A podcast from PRISM (The Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines), exploring the possibility and implications of machine consciousness. Visit www.prism-global.com for more about our work.
17. Soenke Ziesche: Does Moral Concern Require AI to be Conscious?
Soenke Ziesche, author and UN collaborator, explores whether moral concern necessitates AI consciousness in this insightful interview.
22 Jul 2026
16. Heather Alexander: AI Rights and Legal Personhood
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 ...
24 Jun 2026TRANSCRIPT
15. Eric Schwitzgebel: Exotic Minds and the Design Policies for Conscious AI
Professor Eric Schwitzgebel discusses exotic minds and design policies for conscious AI, exploring the philosophical underpinnings of artificial consciousness.
15 May 2026TRANSCRIPT
Megan Peters: Metacognition, Neuroscience, and Tests for AI Consciousness
Host [Host Name] interviews Megan Peters, Associate Professor at UC Irvine, about metacognition, neuroscience, and developing tests for AI consciousness.
29 Apr 2026
Henry Shevlin: Past, Present, and Future of AI Consciousness
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...
2 Mar 2026
Michael Graziano: Is Conscious AI Safer Than The Alternative?
Michael Graziano is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University and one of the most distinctive voices in consciousness science. His lab at Princeton investigates how information-processing systems arrive at the conclusion that they have an inner subjective experience; treating consciousness as a mechanistic, scientific question rather than an intractable mystery. That approach drives his Attention Schema Theory (AST) and its direct applications to machine consciousness. ...
16 Feb 2026
Rose Guingrich: AI Companions, Chatbots, and the Psychology of Human-AI Interaction
Rose Guingrich is a PhD candidate in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University, where she is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Her research examines human-AI interaction through the lens of social psychology and ethics, focusing on how people perceive minds in machines and how those perceptions shape behavior toward AI and other humans. Rose is founder of Ethicom, a consulting initiative providing tools and information for responsible AI use and development, a...
19 Jan 2026
Chris Percy: Computational Functionalism, Philosophy, and the Future of AI Consciousness
Chris Percy is Director of the CoSentience Initiative and lead researcher on a grant-funded project investigating artificial consciousness. He has authored academic papers on consciousness published in leading academic journals. His applied AI research includes a patent in machine learning and publications at NeurIPS workshops, and the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He holds visiting research affiliations with the Universities of Warwick and Derby in the UK and the Qualia Res...
8 Dec 2025
Cameron Berg: Why Do LLMs Report Subjective Experience?
Cameron Berg is Research Director at AE Studio, where he leads research exploring markers for subjective experience in machine learning systems. With a background in cognitive science from Yale and previous work at Meta AI, Cameron investigates the intersection of AI alignment and potential consciousness. In this episode, Cameron shares his empirical research into whether current Large Language Models are merely mimicking human text, or potentially developing internal states that resemble sub...
19 Nov 2025
Lucius Caviola: A Future with Digital Minds? Expert Estimates and Societal Response
Lucius Caviola is an Assistant Professor in the Social Science of AI at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and a Research Associate in Psychology at Harvard University. His research explores how the potential arrival of conscious AI will reshape our social and moral norms. In today's interview, Lucius examines the psychological and social factors that will determine whether this transition unfolds well, or ends in moral catastrophe. He discusses: W...
3 Nov 2025
Lenore Blum: AI Consciousness is Inevitable: The Conscious Turing Machine
*Lenore refers to a few slides in this podcast; you can see them here. Intro Today's guest, distinguished mathematician and computer scientist Lenore Blum, explains why she and her husband Manuel believe machine consciousness isn't just possible, it's inevitable. Their reasoning? If consciousness is computational (and they're betting it is), and we can mathematically specify those computations, then we can build them. It's that simple, and that profound. In this conversation, host Will ...
13 Oct 2025
Clara Colombatto: Perceptions of Consciousness, Intelligence, and Trust in Large Language Models
Clara is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where she directs the Vision and Cognition Lab. Her lab is investigating various aspects of perception and cognition, with a particular focus on the perception of other minds and the visual roots of social cognition. The lab is also exploring how we can perceive not just others’ perceptual and cognitive states, but also their metacognitive states such as awareness, confidence, ...
10 Sept 2025
Keith Frankish: Illusionism and Its Implications for Conscious AI
Keith is an Honorary Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and an Adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. Keith is best known for his theory of illusionism—the view that phenomenal consciousness, or the subjective feeling of experience, is an illusion. Rather than denying that we have conscious experiences, Keith argues that our intuitive conception of them as inherent...
7 Aug 2025
Mark Solms: Engineering Consciousness – Can Robots "Give a Damn?"
In this episode, we ask: if we wanted to construct a conscious mind from scratch, what would we need? That is the question our guest, Professor Mark Solms, addressed in the final chapter of his book The Hidden Spring - a Journey to the Source of Consciousness. Mark is a Professor in Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, and is president of the South African Psychoanalytical Association. He is also an advisor to PRISM and Conscium. Mark has contributed significantl...
14 Jul 2025
Jeff Sebo: AI Sentience, Welfare and Moral Status
In this episode, we spoke to Jeff Sebo of New York University. Jeff is the author of the recently published book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters and Why. In it, he challenges us to expand our moral concern beyond the boundaries of species and substrate. He has also co-authored a number of papers arguing that AI welfare is an issue that needs to be taken seriously today. Links: The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters and Why. Book.Jeff Sebo personal website.Moral co...
23 Jun 2025
Prof Susan Schneider: Organoids, LLMs, and tests for AI consciousness
Professor Susan Schneider introduces her "Superpsychism" theory and the AI Consciousness Test (ACT) in a discussion about consciousness, quantum physics, and the future of conscious machines in this interview.
28 May 2025
Anticipating an Einstein moment in the understanding of consciousness, with Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin, Associate Director at the University of Cambridge, explores the potential for machine consciousness and its ethical ramifications in an interview about understanding future intelligence.
Inside a recent episode
15. Eric Schwitzgebel: Exotic Minds and the Design Policies for Conscious AI
Published 24 Jun 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] So when the design policy of the excluded middle is this, right? Don't create entities. If you don't know whether they have human-like consciousness or whether they're just non-conscious tools, right? Just avoid those middle confusing cases. Now, I think there'll be a lot of pressure to create these confusing cases, But from a public relations point of view, from a regulation point of view, from an ethical point of view, companies might be convinced that it's bad for their interests to create entities that some people might They are conscious and some people might not, right. This could invite a lot of regulation. […]
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