Is it possible to create a conscious robot? If so, should we?

In the last decade, artificial intelligence has surpassed humans in among others the games of Go and Starcraft. Many researchers believe it’s only a matter of time before we make an artificial intelligence that is smarter than humans in all areas. Most famous of these is Ray Kurzweil who predicts this will happen before the year 2050. But will this intelligence be conscious? What are the implications if it is or not? We invite to a panel discussion where these and other questions will be discussed.

To attend, please use this webinar link. A link to the webinar will be provided later. The event will also be streamed on YouTube, however, if there are issues with the stream, please use the webinar link instead.

Organized by Conscious Brain Concepts and UiO:Life Science for the Oslo Life Science Conference 2021

Agenda:

19.00: Welcome

19.05: Opening talks

• The Emergent Consciousness Module

Inga Strümke, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Simula Research Laboratory. Her work focuses on Explainable Artificial Intelligence. 

• The Secret To Making Artificial Consciousness

Morten Goodwin, PhD, is a Professor in Informatics at University of Agder. His work focuses on Artificial Intelligence. 

• Artificial consciousness or artificial person? 

Einar Duenger Bøhn, PhD, is a Professor in Philosophy at University of Agder. His work focuses on Artificial Consciousness. 

• Reconciling consciousness and predictive models of the brain

Keith Downing, PhD, is a Professor in Artificial Intelligence at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His work focuses on Artificial Life and Intelligence. 

19.40: Panel discussion

Join Inga, Morten, Einar and Keith as they together with moderator Elina Melteig discuss whether it is possible to create a conscious robot. And if it is, should we make one? What would the ethical implications be? How could we even know if the robot is conscious? Would a generally intelligent machine be conscious, or would a conscious machine be generally intelligent?

20.40: Questions from the audience

21.00: End

Panelists:

Einar Duenger Bøhn is a professor of philosophy at the University of Agder. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2009). His current interest in the philosophy of technology started from an interest in the metaphysics of consciousness and the resulting differences between the possibilities of artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness, and artificial morality. He is currently working on the notion of a person, and whether it is possible to create an artificial person. He has a book forthcoming on the philosophy of technology. Webpage Publications

Morten Goodwin is a professor of informatics at the University of Agder. His master’s study introduced him to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and he has been bitten by the bug ever since. Goodwin received his master’s degree from the University of Agder, Norway, in 2005, and a Ph.D. degree in 2011 from the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests include data-mining, optimization, deep learning, and adaptive learning. He is also an active popular science communicator focusing on the enormous advances in both research and the practical usefulness of artificial intelligence. In the autumn of 2020, he published the book “AI. Myten om maskinene”. Webpage Publications

Keith Downing is a professor of artificial intelligence at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has a BA in mathematics from Bucknell University, and got his PhD in computer science at the University of Oregon (1990). His journey into artificial intelligence started with computational modelling of the cardiovascular system and he now focuses on evolutionary computation, artificial neural networks, and artificial life. Webpage Publications

Inga Strümke is a postdoctoral researcher at Simula Research Institute. She has a MSc in theoretical physics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and a PhD in particle physics (2019). The PhD took her into the field of machine learning, where she has been active ever since. Beneath her favourite question, “How does the universe work?”, lies a layer of “How can we understand the world we live in?”, which speaks right to her current work on explainable artificial intelligence. Webpage Publications

Moderator: Elina Melteig, Communication adviser at University of Oslo. Webpage

UPDATE: THIS EVENT IS CURRENTLY CANCELED DUE TO CORONA. WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE THE EVENT IN THE AUTUMN SEMESTER IF CONDITIONS ALLOW.

The deep relation between human consciousness and moral responsibility seems obvious, but it has some underappreciated complexities. The traditional idea of free will has misled many into thinking it requires some sort of exemption from external determination, when in fact it requires something more interesting: the kind of autonomy that, independently of indeterminism or determinism, can be achieved—or lost—by some complex physical systems under certain conditions. All living things do things for reasons, but only human beings have reasons they can comprehend and act on. The capacity to be “moved by reasons” (as Kant put it) depends on having language, which both enables and depends on a special kind of consciousness so far exhibited only by our species. The difference makes a difference: we don’t—and shouldn’t—hold wolves or orcas morally responsible when they kill people. They are conscious but are not morally competent agents.

Daniel Dennett is a prominent American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology. He is one of the most famous living philosophers and the author of numerous books. He was a student of W. V. Quine at Harvard University, and Gilbert Ryle at the University of Oxford, where he received his PhD in philosophy in 1965. He’s currently Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and Professor, Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA (http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/).

