The International Center for Consciousness Studies announces the 3rd Annual ICCS Conference "Creativity: Minds and Machines".
The Conference will be held in Rome and Vatican City from September 1 to 3, 2026, at Roma Tre University, Pontifical Gregorian University, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Creativity is still often seen as a privilege of the human mind, but is it truly impossible to find genuine creativity in artificial intelligence? What, exactly, is creativity? How does it manifest itself in the arts, and what does it reveal about the human mind? Finally, does AI threaten human creativity, or could it even enhance our ability to produce truly new objects, ideas, and solutions?
The first part of the conference will be devoted to creativity and artificial intelligence, focusing on what is at stake when machines increasingly participate in domains long associated with human creativity. Understanding creativity as a broad range of powers, from the making of art to the search for moral and intellectual excellence, we will ask whether intelligent machines will ever match human abilities — or could they even contribute to their further development? This part will include panels The Possibility of Artificial Wisdom, AI and Consciousness in Creative Processes, and Standards, Artificial Consciousness, Ethics.
The second part will focus on creativity and the arts. The first panel, Art, Theory of Mind, and the Layers of Consciousness, will examine how painting, literature, and the performing arts can illuminate the nature of conscious experience by creating fictional mindscapes that communicate and explain fundamental aspects of “what it’s like to be a human.” The second panel, Consciousness, Perspectivism, and the Arts, will explore perspective-taking in the brain sciences and the arts, questioning whether implicit perspective-taking in the arts might have encouraged explicit understanding of perspectivism in science.
The program will feature distinguished speakers from a range of disciplines, including Susan Aldworth, Greg Currie, Sergio Durante, David Freedberg, Henrike Moll, John Luc Steels, John Sullins, Robin Zebrowski, Liad Mudrik, and Lisa Zunshine.
Set across three exceptional venues in Rome and Vatican City, the conference will provide an international forum for reflection on one of the most thought-provoking questions of our time: What can the arts teach us about human creativity, and what becomes of this creativity as minds and machines increasingly meet, collaborate, and compete?
The conference will conclude with the Dennett Prize ceremony. Nicholas Humphrey, the 2026 Dennett Prize winner, will deliver the Dennett Lecture and receive the award from Andy Clark, the 2025 Dennett Prize laureate.
Further program details will be announced soon.
