Biological Naturalism about Consciousness
November 5 - November 6
Please join us for the “Biological Naturalism about Consciousness,” a conference at UCLA from Thursday-Friday, November 5-6, 2026 in Royce Hall 306.
RSVP HERE
About the conference
Can non-biological systems be conscious? If not, why not? These questions have taken on new weight as AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, not least because our answers bear on which entities might matter morally.
This conference focuses on biological naturalism: the family of views holding that certain biological properties are required for consciousness. Biological naturalism is often positioned as the principal alternative to functionalism. But compared to its rival, biological naturalism remains underdeveloped as a positive research program—its central commitments are still being clarified, its empirical predictions are still being articulated, and the range of strategies for defending it are only now being explored systematically. (For discussion, see this survey.)
Our aim is to bring together researchers who want to make progress toward developing a positive version of biological naturalism.
Speakers
- Peter Godfrey-Smith (University of Sydney)
- Ned Block (NYU)
- Rosa Cao (Stanford)
- Jonathan Birch (LSE)
- Matthias Michel (MIT)
- Christian de Weerd (Cambridge)
- Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) & Jeremy Pober (University of Antwerp)
- Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced)
- Jake Spinella (UIC)
- Daria Zakharova (LSE)
- Derek Shiller (Eleos)
Organizers: Josh Armstrong (UCLA), Hayley Clatterbuck (UCLA and Rethink Priorities), and Bob Fischer (Texas State University and Rethink Priorities)
Workshop Program
Thursday, November 5
9:00 – 10:00: Jonathan Birch, “What can brain emulations tell us about consciousness?”
10:15 – 11:15: Jeremy Pober and Eric Schwitzgebel, “Substrate Flexibility, Copernicanism, and Biological Naturalism”
11:30 – 12:30: Matthias Michel, “A Bayesian Argument for Computational Functionalism”
12:30 – 1:30: Lunch
1:30 – 2:30: Ned Block, “The Rise of the AI Zombies”
2:45 – 3:45: Rosa Cao, TBD
4:00 – 5:00: Christian de Weerd, “Does consciousness require biology? An explanationist perspective”
Friday, November 6
9:00 – 10:00: Daria Zakharova, “The self-model function of biological agency”
10:15 – 11:15: Peter Godfrey-Smith, “Biological Naturalism and Biological Chauvinism”
11:30 – 12:30: Derek Shiller, “Word and (Biological) Consciousness”
12:30 – 2:00: Lunch
2:00 – 3:00: Carolyn Dicey Jennings, “Relationalism as a Theory of Biological Consciousness”
3:15 – 4:15: Jake Spinella, “Grounding, Functionalism, and Biological Naturalism”
RSVP HERE
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