Books by Dennett:
Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981)
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (1984)
The Mind’s I (1985)
Content and Consciousness (1986)
The Intentional Stance (1987)
Consciousness Explained (1992)
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1996)
Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (1997)
Brainchildren (Representation and Mind) (1998)
Freedom Evolves (2003)
Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005)
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006)
Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (2007)
Science and Religion (2010)
Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (2013)
Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (2013)
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017)

Dennett on Evolution of Consciousness at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbOP0IKpsZ0

Programme:
15.30 – 15.35 Opening by Hans Petter Graver President of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
15.35– 15.45 Introduction by Johan F. Storm, Neurophysiology, and Dagfinn Føllesdal, Philosophy, Univ. of Oslo
15.45– 16.45 Lecture by Daniel Dennett: Autonomy, Consciousness, and Responsibility
16.45– 17.50 Panel Discussion and questions from the audience

Venue:
Auditorium 1, Georg Sverdrupshus (University Library), University of Oslo, Molkte Moes Vei 39, 0317 Oslo

The event is free of charge, seating on a first come first serve basis.

Hosted by www.bevissthetsforum.no

Integrated Information Theory:
What is it, how did it emerge, and how can we use it?

After decades of progress in cognitive neuroscience consciousness is still eluding understanding. Are scientific theories of consciousness even possible? If so, how close have we gotten so far? In this symposium we discuss the integrated information theory (IIT), a leading theory of consciousness. First, the theory and its development will be put in historical context and the fundamentals of the IIT are introduced. Next, how its general approach sets it apart from other theories and how it has been used to inspire clinically useful tools and applications will be explained. Finally, we will discuss questions from the audience about IIT and consciousness more broadly in a panel discussion.

This event is open for everyone, but please let us know if you will attend by joining our facebook event (https://www.facebook.com/events/814383772339927/), or sending an email to b.e.juel@uio.no.
Hope to see you there!

PROGRAM:
15:00 – 15:05: Introductions by Bjørn Juel and Jeremiah Hendren
15:05 – 15:45: Lecture by professor Johan F. Storm,
Title: Theories of Consciousness: concepts, history, and challenges
15:45 – 16:40: Lectures by Matteo Grasso, PhD, and B. Juel, PhD
Title: IIT: From experience to the brain and back

Break with mingling, snacks and refreshments

17:00 – 18:00 Panel Discussion and questions from the audience

This event is open for everyone!
Hope to see you there.

About the speakers/panelists:

Johan F. Storm is professor of medicine at the University of Oslo, where he leads the Brain Signalling group. He heads two international research collaborations focused on the study of consciousness in EU’s Human Brain Project and the Life Science Initiative at UiO.

Matteo Grasso is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for sleep and Consciousness (Tononi lab – UW Madison) specializing in philosophy of mind and computational neuroscience.

Bjørn E Juel works as a researcher with Storm (UiO) and a honorary Fellow at CSC.

Jeremiah Hendren is a PhD candidate studying science communication at Uni. of Munich

More information:

If you want to know more about the integrated information theory right now, here are some links you might find interesting:

Podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bei2xLPpFN4

Pop-sci article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/a…/what-is-consciousness/

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed an explosion of research employing recording of electrical activity directly from the human brain. Intracranial recording provides a powerful window into the neural basis of cognition, thought and consciousness and has been applied to a host of human behaviors.

The first key finding was that the human brain generates robust neural activity up to 250 Hz (high frequency band; HFB) with exquisite spatial (millimeter) and temporal (millisecond) resolution.

The second important observation was that HFB activity, a surrogate for local cortical activity, is modulated by slower cortical oscillations with different tasks eliciting unique sub-second distributed spatial-temporal activity patterns.

I will first discuss how intracranial recording has provided novel insights into the neural basis of attention, language, memory and decision-making with the intracranial findings often challenging prior dogma in the field. I will then review our efforts using HFB activity to decode imagined speech in an effort to develop a brain computer interface for treatment of disabling language deficits.

Bio

Dr. Knight is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC Berkeley and Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery at UC San Francisco. He has a BS in Physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology, an MD from Northwestern University Medical School, did Neurology training at UC San Diego, Post-Doctoral training at the Salk Institute and was a member of the Neurology Department at UC Davis from 1980-1998. He moved to UC Berkeley in 2000 and served as Director of the UC Berkeley Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute from 2001- 2011.

Dr. Knight has twice received the Jacob Javits Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for distinguished contributions to neurological research, the IBM Cognitive Computing Award, the German Humboldt Prize in Neurobiology and the Distinguished Career Contribution Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His laboratory studies neurological patients with frontal lobe damage and also records electrical signals directly from the brain in neurosurgical patients to understand the role of prefrontal cortex in goal-directed behavior.  His laboratory is also engaged in developing a speech prosthesis for use in patients with disabling neurological disorders.

The event is hosted by RITMO Center for Interdisciplinarity Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion (University of Oslo) in collaboration with Forum for Consciousness Research / Forum for Bevissthetsforskning. See here for more information.

