Can We Make AIs Sentient – and Should We? Solms vs Humphrey Live Debate
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To celebrate the publication of “Perspectives on Machine Consciousness”, we are hosting a live online debate between two of the leading thinkers in the science of consciousness.
Mark Solms is a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst at the University of Cape Town. His book The Hidden Spring argues that consciousness is rooted in feeling, generated deep in the brainstem rather than the cortex. He is now working to build artificial agents that genuinely feel. Drawing on Karl Friston's free energy principle, his agents are driven by homeostatic needs they must regulate to survive, and he takes very seriously the moral questions their success would raise.
Nick Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist, based in Cambridge. Like Mark, he puts feeling above thinking. But in contrast to Mark he considers phenomenal experience to be a function of the cortex. In his recent book “Sentience” he draws a sharp distinction between “cognitive consciousness” which arose early in biological evolution and “phenomenal consciousness” which has arisen much later and is restricted to social animals with the need for a developed sense of self.
They will debate the question: "Can we make AIs sentient – and should we?"
📅 Tuesday 3 November · 6:15 PM GMT / 1:15 PM ET · 45 minutes · Online