– Nothing for the moment –
explaining among other things why there’s “something it’s like” at all…in the 2026 online Elsevier Encyclopedia of Consciousness
also: you can download my book here:
Here is the recording of the talk I gave on Feb 15th 2024 at the BhealthyAge Lab at Concordia University in Montreal explaining why, if machines become sufficiently intelligent and are integrated into a social environment they will be conscious just like we are. The reason is that consciousness is not some kind of magical spark generated by special mechanisms in our brain. Consciousness is just a word that describes how intelligent agents interact with the world and with each other. As soon as agents are sufficiently intelligent and have sufficient interactions, they will say of themselves that they are conscious and that they have real feels, and we will agree! This will happen in the next 5-10 years I think!
You can find here the transcript and slides of my plenary talk at the May 2023 Taormina "Towards a Science of Consciousness" conference. The talk was based on my 2023 paper in Frontiers in Psychology explaining how sensorimotor theory can make inroads into solving the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness. It claims that experiences have "something it's like" because we can lose voluntary control over the flow of information, over our bodies, over attention deployment and over motivation.
