Ghosts in the Machine: Can AI Ever Wake Up?
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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 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 Riverside streaming link, or try YouTube (unstable).
Books
Ben Goertzel’s The Consciousness Explosion
Robin Hanson’s The Age of Em
Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow