This symposium is part of the AISB Convention 2026, organised by The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), to be held at the University of Sussex, UK, 1–2 July 2026.
This two-day AISB-26 symposium includes contributions discussing the many ethical issues that arise over AI Consciousness research – in particular the potential for such research to produce systems that have their own moral standing (either as agents or as patients), or that give an illusory, but highly persuasive, appearance of having such status.
Topics of Interest
The following subtopics were included in the original Call for Papers:
Foundations
- What are/aren’t ethically relevant aspects of consciousness in the AI domain?
- Is ethical status in the AI domain an “objective”, or rationally grounded, matter?
- Is “consciousness” an inherently ethical category in relation to AI?
- AC (artificial consciousness) and ethical patiency – machines with moral welfare claims
- AC and ethical agency – when could machines bear responsibility, accountability or blame?
- Ethical agency and patiency as mutually-entailing or independent properties?
- AC and the “expanding ethical circle” – AC ethics versus eco-ethics, and other non-anthropic ethical schemes
- AI agents without consciousness as potential bearers of moral agency or patiency
- Consciousness/sentience versus alternative criteria for ethical concern
- AC and suffering – ethical hazards of false negatives and false positives
- Ethical consequences of Illusionism about consciousness
Impacts & Policy
- How imminent is the emergence of an AC suffering crisis?
- Could consciousness in AI agents make them more (or less) trustworthy, efficient or operationally transparent?
- Would super-intelligent AI be likely to lead to super-conscious AI? Should that imply super-rights?
- The ethical, social and legal responsibilities of AI consciousness researchers
- Is the objectivity of AC research skewed by the mega-corporate context, marketization, ROI considerations?
- Regional/international regulatory frameworks for AC R&D – in the UK, EU, US or other global contexts
- Massive and rapid proliferation: The “ethics of scale” in relation to AI and consciousness
- The ethical, social and legal impacts of seeming-AC
- ACs/AIs as property/wealth owners; bearers of citizenship rights, criminal charges, etc.
- Should there be a moratorium on creating AC/synthetic phenomenology?
Implementation: Biocentrism vs Substrate Independence
- Biological naturalism vs computational functionalism in the context of AIC ethics
- AI super-intelligence and (ethically relevant) consciousness – the “AC drop-out” thesis
- AC, ethics and embodied / humanoid robotics
- Ethics of AC with non-standard implementations: brain organoids, xenobots, synth bio, virtual conscious beings, matrix beings, etc.
- Onboard vs Distributed AC – ethical ramifications
Programme (Provisional)
Day 1 — Wednesday 1 July 2026
| Presenter(s) | Title |
|---|---|
| Afternoon Session 1 — 14:00–15:30 | |
| Bridget Harris | AI consciousness research, cognitive biases and overattribution risks |
| Bazil Solomon | Governance Without a Stop Button: Haltability, Ethical Legitimacy, and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence Governance |
| Oluwafemi Olawoyin | Restraint as Architecture: When AI Ethics Lives in the Code, Not the Consciousness |
| Emma Brambilla | What does it take to be a moral agent? |
| Afternoon Session 2 — 16:00–17:30 | |
| Kamil Mamak | The Ethics of Upgrading Artificial Sentient Beings |
| Mathew Walton | Beyond Anthropocentric Bias: A Species-Agnostic Framework for Evaluating Behavioral Markers of Sentience in AI Systems |
| Daniel Hulme, Lucy Griffiths | Assessing Consciousness Risk in Artificial Systems: A Precautionary Rubric Derived from the Spinning Wheel Theory |
Day 2 — Thursday 2 July 2026
| Presenter(s) | Title |
|---|---|
| Morning Session — 11:00–13:00 | |
| Nina Rajcic | Epistemic Drift and the Illusion of Agency in Large Language Models |
| Kristina Šekrst | To Train a Mockingbird |
| John Dorsch | The Collective Risk Structure of AI Welfare: Artificial Suffering, Material Precarity, and Artificial Self-Knowledge |
| Tom McClelland | How to Navigate Uncertainty About Artificial Consciousness |
Afternoon Session 1 — 14:00–15:30 |
|
| Arianna Pipitone, Mario De Caro, Antonio Chella | Inner Speech for Ethics by Design: From Moral Judgment to Artificial Wisdom |
| Dorian Liu, Cathy Li | What Do We Mean When We Say “Anthropomorphism”? |
| Vitaliy Charushin | Semantic Illusion and Moral Over-Attribution: Why Conscious-Seeming AI Poses Ethical Risk Without Consciousness |
Afternoon Session 2 — 16:00–17:30 |
|
| Anna Strasser | Can we imagine an ethical status of AI systems without consciousness? |
| Various guest discussants | Round Table Discussion — Chair: John Dorsch (Prague)
Confirmed participants: Anil Seth (Sussex), Murray Shanahan (Google DeepMind / Imperial College London), Antonio Chella (ICAR, Palermo), Kristina Šekrst (Zagreb), Ron Chrisley (Sussex). |
AICE-26 Committee
Programme Committee
- Prof Steve Torrance (Sussex) — Symposium Chair
- Dr Frank Schumann (Paris) — Co-organizer
- Prof Antonio Chella (Palermo)
- Dr Rob Clowes (Lisbon, Bochum)
- Prof Mark Coeckelbergh (Vienna)
- Dr John Dorsch (Prague)
- Dr Alexei Grinbaum (CEA, Paris)
- Prof Anil Seth (Sussex)
- Dr Blay Whitby (Sussex)
Steering Group
- Prof Steve Torrance
- Dr Frank Schumann
- Dr Blay Whitby
- Dr John Dorsch
Contact
For inquiries, please contact Prof Steve Torrance.
