I work in the philosophy of AI, mind, cognitive science, and ethics. At the broadest level, I am interested in consciousness and thought. Questions I think about include: does thought have its own phenomenal character? What’s the relationship between what thoughts feel like and what they are about? How does our capacity for conscious thought relate to certain normative properties, such as our well-being or moral status? Could machines, or systems like large language models, ever have conscious thoughts like ours, and how would that effect how we should treat them? Does overattributing mentality to machines misdirect moral attention from AI ethical issues affecting humans? What’s the connection between conscious thought and certain psychological capacities we have, e.g., working memory? What format does thought have, and does that format contribute to its phenomenology?
publications grouped by topic
AI mentality and AI ethics
Lennon, P. (2026.) How Seriously Should We Take AI Welfare? Constraints From the Epistemology of Consciousness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 113(2): 441–452. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70148 [preprint] [journal]
Lennon, P. and A. Curtis-Trudel. (forthcoming). Are LLMs In-Between Believers? In S. AbuMusab and J. Symons (eds.), Agency in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Bloomsbury. [preprint]
Curtis-Trudel, A. and P. Lennon. (forthcoming). Mechanistic Interpretability and Representationalism about Belief. Philosophy of AI. [preprint]
in progress
a paper on the value of conscious thinking and the harm of cognitive offloading thinking to AI
a paper critically evaluating Anthropic’s hypothesis that the J-space is a global workspace architecture
Making the Empirical Case for Cognitive Phenomenology
Lennon, P. (2024). Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought Chauvinistic? American Philosophical Quarterly 61(3): 199-213. [preprint] [journal]
Lennon, P. (2023). Aphantasia and Conscious Thought. In U. Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind vol. 3: 131-155. [preprint] [OUP page]
in progress
a paper on the science of working memory and consciousness
a paper on consciousness and representational format (with Mason Westfall)
The Value of Conscious Thought
Lennon, P. (2026). The Value of Cognitive Experience. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2026.2669935 [preprint] [journal]
in progress
a paper on the relationship between the science of consciousness and the value of consciousness
Defending the Phenomenal Intentionality of Thought
Lennon, P. (2025). Cognitive Phenomenology: In Defense of Recombination. Inquiry 68(2): 483-512. [preprint] [journal]
Lennon, P. (2024). Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought Chauvinistic? American Philosophical Quarterly 61(3): 199-213. [preprint] [journal]
Lennon, P. (2023). In Defense of Cognitive Phenomenology: Meeting the Matching Content Challenge. Erkenntnis 88: 2391-2407. [preprint] [journal]
in progress
a paper on phenomenal intentionality and working memory
a paper responding to Goff’s (2018) cognitive fine-tuning problem
The Nature of Belief
Smithies, D. P. Lennon, R. Samuels. (2022). Delusions and Madmen: Against Rationality Constraints on Belief. Synthese 200: 1-30. [preprint] [journal]
in progress
a paper on the parallels between philosophy of science and the cognitive science of belief (with Joseph Sommer)
Social and Political Philosophy of Sport
Piscataway, New Jersey 2025