Charlotte Blease

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74 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 2 Aug

Charlotte Blease’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Could AI be conscious? · 2 Aug 2026 podcast

So one particular theory is functionalism.

So it's not specifically identifying a mental state with a physical state, perhaps a neural state, but it's more something like the structure of that state.

So in other words, it's the right configuration that matters.

So it's more like structure over or form over content in a certain sense that gives rise to consciousness.

So that's functionalism.

So the idea would be that you don't necessarily need cellular biology, but you could have silicon configured in a particular way that could give rise to multiple ways in which you could realise.

But that's one particular theory.

I'm only calling you that.

You're very welcome.

So Alan picked up on the point about anthropomorphism, which is the idea, and another philosopher, Daniel Dennett, focused on this a lot too, this idea of we adopt what he called the intentional stance philosophy.

meaning that we tend to impute that there's beliefs and desires to all kinds of artifacts and phenomena in our environment.

People tend to wallop the printer that doesn't work and curse it, smoke alarms and all kinds of things.

But I think there's a really serious point here about large language models because of the rapidity of the responses, the fluency of the responses and how compelling they are

mean that we really do tend to anthropomorphize these devices.

And that might be the bigger risk right now than thinking about them having consciousness as we know it, that we tend to sort of view them in our own image.

So, well, that's very seductive.

But I would sort of, to get to the point of are machines currently, or large language models currently conscious,

I agree with Kevin.

It's more a case of that they've got to be sort of multimodal.

They've got to be embodied in some sense in an environment.

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