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🧠 AI consciousness: myth, reality, or an emergent inevitability?
🧠 What is the ontological relationship between the mind and brain?
🧠 Will EMs be conscious or will they be digital zombies?
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About
Future Day 2025 Panelists: Ken Mogi, Ben Goertzel & Robin Hanson
Panelists will discuss the philosophical question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) could ever achieve consciousness or sentience, essentially “waking up” and becoming self-aware, which is currently considered highly speculative and beyond the capabilities of existing AI technology; while AI can mimic human behavior and perform complex tasks, true consciousness with emotions and self-awareness remains a major mystery in the field, making the idea of AI “waking up” a topic of debate among scientists and philosophers.
Participants: Ben Goertzel, Ken Mogi, Robin Hanson
Ben Goertzel is a leading figure in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research and has a computationalist, emergentist, and optimistic view of AI consciousness. His work is centered on developing AI that is not just narrowly intelligent but capable of general cognition, self-reflection, and possibly consciousness. Goertzel believes that AI does not need to be biological to be conscious, the AI may end up having completely alien consciousness – evolving far beyond human intelligence and in the process, discover and embody varieties of Ben Goertzel types of consciousness.
Ken Mogi is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author with a strong focus on qualia, the nature of consciousness, and the role of embodied experience in cognition. His views on AI consciousness are deeply influenced by neuroscience, Japanese philosophy, and the role of subjectivity in intelligence. Ken believes consciousness is deeply tied to subjective qualia, which AI may struggle to replicate, that consciousness is deeply tied to embodiment, sensory feedback, and lived experience and that AI may develop a different kind of subjective experience, possibly not human-like consciousness.
Robin Hanson, an economist and futurist, approaches AI consciousness from an economic, evolutionary, and game-theoretic perspective rather than a philosophical or cognitive science angle. His work primarily focuses on the implications of AI minds rather than their underlying nature. Hanson’s book The Age of Em (2016) explores a future where brain emulations (“Ems”)—exact digital copies of human brains—become dominant. These emulations would function as fully conscious, economically productive digital minds, replacing most human labor. Hanson believes that the most likely route to AI consciousness is not AGI, but direct emulation of human brains.
Chaired by Adam Ford – futurist, Data architect, engineer, analyst & programmer, convener of conferences, blogger at scifuture.org, host at YouTube channel Science, Technology & the Future -with over , IEET scholar, founder of H+ Australia.
Start time
JST UTC+09 AEDT UTC+10 PST UTC-08 EST UTC-05 GMT UTC+0
March 1st 12:30 March 1st 14:30 Feb 28th 19:30 Feb 28th 22:30 March 1st 03:30
How to join
For active participation (asking questions etc) join via these links: day 1 & day 2 to get the appropriate link. Also see the Facebook event. If just lurking, you can tune in via this YouTube streaming link.
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