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Digital physics, chatbot epistemology and the future of Artificial General Intelligence took center stage at the second annual Mindfest, hosted by Â̲èÖ±²¥ 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 Â̲èÖ±²¥ Atlantic, former NASA chair and distinguished scholar at the Library of Congress. The center is based within Â̲èÖ±²¥ 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?