This talk will offer a set of criteria by which a system may be judged to be cognitive or not, testing it against minimally cognitive biological lifeforms such as unicellular organisms and plants. The candidate criteria should admit implicit and nonconscious cognition and distinguish between adaptation and cognition. The criteria will then be applied to AIs, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). The talk will conclude with examples of how well LLMs are able to understand and interpret a complex literary text, Henry James “The Figure in the Carpet.”

Speaker: N. Katherine Hayles

Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles; the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences