Artificial intelligence, or AI, is rapidly transforming our society. It is also raising deep questions and profound concerns.
UC Berkeley’s Department of Philosophy is launching a new initiative to bring leading scholars to campus to discuss the most pressing philosophical questions surrounding AI.
Alva Noë (photo by Jim Block)
“There is great public interest in AI,” said Alva Noë, the philosophy department’s chair. “The technology is bringing about change everywhere you look: business, science, art, journalism, and in our daily lives. Exactly what AI is, though, and what it tells us about ourselves — about the mind, consciousness, value, and work — is an urgent, wide-open, and hugely exciting issue for philosophy.”
As a core piece of this new initiative, the department will award the Professor Sarah Douglas Faculty Fellowship to a faculty expert working at the intersection of philosophy, computer science, and AI. The fellowship will support innovative teaching that engages students in contemporary debates on AI, facilitate scholarly research that informs policy and technological development, and help the faculty member coordinate an annual lecture series.
UC Berkeley philosophy professors Geoffrey Lee and Verónica Gómez Sánchez will share the inaugural fellowship. In the future, the fellowship will rotate among faculty members every three or four years.
Lee’s main research interests are metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and the foundations of cognitive science and neuroscience. Much of his work centers around consciousness and the mind-body problem, which involves the relationship between the intangible nature of the mind and the physical realm of the body. Gómez Sánchez’s main research interests lie in the intersection of philosophy of science, metaphysics, and cognitive science. She studies the nature of intentionality and its role in computational explanations in cognitive science.
The two professors are teaching a seminar this semester on the philosophy of AI.
Sarah Douglas
The centerpiece of the department’s public engagement on this topic will be the Sarah Douglas Lectures on Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. Prominent speakers will discuss the most pressing philosophical questions surrounding AI through accessible and engaging discussions, seminars, and annual lectures. By encouraging dialogue on these important themes, the Douglas Lecture will strengthen UC Berkeley’s reputation as a hub for critical discourse.
“The philosophy department is the right place to host this larger public lecture,” said Sarah Douglas, who funded the fellowship and public engagement initiative. “I want everybody to be exposed to these problems and to think about them. For several thousand years, people have developed very provocative questions. This form of inquiry is where philosophy lives.”
Douglas studied philosophy at UC Berkeley because she wanted to explore how computers can recognize meaning, and she felt philosophers would be most qualified to answer what constitutes meaning in the first place. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1966, earned her Ph.D. from Stanford, and continued investigating this question as a professor of computer science at the University of Oregon, becoming a trailblazer in the field of human-computer interaction.
“I tend to ask big, controversial questions,” said Douglas. “At Berkeley, I was able to explore that curiosity. What I learned from the philosophy department was exactly what I needed to understand algorithms in the second wave of AI.”
While ethical considerations are often at the forefront of AI conversations, Douglas emphasized that a full investigation of AI also requires delving into metaphysics (the study of reality and existence) and epistemology (the study of knowledge). This discourse must go beyond technical possibilities and practical impacts to involve deep, philosophical questions, such as: What is knowledge? Can computers actually think, and if so, what differentiates human thinking? Could AI ever be considered conscious? What is personhood, and could AI ever qualify for that distinction?
At present, the rapid development of AI technology is outpacing the speed at which society can adequately consider these questions and their ramifications. The Department of Philosophy’s new public engagement initiative will strengthen UC Berkeley’s role as a hub for discourse in the philosophy of AI in the center of the world’s technological capital region. Douglas and Noë hope the effort will spark renewed dialogue on responsible AI development between academics, industry leaders, and policymakers.
“This generous gift comes at exactly the right moment,” said Noë. “Sarah Douglas had the vision that these philosophical questions, like the dynamic and change-making technology itself, need to be brought into the public space and made the subject of open, critical inquiry. She has made it possible for philosophers here at Berkeley working at the forefront of these areas not only to move forward with their research, but to bring luminaries from around the world to this campus so we bring their engagement, insight, and activism to the greater public.”
The first of the Sarah Douglas Lectures on Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence will be given by influential philosopher David Chalmers, who will speak at the International House on May 7, 2026.
