6th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind: Natural and Artificial Intelligence (6ICPH)

The 6th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind: Artificial Intelligence (6ICPH) brings together researchers, academics, and students working on central problems in philosophy of mind, with this edition placing artificial intelligence at the center of the programme. Hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto (Porto, Portugal), the conference invites dialogue across philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and adjacent fields that take AI as both an empirical phenomenon and a conceptual stress-test for our theories of mentality. The guiding aim is to examine what contemporary AI — especially language-based and multimodal systems — does (and does not) illuminate about understanding, intentionality, representation, rationality, agency, and consciousness. Alongside classic debates (e.g., functionalism, computationalism, connectionism, embodied and enactive approaches), the conference foregrounds questions that have become newly urgent: whether large language models support attributions of semantic competence or merely simulate it; how norms of reasoning and explanation should be reconceived when behaviour emerges from distributed statistical structures; whether artificial systems can participate in social cognition (coordination, trust, testimony, deception) and what this implies for mindreading and second-person interaction; and how reliance on AI tools reshapes human cognition through extended and scaffolded practices (search, writing, memory, attention, and self-interpretation). The event runs in a hybrid format: online sessions on 4–5 May 2026, followed by in-person sessions on 6–8 May 2026 at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto.