Knowledge in Crisis is proud to support the Minorities & Philosophy special screening of the award-winning documentary American Mirror: Intimations of Immortality.
Now that all the WhatsApp postcards are sent to all grandmas, the Christmas tree photos are liked, and all resolutions are documented (but not yet failed), it is the perfect time to pause our feeds and reflect: In an age where we curate our lives for likes, how do we distinguish who we are from who we post?
Discussion and pizza will follow!
Join us for a public lecture on consciousness and artificial intelligence by world renowned philosopher of mind, Ned Block (NYU).
Abstract: Computational functionalism claims that executing certain computations is sufficient for consciousness, regardless of the physical mechanisms implementing those computations. This view neglects a compelling alternative: that subcomputational biological mechanisms, which realize computational processes, are necessary for consciousness. By contrasting computational roles with their subcomputational biological realizers, I show that there is a systematic tension in our criteria for consciousness: prioritizing computational roles favors consciousness in AI, while prioritizing subcomputational biological realizers favors consciousness in simpler animals. Current theories of consciousness are 'meat-neutral', but if specific physical substrates are necessary, AI may never achieve consciousness. Understanding whether consciousness depends on computational roles, biological realizers, or both, is crucial for assessing the prospects of consciousness in AI and less complex animals.
Ned Block is an American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science.
Dr. Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, came to NYU in 1996 from MIT where he was Chair of the Philosophy Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a faculty member at two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes and two Summer Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation; and a recipient of the Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in Humanities and Social Science from MIT and the Jean Nicod Prize (list of past recipients of the Jean Nicod Prize), Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris.
Dr. Block is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board, and past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The Philosophers’ Annual selected his papers as one of the “ten best” in 1983, 1990, 1995, 2002 and 2010. He is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). The first of two volumes of his collected papers, Functionalism, Consciousness and Representation, MIT Press came out in 2007. He has given the William James Lectures at Harvard, the Immanuel Kant Lectures at Stanford, the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, the Jean Nicod Lectures at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, the Jose Gaos Lectures at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico, the Marc Jeannerod Lecture, University of Antwerp and the Sanders Lecture at the American Philosophical Association.
KiC Public Lectures is organized by the Knowledge in Crisis project, which is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under the Clusters of Excellence programme (10.55776/COE3). We're a collaboration between the University of Graz, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Vienna, led by Central European University.
Join Us!
Jan 12 from 5:30pm to 7pm GMT+1
CEU Auditorium Vienna
This event is FREE but ↗ registration is required.
Do we have free will? Are we morally responsible for our actions? What if the fundamental laws of nature are deterministic, or if there’s a God who infallibly knows what we will do next? These are among the most traditional and thought-provoking questions in philosophy.
This conference brings together scholars working on these and related issues concerning human agency, abilities, and capacities, with a focus on fundamental problems about free will and moral responsibility.
The talks are open and free to the public!
FInd the schedule here ↗
We are pleased to announce the call for participation in the Salzburg-Vienna Workshop: Analogies, external validity and the future of experimental modeling across sciences, to be held at the University of Vienna (Austria) on December 04 – 05, 2025.
The workshop is jointly organized by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Salzburg and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna as part of its Knowledge in Crisis Project, supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).
Description: Can we understand the properties of black holes by studying the behavior of a moving fluid in the university lab? Can we learn something about the molecular mechanisms of aging by performing genetic interventions in a fruit fly? Experimental practices in different sciences often assume that we can. In fact, experimenting on physical systems that are analogous to, but different from, the target system under investigation has been a common method in biomedical sciences for almost a century and it is becoming more and more important in other fields of science, ranging from black-hole physics to social sciences. Albeit common, this experimental method, often called “analogue experimentation” or “experimental modeling” raises many outstanding questions that puzzle scientists and philosophers of science alike. For instance, to what extent can we extrapolate the results obtained in a source analogue system (or model) to the target system under investigation? Which criteria should we use to choose the analog model that will best help us learn about the target system? Is there a unique justification for experimental modeling across sciences or is this context and field dependent? In this workshop, we will address these and related questions from an interdisciplinary perspective. The goal is to substantially improve our understanding on these timely issues and to create more dialogue between scientists and philosophers working on these topics.
