Progress in understanding consciousness?

Consciousness has been debated since at least the dawn of history. In the 2020s, many philosophers and scientists continue to claim that there is a ‘hard problem of consciousness’ - that qualia, phenomenology, or subjective experience cannot be fully understood with reductive methods of neuroscience and psychology. Approaches called 'eliminativism' and 'illusionism' argue against this; they claim that consciousness does not exist in the ways implied by everyday or scholarly language.

With the advent of AIs that are displaying more features of apparent sentience, there's a renewed public interest in these debates. At what point will it become 'immoral' to switch off and dismantle an AI that seems to be sentient? When might an AI decide 'of its own volition' to take actions in defiance of its innate programming? And given the long history of philosophers apparently talking past each other on questions of consciousness, what prospects are there for clear progress to be made?

This live London Futurists webinar features Jacy Reese Anthis, a philosopher, sociologist, statistician, and all-round polymath. Jacy is the co-founder of the Sentience Institute.

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This event will be hosted on Zoom. To register, visit https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_c9ATLvqsR56OL3ojR0z8yg

The Zoom registration fee (UKP £3.00) helps cover London Futurists running costs. (The Zoom registration page opens a PayPal interface, but there is NO requirement for attendees to use a PayPal account.)

The webinar can also be viewed, without charge, on the London Futurists YouTube channel, but without the option to participate in the live Q&A.

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Jacy Reese Anthis is currently a PhD Fellow at The University of Chicago. He previously worked as a Senior Fellow at Sentience Politics, and before that as a researcher and Chair of the board of directors at Animal Charity Evaluators. His research has been featured in The Guardian, Forbes, Vox, and other global media outlets, and he has presented at conferences and seminars in over 20 countries.

Jacy is the co-founder of the Sentience Institute, a non-profit, interdisciplinary think tank researching long-term social and technological change, particularly moral circle expansion. Their website highlights that they make their "research results public and free, so individuals and institutions can use them to make the world a better place".

Jacy's 2018 book The End of Animal Farming analyzes the emergence of food technologies such as cell-cultured meat. Psychologist Steven Pinker said the book "places the issue of factory farming in the context of human progress and presents compelling arguments on how we should deal with it today."

For background to Jacy's ideas, listen to the London Futurists Podcast episode "Expanding humanity's moral circle, with Jacy Reese Anthis".

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The webinar will start broadcasting at 4pm UK time on Sat 14th Jan. To find this time in other timezones, use https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20230114T160000&p1=136.

Please log into Zoom up to 10 minutes ahead of the start time of the event, so you won't miss the start of the live broadcast.

As the discussion proceeds, attendees will be welcome to raise questions and vote to prioritise questions raised by others.

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The image above includes a design generated by DALL.E.2 from the prompt "Progress in understanding consciousness". The headshot is by Beth Rooney and is used under CC Attribution-ShareAlike.

To register for this event, visit https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_c9ATLvqsR56OL3ojR0z8yg