The resting brain, including the mind wandering that it produces, has been argued to play an important role in creating conscious experience. Its role in meditation varies: Concentrative meditation seeks to avoid mind wandering, mindfulness to accept but then let go of it, while nondirective meditation sees it as a central part of the process. This workshop attempts to shed light on various aspects of the interplay between consciousness, meditation and the resting brain.

The workshop will take place on the 6th and 7th of September, 2019, 09.00-18.00 at the University of Oslo, Blindern campus, Niels Treschows hus, 12th floor conference room. See the bottom of this post for a tentative programme. Attendance by request. Send an email to Professor Halvor Eifring at: halvor.eifring@ikos.uio.no if you would like to participate. Limited number of seats.

In addition to this workshop, psychiatrist and philosopher Georg Northoff, from Canada, will on the 5th of September hold a workshop with Professor Halvor Eifring and Professor Svend Davanger about how consciousness comes into existence. The event is hosted by ACEM Norway, at Sporveisgaten 37, Oslo. The event will occur from 18.00 to 20.00, and costs 100 NOK to attend. For a longer description about the event (in Norwegian), go here.

Tentative programme main workshop:

Friday 6 September

9-12.30

● Zac Irving, University of Virginia

Harnessing the wandering mind: meta-control in cognitive science and Zen

● Karin Kukkonen, University of Oslo & Ylva Østby, University of Oslo

Reading experiences, memory and mindfulness: the ReadMemo project

● Reidar Tyssen, University of Oslo

Long-term mental health effects of mindfulness training in medical and psychology students

● Sebastian Watzl, University of Oslo

Changing us or changing them? Meditation and the ethics of distraction

14.00–17.00

● Augustine Casiday, independent researcher

Topic to be announced

● Halvor Eifring, University of Oslo

Modern philosophical discourses on mind wandering

● Johan F. Storm, University of Oslo

Assessing the capacity for consciousness in the resting brain

Saturday 7 September

9-12.30

● Georg Northoff, University of Ottawa

The brain’s resting state and its relevance for consciousness

● Are Holen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The experience of time in nondirective meditation

● Svend Davanger, University of Oslo

How the brain’s synaptic memory creates a personal sense of time

● Stein Andersson, University of Oslo

A non-invasive EEG-based method to study neural plasticity: feasible for exploring basic neurocognitive mechanisms of meditation?

14.00–17.00

● Kieran Fox, Stanford University

Creativity and the wandering mind: novelty and utility in spontaneous waking and sleeping cognition

● Øyvind Ellingsen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The brain and the rest: nondirective meditation and physiological responses related to the autonomic self

● Anders Nesvold, Oslo University Hospital

Alterations in autonomic nerve activity during nondirective meditation

● Vilde Haakensen, Oslo University Hospital

Meditation and the brain: stress reduction in relatives of cancer patients

20181203_Poster Dan DENNETT_FBF-DNVA-UiO 28.Jan_JFS8

CANCELLED

This lecture has sadly been cancelled due to a minor illness preventing Professor Daniel Dennett to travel to Europe at this time. Hopefully a new opportunity will present itself in the future.

Abstract:

The deep relation between human consciousness and moral responsibility seems obvious, but it has some underappreciated complexities. The traditional idea of free will has misled many into thinking it requires some sort of exemption from external determination, when in fact it requires something more interesting: the kind of autonomy that, independently of indeterminism or determinism, can be achieved —or lost—by some complex physical systems under certain conditions. All living things do things for reasons, but only human beings have reasons they can comprehend and act on. The capacity to be “moved by
reasons” (as Kant put it) depends on having language, which both enables and depends on a special kind of consciousness so far exhibited only by our species. The difference makes a difference: we don’t—and shouldn’t—hold wolves or orcas morally responsible when they kill people. They are conscious but are not morally competent agents.

Daniel Dennett is a prominent American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology. He was a student of W. V. Quine at Harvard University, and Gilbert Ryle at the University of Oxford, where he received his D.Phil in philosophy in 1965.   He is one of the most famous living philosophers and the author of numerous books.

Philosophy of mind.  Dennett is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research. In his dissertation, Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content (later discussed in The Intentional Stance) and for a theory of consciousness, outlined in Consciousness Explained, where he presented his multiple drafts model of consciousness. He argues that the concept of qualia is confused and cannot be put to any use. His strategy mirrors Ryle’s approach of redefining first person phenomena in third person terms.

Free will. Dennett is a compatibilist, arguing that free will and determinism are mutually compatible. In his 1978 book Brainstorms, he proposed a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views: “The model … has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined, produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (…). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and …, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent’s final decision.”

Books by Dennett:

Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981); Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (1984); The Mind’s I (1985); Content and Consciousness (1986); The Intentional Stance (1987); Consciousness Explained (1992); Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1996); Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (1997); Brainchildren (Representation and Mind) (1998); Freedom Evolves (2003); Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005); Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006); Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (2007); Science and Religion (2010); Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (2013); Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (2013);       From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017)

 Dennett on Evolution of Consciousness at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2018; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbOP0IKpsZ0