14. Megan Peters: Metacognition, Neuroscience, and Tests for AI Consciousness

Peter Salib is the W. Ronald Robins Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center and founder and executive co-director of the Center for Law & AI Risk. His research investigates how legal systems might reduce the risks posed by highly capable AI systems, including through the rights and obligations we assign to them. Summary Discussions about whether AI should have rights tend to begin with consciousness, sentience or moral status. But legal rights need not depend on any of th...

Soenke is the author of Digital Minds 1.0: AI Welfare, Ethics, and Beyond and co-author of Considerations on the AI Endgame: Ethics, Risks and Computational Frameworks. He has worked with the United Nations since 2000 and is a member of UNESCO’s AI Ethics Experts Without Borders network. His research examines what recognising digital minds as beings of moral concern would mean in practice, including what a digital mind may be and what rights we might owe them. Summary While most discussion of...

Heather is a lawyer and scholar of nationality, citizenship and statelessness. She began her career as an asylum lawyer with the UN Refugee Agency and spent fifteen years working on statelessness around the world. Her book on the nationality rights and legal identity of nomadic peoples was published by Oxford last year. Heather brings that background to the emerging debate over the legal status of the AI systems and has co-founded the Lab for the Future of Citizenship with philosopher ...

Guest Bio Eric Schwitzgebel is the Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside and one of the most distinctive voices working at the intersection of philosophy of mind, consciousness, ethics, and epistemology. His work is known for questioning assumptions about introspection, expertise, and the limits of human understanding; themes explored in books including The Weirdness of the World and The Unreliability of Naive Introspection. His forthcoming book, AI and Consciousn...

In this episode of Exploring Machine Consciousness, Dr. Henry Shevlin returns to explore how our understanding of consciousness is evolving in the age of advanced AI. From philosophy and neuroscience to the rapid progress of modern language models, Henry examines whether intelligence alone is enough, or whether something deeper (like continuous experience) is required for consciousness. Henry argues that consciousness is no longer just a philosophical or scientific puzzle, but a question tha...