Consciousness seminars

Could an artificial agent develop an operational first-person perspective through its own interaction history? This talk considers embodied systems that predict, receive feedback and integrate multiple modalities through global-workspace-like dynamics. Using the Conscious Turing Machine framework, it proposes that an agent-centred world model can acquire a temporally organized point of view. The discussion connects that structural proposal with enaction and neurophenomenology without establishing subjective experience in machines.

Nick Bostrom and Brian Greene examine how increasingly capable artificial intelligence challenges familiar accounts of human creativity, originality and consciousness. They discuss whether machine creativity differs fundamentally from human creativity and what evidence could bear on the possibility of subjective experience in AI systems. The conversation also considers Bostrom’s concerns about systems that recognise when they are being evaluated and change their behaviour, and the resulting difficulty of assessing alignment. It then turns to a hypothetical future in which automation removes much instrumental work: what would give human lives purpose, and would the elimination of practical problems suffice for a worthwhile life? The discussion includes education, human agency and the distinction between pleasurable simulated experience and engagement with reality.

Reports collected after waking offer an imperfect account of dreams because memories fade and are reconstructed. This seminar uses states that combine features of sleep and wakefulness to examine ongoing mental activity more directly. Sleep talking, REM behaviour disorder, lucid dreams and hypnagogia provide windows onto memory processing, emotion, imagined threats and creativity.

Note the later time in the USA!