical Perspective on Debunking Arguments Against LLM Mentality.” arXiv
“Relational Norms for Human-AI Cooperation.” arXiv

Machine minds & AI consciousness

Shevlin (forthcoming). “Aeroplanes Also Fly: Analytic Functionalism and the Possibility of Machine Consciousness – a Reply to Anil Seth.” Behavioral & Brain Sciences. PhilPapers
Shevlin (2026). “Three Frameworks for AI Mentality.” Frontiers in Psychology. Open access
Shevlin (2026). “The Anthropomimetic Turn in Contemporary AI.” The Artificial Intelligence Revolution (eds. Fairfax & Rangeley). PhilArchive
Shevlin (2024). “Consciousness, Machines, and Moral Status.” Humans and Smart Machines as Partners in Thought (ed. Strasser). PhilPapers
Shevlin (2021). “General Intelligence: an Ecumenical Heuristic for Artificial Consciousness Research?” Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Consciousness. PhilPapers
Shevlin & Halina (2019). “Apply Rich Psychological Terms in AI with Care.” Nature Machine Intelligence. DOI
Shevlin, Vold, Crosby & Halina (2019). “The Limits of Machine Intelligence.” EMBO Reports. Open access

Social AI & human-AI relationships

Axelsson & Shevlin (2026). “Disambiguating Anthropomorphism and Anthropomimesis in Human-Robot Interaction.” HRI 2026. arXiv
Shevlin (2024). “Ethics at the Frontier of Human-AI Relationships.” Oxford Handbook of Generative AI, OUP. PhilPapers
Shevlin (2024). “All Too Human? Identifying and Mitigating Ethical Risks of Social AI.” Law, Ethics & Technology. Open access

AI capability, agency & philosophy of science

Shevlin (forthcoming). “Agency & Autonomy in Artificial Systems.” Quaestio. PhilPeople
Srivastava et al., incl. Shevlin (2024). “Beyond the Imitation Game (BIG-bench).” Transactions on Machine Learning Research. arXiv
Vervoort, Shevlin, Melnikov & Alodjants (2022). “Deep Learning Applied to Scientific Discovery.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science. Open preprint
Crosby & Shevlin (2020). “Defining Artificial Intelligence: a Reply to Wang.” Journal of Artificial General Intelligence. Open access

Animal minds, moral status & cognition

Shevlin (2024). “Imagination, Creativity, and Non-human Animals.” Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity, OUP. OUP
Shevlin (2021). “How Could We Know When a Robot Was a Moral Patient?” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. DOI
Shevlin (2021). “Rethinking Creative Intelligence.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science. Open access
Shevlin (2021). “Non-human Consciousness and the Specificity Problem.” Mind & Language. DOI
Shevlin (2020). “Which Animals Matter?” Philosophical Topics. PhilPapers
Shevlin & Friesen (2020). “Pain, Placebo, and Cognitive Penetration.” Mind & Language. DOI
Shevlin (2020). “Current Controversies in the Cognitive Science of Short-Term Memory.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. Open access
Shevlin (2017). “Conceptual Short-Term Memory: A Missing Part of the Mind?” Journal of Consciousness Studies. PhilPapers

Theses

Shevlin (2016). Consciousness, Perception, and Short-Term Memory. Doctoral thesis, CUNY Graduate Center. PDF · CUNY Academic Works
Shevlin (2009). Linking Phenomenal and Access Consciousness: a Case for Sparse Representations. BPhil thesis, University of Oxford. PDF