I am a philosopher of mind and cognitive science and Senior Research Lead at Eleos AI. My current work is on mental capacities and attributes that could ground moral status in AI, such as consciousness and agency. I try to work out which capacities and attributes matter, what it would take for AI systems to have them, and how we can test for them.
These topics are interesting because they involve exploring both the potential of AI and the mechanisms behind the experiences that matter to us. They are also important: it is plausible that some AI systems will be moral patients soon, so we need to prepare for this possibility. Although there are many hard questions in this area, I am optimistic about the potential of philosophical and interdisciplinary research to make valuable, practical progress.
From 2021 to 2025 I was a researcher at the University of Oxford, first at the Future of Humanity Institute and then the Global Priorities Institute. I spent the first half of 2021 conducting research on AI alignment, thanks to a grant from Survival and Flourishing, and from 2017 to 2020 I was a Teaching Fellow at King's College London. Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp from 2016 to 2017, and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford from 2014 to 2017.
In 2015 I completed my Ph.D. in Philosophy at King's College, London, where I was supervised by David Papineau and Nick Shea.
My email address is patrick.butlin {at} gmail.com and my Google Scholar page is here.
