The Sanity and Selfhood of Other Minds
A special issue of Philosophies (ISSN 2409-9287).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2026 | Viewed by 637
Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to invite you to contribute to a Special Issue of Philosophies dedicated to issues that arise from the discrepancy between the currently dominant views on the philosophy of the mind and recent advances in psychiatry, as well as the tensions in the understanding of subjectivity that have developed since the emergence of large language models and other computation-based simulations of conscious selfhood—which, in turn, are finding their way into psychiatric practice.
On the one hand, it has been decisively established by recent advances in psychiatry that in fully (or almost fully) functional individuals, the internal experience of consciousness can take many different and significantly dissimilar forms—some people have a near-constant verbal internal monologue, while others do not, some people can imagine vivid pictures, while others are unable to, and so on. On the other hand, social interaction often forces people to stretch their mental capacities, as well as to suppress their internal process and to simulate states of mind that they believe they need to exhibit as socially competent human beings. In turn, such simulation has now also been efficiently replicated by large language models, which, despite having no conscious experience, can effectively appear as human agents to unsuspicious interactors.
In spite of this, most current philosophy of the mind is not questioning its axiomatic premises. The human mind is believed to correspond to a prototype that can be analyzed and described in terms of a limited type of thought operations. These can be broken down into minimal linguistically expressible units and modified by propositional attitudes, which again correspond to mental states that are identical in form in all minds in which they occur. This prototype matches the Western mainstream view of what the mind of a person is; deviations from this belong exclusively to the domain of medicine and need not be taken into account in philosophical discussions about the nature of consciousness as such. At the same time, on this view, artificial entities that are able to produce, combine and analyze such thought operations may attain the same level in these activities that currently only characterizes human consciousness. Another axis of tensions is thus created between the conscious self and other minds, which puts the selfhoods of all involved parties in question.
The present Special Issue will be an effort to initiate a broader debate on these issues, presenting a range of viewpoints that engage with the accepted dogma of current discourse, as well as historical movements to break with this dogma. We look forward to discussing topics such as the definition of sanity across a range of mental diversity, efforts to change psychiatric practices on the basis of a renewed understanding of mental health/disorders, different views of the perfectly functional as well as dysfunctional mind in different cultures, the distinction between human consciousness and the quasi-mental activities of artificial entities, and so on. Together, these articles will broaden the horizons of the philosophy of the mind and aim to establish a ground for the dialogue between knowledge gained from different disciplines, all of which approach mental activity from their particular points of view.
Prof. Dr. Rein Raud
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- consciousness
- philosophy of mind
- selfhood
- subjectivity
- definition of sanity
- mental diversity
- other minds
- AI
- philosophy of psychiatry
- psychiatric practices
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