I’m Andrew L. Smith, MD, a psychiatrist at the University of Ottawa and The Ottawa Hospital, and a clinician-investigator at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. My academic publications include a 2023 paper on metaphors in large language models in PLOS Digital Health and methodological work in Molecular Psychiatry. I’ve also written in literary registers, including a 2013 humanities piece in CMAJ and a 2020 CBC News opinion piece.
About this Substack
Minds and Conjectures is where I self-publish pieces shorter than a book chapter and aimed at a wider audience than a journal article. The range is named in the tagline: minds in the clinic, in philosophy, in machines.
Some pieces are empirically grounded: close-readings, methodological notes, observations from clinical practice. Others are philosophical, drawing on consciousness research and the embodied-mind literature. Others engage directly with AI systems and the people who build and study them. These pieces share a voice; topic varies.
Contact
You can reach me by email at contact@andrewlsmith.md. I read everything; I don’t always reply quickly.
