The Vocabulary of Mind Under Capture: A Structural Diagnostic of Cognitive Concepts in AI Discourse

Summary

Intelligence, understanding, reasoning, and other mental concepts are being redefined through six specific fallacies—Hard Conflation, Concept Hollowing, the Stolen Concept, Package Dealing, Floating Abstractions, and the Anti-Concept—so that they apply to AI systems while discarding the phenomenal (subjective) aspects originally part of these concepts. Using intelligence as a central example, the argument shows that genuine intelligence requires registration, which requires an interior aspect, which is what phenomenal consciousness names; thus intelligence depends on consciousness. The contemporary view that AI is intelligent yet AI consciousness is intractable is maintained only by capturing both concepts in parallel. An eight-stage account describes how this captured vocabulary becomes the norm for understanding human cognition, erasing resources for recognizing phenomenal experience.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper extends the structural diagnostic developed in a companion paper (Barnes 2026d) from the concept of consciousness to the broader vocabulary of mind. Intelligence, understanding, reasoning, knowing, learning, attention, memory, creativity, agency, intention, and meaning are all undergoing parallel captures through six structurally distinct fallacies: Hard Conflation, Concept Hollowing, the Stolen Concept, Package Dealing, Floating Abstractions, and the Anti-Concept. Each concept was originally indexed to features of human and animal cognition with both phenomenal and functional aspects. The capture hollows the phenomenal aspect while preserving the linguistic vessel, allowing the redefined concept to apply to AI systems that share only the functional features. Intelligence serves as the worked example throughout, with each of the six fallacies traced in operation. A structural argument follows: intelligence properly understood requires registration, registration requires an interior aspect to the system, and an interior aspect is what phenomenal consciousness names. Intelligence, therefore, requires consciousness as substrate. The contemporary discourse maintains incompatible positions (AI is intelligent, AI consciousness is intractable) only through the parallel captures of both concepts. The paper concludes with an eight-stage account of the cultural inversion: how the captured vocabulary becomes the standard for understanding human cognition itself, and how the phenomenal features of human experience lose the conceptual resources that would let them be recognized. A programme for recovering the vocabulary is sketched.