Mindfest

Digital physics, chatbot epistemology and the future of Artificial General Intelligence took center stage at the second annual Mindfest, hosted by Florida Atlantic’s Center for the Future Mind.

Keynote speakers included:

• Stuart Hameroff, co-founder, director, Center for Consciousness Studies and Professor Emeritus, departments of anesthesiology and psychology, University of Arizona
• Sara Imari Walker, theoretical physicist and deputy director of the Beyond Center, Arizona State University
• Scott Aaronson, OpenAI/David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin
• Hartmut Neven, vice president of engineering at Google and founder and head of Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab
• Thomas Pike, dean, Oettinger School of Science and Technology, National Intelligence University, Washington, D.C.
• Michael Patrick Lynch, provost professor of the Humanities and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
• David Chalmers, New York University

The conference was organized by Susan Schneider, the William F. Dietrich Distinguished Professor at Florida Atlantic, former NASA chair and distinguished scholar at the Library of Congress. The center is based within Florida Atlantic’s Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute, as well as the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters.

Conference sessions included:

• Is Your Brain a Quantum Orchestra? The ‘Orch OR’ Theory of Consciousness
• Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe
• The Problem of Human Specialness in the Age of AI
• Democratic AI: The Benefits and Dangers of the Complex System Driving AI
• Are We in a Computer Simulation, and If So, Why Would it Matter?