The Second ICCS Conference “AI and Sentience” was held July 3–5, 2025, in Heraklion, Crete, bringing together leading researchers in philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to address the central question: Is AI sentience possible?
The conference took place at the Megaron Hotel, with sessions at the Municipal Gallery of Heraklion and the historic Vitsentzos Kornaros Cinema and Theatre.
Over three days, participants explored the nature and possibility of AI sentience, engaging with questions such as:
– What is AI sentience, and how can it be detected?
– What are the conceptual and empirical limits of sentience in artificial systems?
– Which theories of consciousness are relevant for understanding or explaining AI sentience?
– What does the prospect of AI sentience reveal about human and animal consciousness?
– What are the moral and social implications of artificial sentience?
The program included plenary lectures, symposia, poster sessions, and open discussions. Each symposium featured four short presentations and a moderated discussion, designed to foster genuine debate among both speakers and attendees.
Day 1 began with a brief registration and welcome speeches by the cofounders of ICCS Dmitry Volkov and Pietro Perconti. Keith Frankish, Nicholas Humphrey, and Michael Pauen discussed the contrasting perspectives on artificial consciousness and the ascription of higher cognitive abilities to AI. The second session on "The psychology of AI" included talks by Alessandro Acciai, Alessio Plebe, and Katarina Marcincinova, addressing illusionism and self-consciousness in AI systems. The afternoon session focused on the social context of sentient AI, with presentations by Pietro Perconti, Clara Colombatto, and Antonio Chella. The poster session highlighted new research on the nature of AI sentience, epistemic underdetermination, inner speech, and the problem of ascribing intentional agency to artificial systems. The first day closed with remote lectures by Michael Levin ("Unconventional Selves: diverse intelligence in novel spaces, scales, and embodiments") and Susan Schneider ("Addressing questions of LLM sentience"), both raising fundamental questions about selfhood and autonomy in AI.
Day 2 began with a plenary session featuring Susan Blackmore ("What is it like to be artificially intelligent?"), David Chalmers ("On the computational correlates of consciousness"), and Robert Clowes ("Confabulating Centres of Narrative Gravity with Large Language Models and its Implications for Understanding Consciousness"). Riccardo Manzotti and Maria Raffa continued with sessions on value, active inference, and artificial freedom. In the afternoon, a special art event at the Municipal Gallery of Heraklion explored the intersection of art, consciousness, and AI. Practical sessions followed: Roman Yampolskiy discussed the limits of explainability and control in advanced AI systems, and Daniel Hulme addressed intelligence and consciousness "in practice." The day concluded with a panel discussion, "Sentience beyond human biology," featuring Joscha Bach, Matthew Macdougall, Murray Shanahan, and Dmitry Volkov.
Day 3 was dedicated to the inaugural Dennett Prize. The award ceremony, held at the Vitsentzos Kornaros Cinema, honored Andy Clark, Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, as the first recipient of the prize for his outstanding contributions to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. After brief introductory speaches and words in memoriam Daniel Dennett by Dmitry Volkov, Nicholas Humphrey, and Susan Blackmore, Clark was awarded with a $10,000 prize and a statuette of The Crusader, a replica of Dennett’s hand-carved soapstone original. In his Dennett Lecture, Clark focused on the nature of qualitative experience and proposed a strategy for implementing Dennett's project to escape Cartesian gravity. The Dennett Prize recognizes significant advances in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and artificial intelligence—fields profoundly shaped by the ideas of Daniel Dennett. The Dennett Prize Committee unanimously selected Andy Clark as the winner from fourteen applications.
The 2025 ICCS conference in Heraklion reaffirmed the Center’s commitment to advancing interdisciplinary discussion of consciousness and AI. Selected recordings of the conference will be available on our YouTube channel—subscribe to stay up to date!
