NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program
Spring 2024
The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness
Friday, April 19, 2024
This event was recorded. Videos will be available soon on The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness website.
About the event
Which other animals have the capacity for conscious experience? For a long time this question was neglected in science, but a new interdisciplinary field is now emerging to tackle it, drawing on expertise from neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, animal welfare/veterinary science, the social sciences, and the humanities. While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged. In this public-facing event, experts from across the field will meet to discuss the progress that has been made, the key points of agreement and disagreement, the most promising directions for the future, and what recognizing other animals as conscious beings means in practice for ethics and policy.
Panels
Scientific Methodology
Kristin Andrews: The history of the science of animal consciousness
Jonathan Birch: The marker method for studying animal consciousness
Moderated by David Chalmers
Vertebrate Consciousness
Noam Miller: Evidence regarding consciousness in reptiles
Anna Wilkinson: Evidence regarding consciousness in amphibians
Becca Franks: Evidence regarding consciousness in fishes
Moderated by Kristin Andrews
Invertebrate Consciousness
Alexandra Schnell: Evidence regarding consciousness in cephalopod mollusks
Robert Elwood: Evidence regarding consciousness in decapod crustaceans
Lars Chittka: Evidence regarding consciousness in insects
Moderated by Jonathan Birch
Public Policy
Cleo Verkuijl: Public policy at the global level
Katrina Wyman: Public policy at the local level
Moderated by Jeff Sebo
Thank you to our co-sponsors for supporting this event:
NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program
NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
NYU Center for Bioethics
NYU Animal Studies
The Moral Status of Insects and AI Systems, and Other Thorny Questions in Global Priorities Research
Jeff Sebo and Spencer Greenberg
January 30, 2024 | 6:00pm-8:00pm ET
Jurow Hall | Silver Center for Arts and Science | 31 Washington Pl
About the event
Join us for a special live taping of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Host Spencer Greenberg and guest Jeff Sebo will discuss the moral status of insects and AI systems, as well as other thorny questions in global priorities research.
About the speakers
Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. He is the author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also an executive committee member at the NYU Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Spencer Greenberg is an entrepreneur and mathematician with a focus on improving human well-being. He's the founder of ClearerThinking.org, which provides 70 free, digital tools to help people make better decisions and improve their lives, as well as the host of the Clearer Thinking podcast. Spencer is also the founder of Spark Wave, an organization that conducts psychology research and builds psychology-related products designed to help benefit the world. He has a Ph.D. in applied math from New York University, with a specialty in machine learning, and his work has been featured by numerous major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the Independent, the New York Times, Gizmodo, and more.
Thank you to Effective Altruism New York City for their generous support of this event.
Fall 2023
Nervous Systems, Functionalism, and Artificial Minds
Peter Godfrey-Smith
About the talk
Advances in AI have raised again the question of whether the biology of animal nervous systems matters to the mental characteristics of physical systems, especially consciousness. Godfrey-Smith argued that nervous systems are indeed special, and a conscious artificial mind will probably have to be more brain-like than many people have supposed. He criticized standard arguments for “substrate neutrality” and offered thoughts on which features of nervous systems are important. He also looked at empirical work in flies and other invertebrates, and discussed some ethical angles.
About the speaker
Peter Godfrey-Smith is professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, in Australia, after previously teaching at Stanford, Harvard, and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has written six books, including Other Minds, now published in over 20 languages. His most recent is Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Thank you to the NYU Center for Bioethics and the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness for co-sponsoring this event.
AI Consciousness Report: A Roundtable Discussion
Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Yoshua Bengio, and Grace Lindsay
About the event
This event featured four authors from the recently released and widely discussed AI consciousness report. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing existing AI systems in detail, in light of the best-supported neuroscientific theories of consciousness. The paper surveys several prominent scientific theories of consciousness, including recurrent processing theory, global workspace theory, higher-order theories, predictive processing, and attention schema theory. From these theories the authors derive "indicator properties" of consciousness, elucidated in computational terms that allow them to assess AI systems for these properties. They use these indicator properties to assess several recent AI systems, and discuss how future systems might implement them. In this event, the authors summarized the report, offered perspectives from philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science, and responded to questions and comments.
About the panelists
Patrick Butlin is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science and a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. His current research is on consciousness, agency and other mental capacities and attributes in AI.
Robert Long is a Research Affiliate at the Center for AI Safety. He recently completed his PhD in philosophy at New York University, during which he also worked as a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute. He works on issues related to possible AI consciousness and sentience.
Yoshua Bengio is recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, known for his conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute, one of the world’s largest academic institutes in deep learning. He is also the Scientific Director of IVADO. His scientific contributions have earned him numerous awards. He is the 2018 laureate of the A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their important contributions and advances in deep learning. In 2022, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor by France and named co-laureate of Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for technical and scientific research. Later that year, Professor Bengio became the most cited computer scientist in the world in terms of h-index. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and of Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Canadian CIFAR AI Chair.
Grace Lindsay is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Data Science at New York University. After a BS in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh and a year at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Freiburg, Germany, Grace got her PhD at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University in the lab of Ken Miller. Following that, she was a Sainsbury Wellcome Centre/Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit Research Fellow at University College London.
Thank you to the NYU Center for Bioethics and the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness for co-sponsoring this event.
Summer 2023
Workshop on Animal and AI Consciousness
Rose Guingrich, Ali Ladak, Leonard Dung, Adam Bradley, and Brad Saad with Syd Johnson
This event took place at the Silver Center for Arts and Science in June 2023.
