Exploring Machine Consciousness
Exploring Machine Consciousness is a podcast from PRISM, the Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines. It examines whether machines could ever be genuinely conscious and what that possibility would mean for science, ethics, and society. Episodes dig into the research and open questions surrounding artificial sentience and its implications. More information about the organization's work is available at prism-global.com.
Episodes
17. Soenke Ziesche: Does Moral Concern Require AI to be Conscious?
Soenke is the author of Digital Minds 1.0: AI Welfare, Ethics, and Beyond and co-author of Considerations on the AI Endgame: Ethics, Risks and Computational Frameworks. He has worked with the United Nations since 2000 and is a member of UNESCO’s AI Ethics Experts Without Borders network. His research examines what recognising digital minds as beings of moral concern would mean in practice, includi
16. Heather Alexander: AI Rights and Legal Personhood
Heather is a lawyer and scholar of nationality, citizenship and statelessness. She began her career as an asylum lawyer with the UN Refugee Agency and spent fifteen years working on statelessness around the world. Her book on the nationality rights and legal identity of nomadic peoples was published by Oxford last year.Heather brings that background to the emerging debate over the legal status of
15. Eric Schwitzgebel: Exotic Minds and the Design Policies for Conscious AI
Guest BioEric 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 of
14. Megan Peters: Metacognition, Neuroscience, and Tests for AI Consciousness
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
13. Henry Shevlin: Past, Present, and Future of AI Consciousness
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 argues
12. Michael Graziano: Is Conscious AI Safer Than The Alternative?
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
11. Rose Guingrich: AI Companions, Chatbots, and the Psychology of Human-AI Interaction
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,
10. Chris Percy: Computational Functionalism, Philosophy, and the Future of AI Consciousness
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
9. Cameron Berg: Why Do LLMs Report Subjective Experience?
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 Mod
8. Lucius Caviola: A Future with Digital Minds? Expert Estimates and Societal Response
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
7. Lenore Blum: AI Consciousness is Inevitable: The Conscious Turing Machine
*Lenore refers to a few slides in this podcast; you can see them here. IntroToday'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 tho
6. Clara Colombatto: Perceptions of Consciousness, Intelligence, and Trust in Large Language Models
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 and
5. Keith Frankish: Illusionism and Its Implications for Conscious AI
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 th
4. Mark Solms: Engineering Consciousness – Can Robots "Give a Damn?"
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 Association.
3. Jeff Sebo: AI Sentience, Welfare and Moral Status
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 Moral
2. Susan Schneider: Organoids, LLMs, and tests for AI consciousness
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 ha
1. Henry Shevlin: Anticipating an Einstein moment in the understanding of consciousness
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 r
