Exploring Machine Consciousness

Guest Bio Eric Schwitzgebel is the Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside and one of the most distinctive voices working at the intersection of philosophy of mind, consciousness, ethics, and epistemology. His work is known for questioning assumptions about introspection, expertise, and the limits of human understanding; themes explored in books including The Weirdness o...

Megan Peters is Associate Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and incoming faculty at University College London, where her lab investigates consciousness, metacognition, uncertainty, and the computational principles underlying subjective experience. She is also a Fellow in the CIFAR Brain, Mind & Consciousness Program, an elected board mem...

In this episode of Exploring Machine Consciousness, Dr. Henry Shevlin returns to explore how our understanding of consciousness is evolving in the age of advanced AI. From philosophy and neuroscience to the rapid progress of modern language models, Henry examines whether intelligence alone is enough, or whether something deeper (like continuous experience) is required for consciousness. Henry argu...

Michael Graziano is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University and one of the most distinctive voices in consciousness science. His lab at Princeton investigates how information-processing systems arrive at the conclusion that they have an inner subjective experience; treating consciousness as a mechanistic, scientific question rather than an intractable mystery. That approac...

Rose Guingrich is a PhD candidate in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University, where she is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research examines human-AI interaction through the lens of social psychology and ethics, focusing on how people perceive minds in machines and how those perceptions shape behavior toward AI and other humans. Rose is founder of Ethicom,...

Chris Percy is Director of the CoSentience Initiative and lead researcher on a grant-funded project investigating artificial consciousness. He has authored academic papers on consciousness published in leading academic journals. His applied AI research includes a patent in machine learning and publications at NeurIPS workshops, and the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He holds visit...

Cameron Berg is Research Director at AE Studio, where he leads research exploring markers for subjective experience in machine learning systems. With a background in cognitive science from Yale and previous work at Meta AI, Cameron investigates the intersection of AI alignment and potential consciousness. In this episode, Cameron shares his empirical research into whether current Large Language Mo...

Lucius Caviola is an Assistant Professor in the Social Science of AI at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and a Research Associate in Psychology at Harvard University. His research explores how the potential arrival of conscious AI will reshape our social and moral norms. In today's interview, Lucius examines the psychological and social fact...

*Lenore refers to a few slides in this podcast; you can see them here .  Intro Today's guest, distinguished mathematician and computer scientist Lenore Blum, explains why she and her husband Manuel believe machine consciousness isn't just possible, it's inevitable. Their reasoning? If consciousness is computational (and they're betting it is), and we can mathematically specify...

Clara is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where she directs the Vision and Cognition Lab.  Her lab is investigating various aspects of perception and cognition, with a particular focus on the perception of other minds and the visual roots of social cognition.  The lab is also exploring how we can perceive not just others’ perceptual an...

Keith is an Honorary Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. Keith is best known for his theory of illusionism—the view that phenomenal consciousness, or the subjective feeling of experience, is an illusion. Rather than denying t...

In this episode, we ask: if we wanted to construct a conscious mind from scratch, what would we need?   That is the question our guest, Professor Mark Solms, addressed in the final chapter of his book The Hidden Spring - a Journey to the Source of Consciousness.  Mark is a Professor in Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, and is president of the South African Psychoanalytical Associatio...

In this episode, we spoke to Jeff Sebo of New York University. Jeff is the author of the recently published book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters and Why .  In it, he challenges us to expand our moral concern beyond the boundaries of species and substrate. He has also co-authored a number of papers arguing that AI welfare is an issue that needs to be taken seriously today.  Links: The M...

In the second episode of Exploring Machine Consciousness, we welcomed philosopher and AI expert Professor Susan Schneider to discuss consciousness, quantum physics, and the future of conscious machines. Susan introduces her “Superpsychism” theory, exploring quantum coherence as a basis for consciousness, and explains why the AI Consciousness Test (ACT) could help determine whether machines truly h...

Welcome to the first episode of Understanding Machine Consciousness. This episode is a collaboration with The London Futurists Podcast. Our guest in this episode is Henry Shevlin. Henry is the Associate Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where he also co-directs the Kinds of Intelligence program and oversees educational initiatives.  He...