About the event
The NYU Workshop on Animal and AI Consciousness will feature award-winning presentations from early-career scholars working on topics related to animal and AI consciousness from multidisciplinary perspectives, as well as a talk by Syd Johnson.
About the award winners
Rose Guingrich is a PhD candidate in psychology and social policy at Princeton University working under the advisement of Michael Graziano. She studies how interacting with social AI agents like chatbots, digital voice assistants, and social robots can impact how we interact with people. In her work, she considers the consequences of ascribing consciousness to AI and aims to develop tools and guidelines for designing ethical AI. She was recently awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Outside of researching human-AI interaction and teaching AI ethics, she is an artist, writer, and photographer.
Ali Ladak is a PhD student in Psychology at Edinburgh University and a Researcher at Sentience Institute. His research is on the social psychology of human relations with nonhuman animals and artificial intelligences, addressing questions such as when people perceive mental states in and grant moral consideration to such entities. He also conducts some research in philosophy, addressing questions such as how we can judge whether artificial intelligences are sentient.
Leonard Dung is a Philosopher at the Centre for Philosophy and AI Research, located at the University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Previously, he earned a PhD from the Ruhr-University Bochum. Presently, he is working on the philosophy and ethics of artificial intelligence. His research especially focuses on AI sentience, AI moral status and risks, including existential risks, from advanced AI systems. Moreover, he investigates topics related to animal consciousness and welfare which were also the focus of his PhD.
Adam Bradley is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of the Hong Kong Catastrophic Risk Centre at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
Bradford Saad has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Since graduating, he has conducted research in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and epistemology at the University of Antwerp's Centre for Philosophical Psychology, Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, and Rutgers's Department of Philosophy. At present, he is a research fellow at the Sentience Institute and a researcher in philosophy of artificial intelligence at Utrecht University. His current research is focused on digital minds and catastrophic risks.
About the featured speaker
L. Syd Johnson, PhD, is a philosopher, bioethicist, and neuroethicist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at Upstate Medical University. She's interested in brains of every kind, shape, and size, on neuroscientific research, and on embracing uncertainty. As an animal ethicist, she’s also interested in pushing bioethics and neuroethics to be less anthropocentric, and in overthrowing human exceptionalism and human supremacy.
Thank you to the NYU Center for Bioethics for co-sponsoring this event.
Spring 2023
Why interspecies welfare comparisons are both important and difficult to make
Bob Fischer
About the talk
Humans regularly need to make decisions that involve trade-offs across species. When an action or policy might be good for some animals but bad for others, making a principled decision partly requires comparing these welfare impacts in a principled way. This, in turn, partly requires comparing welfare ranges—that is, how much pleasure, pain, and other such states animals can experience—in a principled way. However, our ability to make these comparisons is very limited at present. In this talk, Bob Fischer will discuss why interspecies welfare comparisons are both important and difficult to make. He will argue against using neuron counts as a proxy for welfare ranges and in favor of a more sophisticated framework, and will present some implications of this framework for several farmed species.
About the speaker
Bob Fischer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, a Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities, and the Director of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals. His most recent books are Animal Ethics—A Contemporary Introduction, published by Routledge in 2021, and Weighing Animal Welfare: Comparing Well-being Across Species, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Thank you to our co-sponsors for their generous support of this event:
NYU Animal Studies
NYU Center for Bioethics
Fall 2022
Investigating Nonhuman Consciousness
Susan Schneider and Jonathan Birch
December 2022 | Recording
About the talk
Humans make many decisions that affect nonhumans without always knowing whether these nonhumans are conscious. Is there a test for nonhuman consciousness that can be useful for impact assessments and policy decisions despite the limitations on our knowledge about other minds? In this panel, Jonathan Birch will present his proposed strategy for investigating invertebrate consciousness and Susan Schneider will present her proposed test for AI consciousness. Birch and Schneider will then discuss the pros and cons of these tests, as well as the similarities and differences between testing for consciousness in these different nonhuman populations.
About the panelists
Susan Schneider is William F. Dietrich Distinguished Professor of Philosophy of Mind, Founding Director of the Center for the Future Mind, and Co-director of the Machine Perception and Cognitive Robotics Lab at Florida Atlantic University. Schneider previously held the NASA Chair at NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She also appears frequently on television shows on stations such as PBS and The History Channel, and writes opinion pieces for the New York Times, Scientific American, and The Financial Times. Her recent book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of the Mind, discusses the philosophical implications of AI.
Jonathan Birch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the LSE and Principal Investigator on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project. In 2021, he led a "Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans" that led to invertebrate animals—including octopuses, crabs, and lobsters—being included in the UK government's Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. In addition to his interest in animal sentience, cognition, and welfare, he also has a longstanding interest in the evolution of altruism and social behavior. His first book, The Philosophy of Social Evolution, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
Thank you to our co-sponsors for their generous support of this event:
NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
NYU Animal Studies
NYU Center for Bioethics
About the talk
Artificial intelligence systems—especially large language models, giant neural networks trained to predict text from the internet—have recently shown remarkable abilities. There has been widespread discussion of whether some of these language models might be sentient. Should we take this idea seriously? David Chalmers discussed the underlying issue and tried to break down the strongest reasons for and against.
About the speaker
David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU. He is the author of The Conscious Mind (1996), Constructing the World (2010), and Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (2022). He co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and the PhilPapers Foundation. He is known for formulating the “hard problem” of consciousness, which inspired Tom Stoppard’s play The Hard Problem, and for the idea of the “extended mind,” which says that the tools we use can become parts of our minds.
Thank you to our co-sponsors for their generous support of this event:
NYU Center for Bioethics
NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
NYU Minds, Brains, and Machines Initiative