Introduction to the AICE-26 Symposium
AI, Consciousness and Ethics: The Debate Background
Steve Torrance
Are we likely to soon recognize a new constituency of non-biological ethical beings – AI agents which are either moral receivers (that have ethical rights) or moral doers (that have ethical duties)?
How does the development of AI consciousness (AIC), if it were possible, fit in with such a prospect?
How might such ethically significant agents be implemented?
Should such agents be implemented? Should there be (inter-)governmental control on work on AIC agents? How might work in this area change our view of human existence, of living creatures, or of our technologies?
Machine Consciousness[1] and Machine Ethics[2] have both been active as AI subfields for over two decades. Recently, many have speculated about AI systems or models with the conversational abilities of LLMs and other advanced Gen-AI systems currently or soon to be available. Such models or systems are already being seen by some commentators as giving moral status to the AI agents that instantiate those models – in particular an ability to experience suffering and other morally significant states of (valenced) awareness. Such claims are considered by many to be highly controversial, doubtful or even dangerous – but there is an important group of AI Consciousness research and development that see the products of such R&D to result, potentially or probably, in the creation of artificial beings with genuine moral claims on their developers and on humanity as a whole.
Work in AIC development goes hand in hand with work in Consciousness Science more broadly; various theories from that domain have been considered in relation to grounding AIC accounts.[3] Principles have been proposed for ethically responsible research into AI-based consciousness, designed to guide researchers in avoiding vulnerability or victimisation in putative AIC agents that may be created.[4] Others have examined the potential effects on human society and experience in relation to a spread of strong but mistaken belief in artificial sentience in the AI-enhanced systems we interact with on social media,[5] or have proposed a moratorium on AIC research while we properly assess its ethical and societal ramifications.[6]
Such ethical debates take on a specially acute nature when one takes into account the potential for a vast multiplication of AIC agents, somewhat on the scale of personal mobile phones or social media accounts today (a key aspect of the so-called “Ethics of Scale”): the claims of the constituency of AIC ethical patients, considered collectively, may come to be seen, on numerical grounds, as competing with or outweighing the claims of the human population. In addition, the potentiality for developments in “General AI” (AGI) or greater than human-level AI (“Super-AI”) may further add to the piquancy of the ethical debate: super-AI (super-conscious?) beings may be seen to have ethical needs and sensibilities that outclass those of humans,[7] rather as deities have been seen in many civilisations to command deference on the part of the humans who worship them. A scenario where these two circumstances are combined into a runaway “intelligence explosion”, where super-intelligent machines recursively create further machines of even greater intellectual capacity ad indefinitum, was anticipated by I.J. Good as long ago as 1965.[8]
Questions in the AIC Debate
Questions arise of many different sorts. Some concern the conceptual or theoretical foundations of notions such as consciousness, suffering, needs, etc., in the context of AI ethics; and foundational questions concerning the ethical notions implicated in the debate. Other questions cover social, legal, economic and civilizational impacts, and related policy issues concerning such research – for example, in the context of the rapid proliferation (and marketisation) of AI and AIC research and product distribution, or of current and future mass consumer reception of “conscious-seeming” beings, potential for sweeping changes to social and civilizational structure, etc. There are also many issues in psychology, biology, neuroscience, etc. concerning the nature of consciousness itself which impact upon the ethics of AI as research or product development.
In the Call for Papers, potential contributors were asked to submit a short abstract and an extended abstract of 1000 words, ensuring that their submitted text covered all three of the major topics of the symposium – AI, consciousness, and ethics. Around 30 responses were received and reviewed. 15 contributors have been selected to give oral presentations. A Round Table discussion has also been organized as a closing event.
References
- O. Holland (ed) (2003). Special issue on Machine Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10 (4–5); S. Torrance, R. Clowes, R. Chrisley (eds) (2007). Special issue on Machine Consciousness, Embodiment & Imagination. Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (7). ↑
- S. Torrance (ed) (2008). Special Issue on Ethics and Artificial Agents, AI & Society 22(4); M. Anderson, S.L. Anderson (eds) (2011). Machine Ethics, Cambridge University Press. ↑
- P. Butlin, R. Long, et al. (2023). “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness.” arXiv:2308.08708. For a contrasting approach, see A. Seth (2025), “Conscious Artificial Intelligence and Biological Naturalism” (Target article), Behavioral and Brain Sciences, DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X25000032. ↑
- P. Butlin, T. Lappas (2025). “Principles for responsible AI consciousness research.” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 82. ↑
- M. Suleyman (2025). “We must build AI for people, not to be a person: Seemingly conscious AI is coming.” mustafa-suleyman.ai. ↑
- T. Metzinger (2021). “Artificial suffering: An argument for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology.” Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness, 8(1), 43–66. ↑
- S. Torrance (2012). “Super-intelligence and (super-)consciousness”, International Journal of Machine Consciousness 4(2), 483–501. ↑
- I.J. Good (1965). “Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine”, in Alt, F. & Rubinoff, M. (eds.) Advances in Computers, vol 6, Academic Press; cited in D. Chalmers, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17, No. 9–10, 2010, 7–65. ↑