Organizing committee: Tarja Knuuttila (University of Vienna), Patricia Palacios (University of Salzburg), Margarida Hermida (University of Salzburg), Florian Kolowrat (University of Vienna).
Speakers:
-Luca Ferraro (University of Ferrara)
-Antonio Ferreiro (Utrecht University)
-Mirta Galesic (Complexity Science, Hub, Vienna)
-Margarida Hermida (University of Salzburg)
-Tarja Knuuttila (University of Vienna)
-Andrea Loettgers (University of Vienna)
-Francesco Nappo (Polimi)
-Henrik Olsson (Complexity Science, Hub, Vienna)
-Patricia Palacios (University of Salzburg)
-Mauricio Suarez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
-Karim Thébault (Bristol)
-Giovanni Valente (Polimi)
-Jon Williamson (Manchester)
The workshop will take place in a hybrid format. If you would like to attend the workshop either in person or online, please send an email to Florian Kolowrat at florian.kolowrat@univie.ac.at. In the email, explain in one or two sentences your motivation for attending the workshop and your affiliation. There are limited places and students and researchers working on relevant topics will be given priority.
More information about the workshop can be found here:
Several philosophers and scientists have been discussing the possibilities of creating and assessing conscious AI recently (Bayne et al. 2024, Birch 2025, Block 2025, Chalmers 2023, Dung 2025, Schneider et al. 2025, Seth 2025). Butlin et al. (2023) are optimistic that it is feasible and outline a detailed research program for the purpose of assessing consciousness in AI. They assume computational functionalism as a working hypothesis and appeal to neuroscientific theories of consciousness for the identification of potential computational markers of consciousness.
In this talk, I will scrutinize computationalism and functionalism as two different crucial assumptions and evaluate whether it shows promise in being empirically more plausible than a biological theory of consciousness (as suggested by Putnam 1965). I argue that we face significant epistemic limitations once we try to appeal to neuroscientific theories to assess consciousness in AI. This will be illustrated by using Global Neuronal Workspace Theory as an example. Relying on prior work by Chirimuuta (2022, 2025), Cao (2022) and Block (2005) as well as Maley (2023, 2025), Williams (2025), and Piccinini (2020), I make a case for the medium dependence of neural processing. The appeal to neuroscientific theories does not render their computational interpretations empirically plausible since the theories are empirically supported given their “messy” (Cao 2022) biochemical details. I argue that in the case of non-biological artificial systems, all possible markers of consciousness typically used in humans and animals are either absent (neural and first-person markers), ambiguous (verbal report and other behaviors), or question begging (computational markers). We can thus only attribute consciousness (Dennett 1987) rather than assess it in AI systems which substantially limits the research program outlined by Butlin et al (2023) and others.
This talk is open to the public in an online format (Zoom); it can be accessed ↗ here.
Tobias Schicht is the Lichtenberg-Professor of Philosophy at Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany). He is interested in consciousness and cognition, drawing on both philosophy and the sciences of the mind.
Join us for our second annual celebration of World Philosophy Day. We'll be showing the film Waking Life (2001) at the Filmcasino. After the film, postdoctoral researchers Alex Horne (University of Vienna) and Camilo Martinez (CEU) will guide the audience through the film's many philosophical themes, encouraging the audience to share their thoughts and feelings about what they've just seen.
About the film:
Transcending the boundaries of technology and imagination, "Waking Life" (2001) is a revolutionary breakthrough in film animation. In "Waking Life," Wiley Wiggins ("Dazed and Confused") travels through a series of encounters and observations in a world that may or may not be reality. It is this surreal existence, flourishing with endless ideas and possibilities, that ultimately leads to the question -- Are we sleep-walking through our waking state or wake-walking through our dreams?
