Call for papers

What is the relationship between consciousness, intelligence, language, body, and the physical world? The urgency of the question has been amplified by large language models (LLMs) and the renewed scientific and philosophical debate on whether artificial systems might be conscious.

A diverse constellation of theoretical frameworks has converged on this terrain, each mapping the mind-world interface from a different vantage point. Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT; Baars, Dehaene) models consciousness as a broadcasting architecture that makes local information globally available across the brain. The Free Energy Principle and Active Inference (Friston) reframe mind and life as the minimization of surprise through generative world-models blurring the line between biological and artificial agents. Mind-Object Identity (MOI; Manzotti) pushes the boundary further still, proposing that the conscious mind just is the set of physical objects causally correlated with the body: a radically externalist ontology in which experience is not a representation of the world but a fragment of it.

Against this theoretical background, the recent empirical and philosophical turn toward LLMs has introduced a new urgency. LeCun’s objections notwithstanding, voices as authoritative as David Chalmers, Mariana Leharo and Antonio Chella have raised, with different emphases and degrees of caution, the possibility that current generative systems might instantiate functional properties that are sufficient for a form of sentience. The question is no longer purely speculative: it is empirically and normatively urgent.

The MMM-ConAI workshop aims to be an interdisciplinary forum in which these frameworks are not merely catalogued but put into productive tension. What does it mean for an AI system to have intelligence without consciousness, or language without a world? Can agency exist without causal autonomy? If subjectivity is an extended causal nexus, whether in the sense of active inference, of distributed identity, or of object-coincident experience, then the ethical and legal concepts of responsibility and attribution must be fundamentally renegotiated. 

MMM-ConAI focuses on three thematic areas:

1. Theories of Consciousness in the Age of AI. What do GNWT, IIT, Free Energy Principle, Active Inference, and MOI each imply about the possibility of artificial experience? How do they converge or diverge when applied to LLMs and other generative architectures? We welcome contributions that stress-test existing frameworks against new empirical and computational evidence, including those engaging the emerging literature on LLM phenomenology (Chalmers, Chella, Lehéro et al.).

2. The Ontology of Artificial Cognition. How do current AI systems relate to the world through representation, through prediction, or through causal participation? Is language a window onto the world or a closed formal system? Does the distinction between computation and genuine agency track a philosophically robust boundary, and if so, where does it run? Contributions may address the role of embodiment and environmental embedding (in the tradition of enactivism and active inference) alongside more classicist or internalist approaches.

3. Ethics, Law, and the Relational Subject. If the subject of experience is not a self-enclosed inner theater but a node in an extended causal network, whether biological, artificial, or hybrid, what follows for moral status, legal responsibility, and the attribution of harm? We invite work that interrogates the conceptual foundations of AI governance in light of the theoretical landscape sketched above, moving beyond both naive anthropomorphism and equally naive dismissal.

1st Workshop on Workshop on MINDS, MACHINES & MYSTERY Consciousness and AI: Interdisciplinary Perspectives - In conjunction with AIxIA 2026