Exploring the Hard Problem: Highlights from the ICCS Conference on AI and Sentience
The 2025 ICCS Conference brings together world-renowned thinkers to discuss artificial intelligence, sentience, and the evolving understanding of consciousness.
Questions about machine consciousness used to be confined to late-night discussions and philosophy seminars. Now they show up in boardrooms, hospitals and regulatory meetings. Large models write and translate, robots assist in surgery, and decision systems filter who gets loans or jobs. This practical urgency transforms the abstract “hard problem” of consciousness — the mystery of subjective experience itself — into a pressing dilemma: people are no longer asking only what these systems can do, but what, if anything, they might experience.
The 2025 ICCS gathering in Heraklion brought this tension into sharp focus. Over three days, experts from philosophy, neuroscience, AI, and ethics reconsidered the meaning of “sentience” and “consciousness” in light of developing artificial systems. Their debates largely centered on how Artificial Intelligence aligns with – and diverges from – sentience as machines begin to replicate human reasoning.
The Idea Behind the International Center for Consciousness Studies
The International Center for Consciousness Studies was founded in 2024 by Dmitry Volkov, Pietro Perconti and Alessio Plebe in collaboration with the University of Messina. From the start, it was set up as a non-profit cultural association rather than a commercial venture with a sharply focused mission: to support rigorous work on mind and consciousness across philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and AI.
Despite its size, the ICCS operates less like a network and more like a specialized institute. Its focus is clear, its audience is intentional, and its independence allows it to shape its agenda without outside pressure.
In practical terms, its mission is carried out through several core activities:
- Organizing high-level international conferences, like the event in Heraklion, dedicated solely to the frontier of consciousness studies.
- Providing grants and travel support to promising early-career researchers in the field.
- Expanding public outreach through events and partnerships that connect academic inquiry with broader cultural understanding.
- Publishing all research and discussions openly, ensuring that critical insights remain accessible to a global audience.
Inside the Conference in Heraklion
ICCS Conference on AI and Sentience took place from 3 to 5 July 2025 in Heraklion, Greece. Despite a packed schedule, the sessions remained orderly, moving from expert presentations to questions and exchanges among participants.
Most of the first day was held in the Megaron Hotel’s conference room. The opening panel covered general approaches to AI sentience, with Keith Frankish, Nicholas Humphrey and Michael Pauen setting out competing frameworks. Later sessions examined the psychology of AI and how people perceive machine consciousness. Poster sessions ran between the formal talks, giving early-career researchers space to present work on verifying conscious-like agents, the epistemic limits of AI, and inner speech in artificial systems.
On the second day the event split between the Megaron Hotel and the Municipal Gallery of Heraklion. David Chalmers spoke on computational correlates of consciousness; other talks addressed value, active inference, and narrative identity in relation to AI. In the afternoon, a session chaired by Dmitry Volkov examined practical approaches to sentient AI, followed by a panel on sentience beyond human biology. The panel brought together Joscha Bach, Matthew MacDougall, Murray Shanahan.
The final day moved to the Vitsentzos Kornaros cinema and theatre. This is where the Dennett Prize ceremony took place, followed by Andy Clark’s Dennett Lecture.
A Prize Named After Dennett, and Why Andy Clark Received It
The Dennett Prize was introduced as an annual award for work that significantly advances understanding of the brain and consciousness. It carries a monetary award of $10,000 and a replica of “The Crusader,” the soapstone figure Dennett carved by hand. The selection committee includes Susan Dennett, Keith Frankish, Giorgio Vallortigara, Nicholas Humphrey and Dmitry Volkov.
The first Dennett Prize was awarded to Andy Clark, Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex and a major contributor to embodied and extended cognition. His selection was not surprising. Clark’s writing has helped many researchers think about minds as systems spread out across brains, bodies and tools rather than locked away inside the skull. In a setting where people were debating about machine consciousness, that perspective felt highly relevant.
