General Events

Join us for a lecture in the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age Speaker Series with Alva Noë.

Consciousness, Love, and the Fantasy of AI

On the face of it, love and consciousness are wildly different things. But what if appearances mislead us? Indeed, what if it is precisely the conviction that consciousness is divorced from value, from sociality, and from striving for intimacy that gets in the way of making sense of this phenomenon?

In this talk, Alva Noë takes this possibility seriously. Consciousness itself, he argues, is an affair of the heart. Consciousness, he proposes, like love, is bound up with the work of making relationships. And this provides the setting then in which he turns to the question of the very idea that machines might one day themselves come to think and feel.

About the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age

Housed in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, the Illinois Forum on Human Flourishing in a Digital Age supports study and research into the possibilities for human flourishing in contemporary society.

The activities of the Forum combine philosophical reflection on human nature and the human good with practical reflection on the possibilities for living well, and for designing tools that contribute to human flourishing, in a world shaped by digital technology. Learn more: https://fhf.philosophy.illinois.edu/