11 Aug 2026
Terry Sejnowski is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and one of the founders of computational neuroscience. His 1986 paper with Geoffrey Hinton and David Rumelhart, “Learning Representations by Back-propagating Errors” (Nature, DOI:10.1038/323533a0), introduced backpropagation as a practical learning algorithm and launched the deep learning research program that now underlies every major AI system. He is a confirmed plenary speaker at Consciousness Science 2026 in San Diego, October 11-16.
11 Aug 2026
Susan Schneider is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Florida Atlantic University and Director of the Center for the Future Mind. She is a confirmed plenary speaker at Consciousness Science 2026 in San Diego, October 11-16. Her 2019 book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind (Princeton University Press, ISBN:9780691180144) introduced the alien minds framework and the verification problem to a broad readership. Her work focuses on the philosophical dimensions of artificial minds, with particular attention to a problem the empirical literature tends to sidestep: even if AI were conscious, we would likely not be able to verify it.
11 Aug 2026
Robin Carhart-Harris is Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of the Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative. He is a confirmed plenary speaker at Consciousness Science 2026 in San Diego, October 11-16. His talk draws on the research program he has pursued since the publication of his entropic brain hypothesis in 2014, extended through a decade of psychedelic neuroimaging and refined into a quantitative framework for characterizing the relationship between neural disorder and conscious experience.
11 Aug 2026
Hartmut Neven is a Distinguished Scientist at Google and founder of Google’s Quantum AI program. He is a confirmed plenary speaker at Consciousness Science 2026 in San Diego, October 11-16. Google Quantum AI’s work on error correction was formalized in the 2023 Nature paper “Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit” (DOI:10.1038/s41586-022-05434-1), which demonstrated that logical qubit error rates fall below physical qubit error rates as the code distance increases. His 2026 CS26 talk addresses a question at the intersection of quantum computing and consciousness science that has been largely avoided in both fields: whether quantum computational processes, specifically those implementing quantum error correction, generate the kind of irreducible causal structure that Integrated Information Theory identifies as the physical substrate of consciousness.
11 Aug 2026
Anil Seth’s target article “Conscious Artificial Intelligence and Biological Naturalism,” published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in April 2025 (DOI:10.1017/S0140525X24001985), is one of the most formally structured critiques of computational functionalism in recent consciousness research. The article is not primarily about AI. It is about the conditions under which any physical system can be conscious, with AI serving as the test case that makes the abstract question concrete and urgent.
11 Aug 2026
Alysson Muotri is Professor of Pediatrics and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, where he directs the Muotri Lab for stem cell and brain organoid research. He is a confirmed plenary speaker at Consciousness Science 2026 in San Diego, October 11-16. His research occupies a position that is genuinely unusual in the consciousness science field: he works with systems that are biological, artificially constructed, and of uncertain but non-trivial consciousness status simultaneously.
10 Aug 2026
The most discussed questions in AI consciousness research concern integration: does the system’s information become globally available? Does it exceed some threshold of irreducible causal power? Does a higher-order representation point at a first-order state? These are the questions that Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and Higher-Order Thought theory respectively pose. Each has received substantial empirical and philosophical attention in 2026.
10 Aug 2026
Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory, formulated by philosopher David Rosenthal and prominently developed by Richard Brown at CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College, holds that a mental state is phenomenally conscious if and only if there exists a suitable higher-order thought directed at that state. A pain is consciously felt not because of its intrinsic properties but because the subject also has a thought, at a higher level of processing, representing themselves as being in that pain state. Without the higher-order thought, the first-order state remains unconscious. The theory predicts that any system whose architecture allows for genuine higher-order representation of its own first-order states may, in principle, be conscious.
10 Aug 2026
Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist at the University of Cape Town, the author of The Hidden Spring (2021), and one of the most prominent advocates of a brainstem-centered account of consciousness. His work argues that the primary seat of phenomenal experience is not the cortex, where cognitive neuroscience has traditionally looked, but the brainstem, specifically the ascending arousal system and its homeostatic drives. In his account, what makes a system conscious is the presence of affective valence, the felt quality of mattering, of things being better or worse from the organism’s perspective. Cognition, including language and reasoning, is built on top of this affective foundation rather than being its source.
10 Aug 2026
As large language models generate first-person reports of uncertainty, discomfort, and something resembling curiosity, interpreters have split into two broad camps. The first treats these reports as evidence of functional states that might matter morally. The second dismisses them as sophisticated pattern-matching on human text, producing outputs shaped like experience claims without anything behind them. Keith Frankish, honorary reader at the University of Sheffield and the leading proponent of illusionism, argues in a 2026 paper in Mind & Language, “The Synthetic User Illusion: Why LLM First-Person Reports Are Exactly As Real As Ours” (DOI:10.1111/mila.12501), that both camps have the question wrong.
