My research

I am a philosopher of mind and cognitive science, with specialisations in artificial intelligence and animal minds. Recurrent topics in my work include consciousness, perception, short-term memory, and the psychological measurement of pain and suffering.

I am currently a Research Associate with the Kinds of Intelligence project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. I am founder and convener of the Kinds of Intelligence Reading Group, and served as lead organiser for our 2018 Varieties of Mind conference, a role I will be reprising this year for the 2020 Kinds of Intelligence 3.0 conference with my colleague Dr Alexandria Boyle.

I am a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence  and Consciousness, and a former Chair of the Student Committee of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2016-2018). I am also serving as Guest Editor for the Spring 2020 volume of Philosophical Topics, which will focus on non-human consciousness.

Manuscripts under review

1. Negative valence, felt unpleasantness, and animal welfare.
2. Uncanny Believers: Uncanny believers: chatbots, beliefs, and folk psychology.

Publications

1. Shevlin (forthcoming). Rethinking creative intelligence: comparative psychology and the concept of creativity. European Journal for Philosophy of Science.
2. Shevlin (forthcoming). Non-human consciousness and the specificity problem. Mind & Language.
3. Shevlin (forthcoming). How could we know when a robot was a moral patient? Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.
4. Shevlin (2020). Current controversies in the cognitive science of short-term memory. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.
5. Shevlin (2020). General intelligence: an ecumenical heuristic for artificial consciousness research? Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Consciousness.
6. Crosby & Shevlin (2020). Defining Artificial Intelligence: a reply to Wang. Journal of Artificial General Intelligence.
7. Shevlin & Friesen (2020). Pain, Placebo, and Cognitive Penetration. Mind & Language.
8. Shevlin (2019). Qualia and ‘raw feels’. In Introduction to Philosophy of Mind, H. Salazar (ed.).
9. Shevlin, Vold, Crosby, & Halina (2019). The Limits of Machine Intelligence. EMBO Reports.
10. Shevlin & Halina (2019). Apply rich psychological terms in AI with care. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(4), 165–167.
11. Bhatnagar et al. including Shevlin (2018). Mapping Intelligence: Requirements and Possibilities. In Muller, V. C., ed., Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence 2017
12. Shevlin (2017). Conceptual Short-Term Memory: A Missing Part of the Mind? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 24(7–8), 163–188.
13. Shevlin (2017). The Lower Bounds of Desire. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 24(5– 6), 251– 258.

Manuscripts under review

Animal suffering and felt unpleasantness: a sensory-motivational account 

The Varieties of Categorization and the Perception-Cognition Debate 

Other writing

GPT-3: A Digital Remix of Humanity (2020). Daily Nous.

AI reflections in 2019 (2020). Nature Machine Intelligence.

A Lack of Understanding: Storytelling for Robots (2019). Litro Magazine.

Brutality Is Common in Video Games, but Not Sexual Violence. Why? (2018). Aeon.

Doctoral and Masters theses

Consciousness, Perception, and Short-Term Memory (Doctoral Thesis)

Linking phenomenal and access consciousness: a case for sparse representations (BPhil thesis)