The public understanding of science is a significant determinant of trust in scientific research and, consequently, of support for public policy shaped by the results such research. What sort of understanding, however, might have the twin virtues of not only promoting such trust and support, but also of embodying a defensible fidelity to the epistemic status of our best science? In the sphere of education this question is often answered in terms of appeals to scientific literacy. I argue that currently influential conceptions of this – focusing on more effective science teaching, and teaching “the nature of science”, respectively – have neither virtue. What is required to promote science for the good of society in an epistemically responsible way, I contend, is a philosophical insight regarding scientific knowledge that is inherent in scientific practice itself, concerning its remarkable instrumental success.
For further information please contact: guido.melchior@uni-graz.at
Educational systems and the lifeworld today are confronted with huge transformational processes, placing unprecedented emphasis on questions concerning science and its nature. This was one reason to bring the Cluster of Excellence Knowledge in Crisis into the world. The goal for this workshop is to foster the collaboration between philosophy and science education, enabling each discipline to build upon the other's research findings and to jointly address new challenges.
Philosophy and science education share a common field of work: reflecting on the Nature of Science (NoS). NoS is an extensive field of research in science education, while it is largely neglected in philosophy education. This is because philosophy educators mainly focus on ethical and other areas of their field, often delegating science reflection processes to their colleagues in scientific disciplines. Meanwhile, philosophers of science, when dealing with education, usually look at the findings of science education. To build a bridge between the disciplines, the workshop will address key questions such as the following:
1. What aspects of NoS are best to be developed by science and philosophy education? Are epistemic competencies a promising candidate?
2. How can science education reflect the current research in history and philosophy of science?
3. Should we put more focus on teaching the history of science, and if yes, in what way and within which subjects?
4. Which empirical findings from teaching research and student beliefs are available that need to be taken into account?
5. Which interdisciplinary competencies are needed and have to be developed when we do empirically informed philosophy and philosophically informed science?
6. What are the most important problems in science communication for the broad public (e.g., media, citizen science, etc.) and what can philosophy and science education contribute?
This workshop presents talks from experts of different disciplines that work on the mentioned questions. A representative essay or longer abstract will be sent out to all the speakers in advance to deepen the discussion round.
Speakers include T.Y. Branch (Leibniz University Hannover), Anna Breitwieser (University of Salzburg), Bettina Bussmann (University of Salzburg), Anja Chakravartty (University of Miami), Kerstin Kremer (University of Giessen), David Lanius (University of Salzburg), and Raimund Pils (University of Salzburg).
The full programme can be found ↗here.
Contact Bettina Bussmann to register.
Pint of Science is an international festival where local scientists share their ongoing research at the bar! For this special off-season edition, Raimund Pils, Benedikt Leitgeb and Charlotte Werndl are at Weinek to discuss experts, climate change, and more. ↗ Details and registration here!
In unserer Demokratie ist Wissen die Grundlage für Meinungsbildung, Entscheidungen und gesellschaftliches Miteinander. Doch was passiert, wenn wir nicht mehr wissen, was wir glauben sollen? Bettina Bussmann und David Lanius vom Fachbereich Philosophie an der Gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Salzburg im Gespräch mit Senja Post und Gregor Betz vom Karlsruher Institut für Technologie über Wissenschaftsskepsis, Fake News, Bildung und Moralismus. Wir freuen uns auf Ihre Teilnahme und eine spannende Diskussion.
Die Panorama:Uni ist eine gemeinsame Vortragsreihe der Universität mit den Salzburger Nachrichten und der Wissenstadt Salzburg. Wissenschaftler*innen der Universität Salzburg stellen ihre aktuellen Forschungsgebiete vor und stehen für Fragen der Salzburger Bevölkerung zur Verfügung.