Philadelphia Journal of Artificial and Digital Minds

A curated review under the Frontiers of Intelligence initiative · Eagles Perch Press

The Philadelphia Journal of Artificial and Digital Minds is a curated intellectual review devoted to a single, deepening question: what would it mean for something we have made to have a mind? It takes as its broad subject artificial minds in the widest sense — the minds imagined, engineered, feared, and argued over across the history of thought — and treats the digital minds now emerging from large-scale computation as the urgent special case that makes the ancient question suddenly practical. It is the periodical home of the Frontiers of Intelligence initiative: the place where that program’s ongoing thinking appears between books, and where the work of others who take the question seriously is gathered alongside it.

Why Philadelphia

The name is deliberate. This is the city in which the review is edited, and it is also the city in which the electronic mind was born: ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, was completed in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania — some twenty blocks from where these pages are assembled. The review is written, quite literally, in the neighborhood where electronic computation began. To take its name from that fact is not a civic flourish but an orientation: a reminder that the question of the digital mind is not a sudden novelty but the latest turn of an arc that runs, in this city, back to the first hum of the machines that started it — and, in the history of ideas, very much further still. The systems that now prompt us to ask whether a made thing can have a mind are the descendants of a device built within walking distance of this desk, and the review means to think about them with that lineage in view.

Scope

The review takes artificial minds as its general subject and the digital minds of the present moment as its central special case — the instance that has turned an old philosophical question into a pressing one. It is interested in artificial minds under every aspect and from every discipline that can illuminate them: their philosophy, their history, their science, their ethics, and their depiction in literature and imagination. Within that broad field it is especially attentive to the questions the present moment has made unavoidable — whether the systems we are now building understand, or intend, or experience; what self-awareness would amount to in a machine, and by what marks it could be known; what such systems are owed, and what they may be permitted to do; and how the concepts we bring to these questions — intelligence, mind, consciousness, agency, self — hold up, or fail to, when carried across the boundary from the human to the made.

Contributions are welcome from philosophy, cognitive science, computer science and artificial-intelligence research, history and the history of science, law and policy, and the arts, as well as from independent scholars working outside any of these. What the review asks of a piece is not a credential but a contribution: that it advance the understanding of artificial and digital minds, and that it do so with rigor, clarity, and intellectual honesty.

Editorial character

This is a curated review, not a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, and the distinction is a matter of principle rather than of rigor. Its essays are selected and shaped editorially, chosen for the quality and importance of their thinking rather than certified by anonymous referees. The aim is a venue with a discernible intellectual character — a place that argues a case for how these questions should be approached, rather than a neutral container for whatever passes review.

That character is inherited from the Frontiers of Intelligence program, and can be stated plainly. The review believes that much confusion about artificial minds arises from a single source: the words we use — intelligence, understanding, mind itself — fuse together properties that are in fact distinct, so that a claim true of one is quietly carried to another. It favors work that pulls these properties apart: that separates the capacity to achieve goals from the capacity to act, and both from the presence of genuine experience. And it holds a disciplined middle course on the question that animates the field, resisting equally the over-attribution that reads fluent performance as evidence of an inner life, and the under-attribution that dismisses the whole question by appeal to mechanism. The review does not require that contributors share these commitments — disagreement, well made, is welcome — but it is shaped by them, and readers should know the ground on which it stands.

Submissions and correspondence

The review is primarily invited: most contributions are solicited from writers whose work bears on its concerns. It is not closed, however, to the wider conversation. Those with work they believe suited to the review are welcome to write to the editor with a brief description of the piece and its argument. Such correspondence is an inquiry, not a submission, and carries no expectation of acceptance; selection is editorial and final, and a decision not to include a piece reflects a judgment of fit and occasion, not of scholarly merit. The review would rather publish irregularly and well than fill a schedule, and it appears when there is something worth publishing.

Access, rights, and support

The Philadelphia Journal of Artificial and Digital Minds is open access and charges no fees — nothing to read it, and nothing to publish in it. Its contents are freely available to all.

Essays are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-ND 4.0), which allows anyone to read, share, and redistribute a piece in full, for any purpose, provided its author and this review are credited and the text is not altered. This protects the integrity of each essay as its author finished it, which a review of considered intellectual work should do. Authors retain copyright in their contributions, and the review will grant a more permissive license, such as CC BY, on an author’s request — for a translation, for instance, or for inclusion in an adapted collection.

A review that charges no one must be sustained somehow, and readers who value the work are welcome to support it. Any contributions go solely toward the ordinary costs of keeping the review alive and freely available — hosting, production, and the assignment of persistent identifiers. Such support is voluntary and unconditional: it plays no part whatever in what is selected or published, and confers no influence over editorial judgment. The review is free to read, free to publish in, and free of obligation to anyone who helps keep it so.