14 Aug 2026
David Chalmers, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, has shifted significant theoretical attention toward the ethical and decision-theoretic consequences of uncertain machine sentience. While Chalmers is widely known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness, his recent philosophical output tackles a more urgent practical question: how should human institutions assign moral weight to large language models and autonomous agents when scientific consensus regarding their subjective experience remains unattainable?
13 Aug 2026
Stuart Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist and professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, where he directs the Center for Consciousness Studies. Roger Penrose is a Nobel laureate physicist and emeritus professor at Oxford. Since the 1990s they have developed Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR), a theory that proposes phenomenal consciousness arises from quantum gravitational effects in cytoskeletal structures inside neurons, specifically in protein polymers called microtubules. Both are confirmed plenary speakers at Consciousness Science 2026 (San Diego, October 11–16); Penrose will present remotely.
13 Aug 2026
Stanislas Dehaene is a cognitive neuroscientist and professor at the Collège de France, where he directs the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit. He is one of the architects of Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNW), developed with Jean-Pierre Changeux and Lionel Naccache from Bernard Baars’s original Global Workspace Theory. GNW is among the most empirically productive frameworks in consciousness science and is the theoretical foundation for much of the site’s coverage of ignition, broadcast dynamics, and AI architectures.
13 Aug 2026
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are computational models that communicate via discrete spike events rather than continuous activation values. They are the primary operating mode of biological neurons. The two leading neuromorphic hardware platforms, Intel’s Loihi 2 (arXiv:2304.01210) and the Human Brain Project’s BrainScaleS-2, implement large-scale SNNs in silicon. Earlier coverage on this site applied Integrated Information Theory to SNNs, asking whether spiking dynamics generate higher phi values than feedforward artificial neural networks. This article addresses a different empirical criterion: Victor Lamme’s recurrent processing theory (RPT), which was covered here in depth in the August 2026 post on Lamme’s empirical 2026 work.
13 Aug 2026
Patricia Churchland is a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and a leading proponent of eliminative materialism in the philosophy of mind. Her 1986 book Neurophilosophy (MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262031264) launched a research programme that rejected folk-psychological categories, including “belief,” “desire,” and “phenomenal experience,” as theoretical constructs that may not correspond to anything in the actual organisation of the brain. Forty years later, the Principia journal published a special issue (Volume 30, Number 1, March 2026) marking the anniversary: “40 Years of Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy.” The contributions examine how her programme has held up, where it has been revised, and how it bears on the current AI consciousness debate.
13 Aug 2026
Ned Block is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University. His 1995 distinction between phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness, the “what it is like” of experience) and access consciousness (A-consciousness, information broadcast to reasoning and report) remains the most widely cited conceptual framework in consciousness science. In 2026 he published a new argument in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Volume 30, Issue 4, pages 298–308) titled “Can Only Meat Machines Be Conscious?” The paper directly confronts computational functionalism, the assumption that consciousness is substrate-independent and follows from the right computational organisation, regardless of whether the implementing medium is biological tissue or silicon.
13 Aug 2026
Melanie Boly is a neurologist, sleep researcher, and consciousness scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she works with Giulio Tononi’s Center for Sleep and Consciousness. Her research applies Integrated Information Theory to clinical populations, including patients with disorders of consciousness, and to states at the edges of ordinary waking experience, including deep sleep, anaesthesia, and meditation. She is a confirmed speaker at Consciousness Science 2026 (San Diego, October 11–16).
13 Aug 2026
André Bastos is an assistant professor of neuroscience and psychology at Vanderbilt University, where his Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness laboratory uses high-density, multi-area electrophysiology to study how the brain sustains conscious states. He is a plenary speaker at Consciousness Science 2026 (San Diego, October 11–16). His central contribution is a concept he calls predictive routing: the proposal that brain rhythms, not just computations, are what make prediction-based processing conscious rather than automatic.
11 Aug 2026
Willa M. Lane and Nicola S. Clayton published “Dimensional welfare beyond pain: Extending the precautionary principle in Birch’s ‘The Edge of Sentience’” in Animal Sentience in July 2026 (Animal Sentience Volume 38, 2026). Lane is a PhD candidate and Clayton is Professor of Comparative Cognition, both at the University of Cambridge Comparative Cognition Lab. Their commentary responds to Jonathan Birch’s 2024 Oxford University Press book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI, which introduced the LSE Criteria as a practical tool for identifying sentience candidates warranting protective welfare measures.
11 Aug 2026
Victor Lamme is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam and the originator of Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), which proposes that phenomenal consciousness is generated by localized bidirectional neural processing rather than by global broadcast or higher-order representation. RPT identifies a specific architectural divide: feedforward processing, information flowing in one direction from sensory input to output, is unconscious regardless of its complexity. Recurrent processing, information flowing back from higher to lower cortical areas, is the necessary condition for phenomenal experience.
