This is a short sketch of some central ideas developed in my recent monograph The Prospect of a Humanitarian Arti cial Intel- ligence, published by Bloomsbury, London 2023. The monograph is available open access at library.oapen.org/handle/20.500. 12657/61934. It illuminates the development of AI by examining our drive to live a digni ed life. It uses the notions of agency and attention to consider our pursuit of what is important. It shows how the best way to guarantee value alignment between humans and potentially intelligent machines is through attention routines that satisfy similar needs. Setting out a theoretical framework for AI, the book acknowledges its legal, moral, and political impli- cations and takes into account how epistemic agency di ers from moral agency. Insightful comparisons between human and animal intelligence clarify why adopting a need-based attention approach justi es a humanitarian framework. This is an urgent, timely argu- ment for developing AI technologies based on international human rights agreements.

In this article I show how Hans Blumenberg offers a positive but also more nuanced approach to the question of indeterminacy than current algorithmic systems, whilst offering a corrective to its potential metaphysical drifts and dangers. Much of Blumenberg's work addresses the same question at the heart of the digital namely how to address that which eludes conceptual capture. For Blumenberg theoretico-rational procedures will always be incomplete in addressing a radically contingent, unpredictable world. Born deficient, man also needs "life-worlds" to orient us and shield us from the absolutism of reality. Digital life-worlds are possible to the extent, however, that they remain  fictional mental constructs rather than aspire to be "literalized" and compete with reality. Deployed properly, life-worlds - in which such strategies as myth, rhetoric, pensiveness and more generally the art of detour play a crucial role and provide with the constant possibility of interruption and disruption - do not make up for self-reinforcing and enclosed loops but allow for reflexibility, distance and criticality. Instead of seeking to control reality and eliminate contingency - futile tasks to begin with - they offer exible and resilient constructs that also cultivate the human realm.

Homo sapiens encapsulates peculiarities otherwise unseen in the biosphere: self-consciousness, language, reason, altruism, and extensive cultural inheritance - traits sometimes labelled "the human syndrome". The topic has mainly been studied along two separate pathways: along cognitive or along bodily features. However, the upcoming concept of embodied cognition o ers a suitable pathway to explore how mind and matter interact. By means of phenomenology, this conceptual paper explores the human syndrome as a systemic mind-body interaction over evolutionary time.
The essential crossroad of hominin evolution is verticalization of the spinal cord and bodily uprightness. This habit poses a challenge to the traditional adaptationist program, as it comprises substantial anatomical drawbacks. Uprightness, moreover, is not solely maintained by neuromuscular reflexes but by conscious involvement, too. Human locomotion is a psychophysical dance, culturally induced and actively maintained by the balancing self. From supporting the trunk in quadrupeds, forelimbs became hands and arms, as tools serving the mind.
Verticalization also favored enhanced awareness of three-dimensionality of the environment and deliberate use of forelimbs to manipulate it. Release of forelimbs was in turn decisive for uncoupling respiration from locomotive functions, as a conditioner for language, which emerged from gestural expressions during the homo erectus period. Finally, language became the prelude for the upper Palaeolithic cognitive transition to reason and representation, as recognizable in cave art.
Upright posture, language, and reason accordingly summarize the nested evolutionary history of hominins, where each competence became precursor for the next: Uprightness gave birth to language, which in turn became the pathway for reason. Finally, verticalization emerges as the ultimate reason for ethical conceptions, accomplished as beauty, truth and goodness.

Physicalists typically believe that neurophysiology has refuted the thesis that non-physical minds can interact with the brain. In this paper, I argue that it is precisely a closer look at the neurophysiology of volitional actions that suggests otherwise. I start with a clarification of how the present inquiry relates to the main argument for physicalism, and how the most common alternative views relate to the  findings of my study. I then give a brief overview of the neurophysiological research about volitional actions, finding that there is no research specifically directed at the pertinent question. I proceed by pointing out what it would take for a complete physical explanation of volitional actions to be true: namely a complete physical explanation of the increase in the firing rate of the neurons with which the sequence leading up to volitional actions starts. Since no dedicated research about this question is available, I offer a study of the known mechanisms of neuronal excitation as a substitute, finding that there is no plausible biochemical or physical mechanism that could explain the causal initiation of volitional actions - at least none that upholds energy conservation. But non-conservation is precisely what interactive dualism, in its most plausible version, predicts. Thus, rather than buttressing physicalism, our empirical knowledge of volitional actions points toward interactive dualism.