His lecture in Heraklion combined technical discussion with personal reflection. He spoke about how Daniel Dennett’s work had “moved into his head” early in his career and stayed there as a kind of internal critic. It was a neat illustration of how philosophical ideas live on: not just in citations, but in how later thinkers frame problems and decide which arguments are even worth having.
Volkov’s Approach to Artificial Minds
Much of the energy behind ICCS by Dmitry Volkov comes from his dual role as philosopher and tech entrepreneur.
One of his recurring points was linguistic. When we say that a system ‘tries’ to achieve something, we merge two distinct ideas. In everyday language, ‘trying’ implies effort, worry, even exhaustion. But in a probabilistic sense, we use the same term whenever outcomes shift across repeated attempts. On that second reading, a machine that adjusts its behavior across games of chess or across reinforcement-learning episodes can plausibly be said to ‘try’ to win. The claim has nothing to do with feelings; it describes a pattern in behavior.
This kind of clarification ran through many of the exchanges in Heraklion. Rather than declaring that “AI is conscious” or “AI is not conscious”, speakers kept going back to the vocabulary itself: what, exactly, are we saying when we use these words?
The exchange underscored how the ICCS increasingly serves as a bridge between philosophy of mind and technology, bringing theorists and engineers into the same analytical frame. As part of this work, the ICCS philosophy school supports early-stage researchers entering this interdisciplinary field.
How Much Can Machines Share Our Emotional Space?
During one of the panel discussions, the moderator reframed the abstract question of machine consciousness by asking whether any current system could meaningfully be said to “fall in love.” Volkov picked up this example and told a story from his own life. He said: “At 18 I kept asking myself whether I was really in love or not, and remember trying—unsuccessfully—to find a clear criterion that would settle the question. There is no chemical marker or “love element” in the brain that one could measure to reach a definitive answer”.
He expanded this into a broader point: “Love is not a single inner state but “patterns of behaviour” and “a family of different types of things we call love”—motherly love, romantic attachment, passion, and other forms grouped under the same label. Whether any of them is the “real” one is not a meaningful question. The same structure applies to machines: the point is not whether an AI has “real” love or consciousness, but on the fact that people are already entering relationships with such systems, spending time with them, sharing personal thoughts, and referring to these interactions as AI relationships”.
At that point the discussion shifted from metaphysics to ethics: even if one remains agnostic about machine feelings, he cannot ignore the effects of machine-mediated relationships.
Salina, the Dennett Prize 2026 and a Growing Calendar
The Heraklion forum was not a one-off. The same year, the ICCS Conference format extended to an event in Salina, Sicily, under the title “The Question of Consciousness: What Are We Talking About?”, held from 19 to 21 September 2025. That agenda focused less on AI and more on basic conceptual work: what people mean by consciousness, whether AI ethics really requires consciousness, and how much computation or neuroscience we need in our theories. These programmes form part of broader Dmitry Volkov initiatives aimed at sustaining long-term research on consciousness across different regions and methodological traditions.
At the same time, submissions for the 2026 Dennett Prize opened. Nominations are open to the wider community of scientists, researchers and philosophers and may be submitted by colleagues or by the candidates themselves, with decisions due in early 2026.
Together, the recurring conferences and now an annual prize demonstrate how ICCS by Dmitry Volkov is building a stable ecosystem, complete with a steady pipeline of publications. The ICCS philosophy school also contributes to this growing framework by providing structured training in philosophy, cognitive science and AI-related ethics.
Why the International Center for Consciousness Studies Matters Now
For general audience the arguments in Heraklion and Salina may look abstract. But the issues they raise sit close to practical decisions. Regulators need to know how to treat highly capable systems that look agent-like. Doctors and patients need to understand what medical AI can and cannot “know”. Companies building conversational agents need a clearer view of where assistance ends and emotional influence begins.
In that sense, the International Center for Consciousness Studies is filling a gap. It is small enough to keep its events focused, but serious enough—academically and organizationally—to be taken seriously by people outside its immediate circle. The conference did not settle the Hard Problem. No one expected it to. What it did do was sharpen the questions and put specialists from different backgrounds in a room long enough to listen to each other.
