Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience
Research Seminars
The PPN Research Seminar is a joint endeavour to promote interdisciplinary discussion between Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience.
Time: 3-5pm (but see * in list of seminars below for exceptions)
Venue: Some seminars will take place in person and some via Microsoft Teams. Most will be hybrid. Details provided via our email list.
In addition to the regular meetings, we hold Work in Progress (WiP) meetings where postgraduates present their work. WiP meetings are identified as such below.
All students, staff and visiting researchers are welcome to attend.
Organizers:
- Derek Brown (derek.brown.2@glasgow.ac.uk)
- Andrea Blomkvist (andrea.blomkvist@glasgow.ac.uk)
- Filippo Cabras (PhD Student)
These seminars are jointly sponsored by the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, the Department of Philosophy and the CSPE.
Please scroll down to see the programme!
Programme 2026-27
First Semester
25 September [FRIDAY] (3-5pm)
Joe Cruz (Williams College)
Illusionism and Artificial Consciousness
Abstract: I’m going to defend two claims that you’re likely to find implausible. Firstly, I’ll argue that illusionism —or, at any rate, a view that is recognizably a kind of illusionism—is true about consciousness. Secondly, I’ll claim that even though familiar current LLMs are very likely not conscious, it is not conceptually difficult to see how they easily might someday, even soon, be. My version of illusionism maintains that our conception of phenomenal consciousness is the byproduct of an inability to represent our fine-grained cognitive, embodied, perception-and-action systems. We misunderstand this self-opacity as the presence of real phenomenal properties when in fact there are none. Instead of asking what sort of special property consciousness is, we should aim to explain why we think that there is such a special property. I am proposing an answer to the latter question.This view shows why LLM consciousness is not difficult to conceive. What is required is that the LLMs' self-representational schemes are inadequate to characterizing their own finest-grain processing, and that they represent the mismatch in such a way as to be ineliminably opaque. An LLM might then understand itself as conscious in just the way that we understand ourselves as conscious. Current LLMs are somewhat ambiguous on this front. They are representationally heterogeneous, but the heterogeneity might be the wrong kind. I’ll try to say something more about what the right kind is, but I admit that LLMs might indeed already be conscious.
28 September (3-5pm)
Stephen Butterfill (University of Warwick)
12 October (3-5pm)
Soren Overgaard (University of Copenhagen)
26 October (3-5pm)
Karla Evans (University of York)
9 November (3-5pm)
Will Sharp (University of Geneva)
16 November (3-5pm)
Sascha Fink (University of Cologne)
23 November (3-5pm)
Luca Barlassina (University of Sheffield)