The Second ICCS Conference, "AI and Sentience," was held from July 3 to 5, 2025, in Heraklion, Crete, bringing together leading researchers in philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to address a central and timely question: Is AI sentience possible? The conference took place at the Megaron Hotel, with additional sessions hosted at the Municipal Gallery of Heraklion and the historic Vitsentzos Kornaros Cinema and Theatre.
The program included plenary lectures, symposia, poster sessions, and open discussions. Each symposium consisted of four short presentations followed by a moderated discussion, designed to foster substantive debate among speakers and attendees.
The event started with opening remarks by the ICCS cofounders Dmitry Volkov and Pietro Perconti. The opening session featured Keith Frankish, Nicholas Humphrey, and Michael Pauen, who examined contrasting perspectives on artificial consciousness and the attribution of higher cognitive capacities to AI systems.
The second session, "The Psychology of AI," included talks by Alessandro Acciai, Alessio Plebe, and Katarina Marcincinova, focusing on illusionism, self-representation, and self-consciousness in artificial agents.
The afternoon session addressed the social context of sentient AI, with presentations by Pietro Perconti, Clara Colombatto, and Antonio Chella. A poster session followed, highlighting new research on AI sentience, epistemic underdetermination, inner speech, and the attribution of intentional agency to artificial systems.
The first day concluded with remote keynote lectures by Michael Levin ("Unconventional Selves: Diverse Intelligence in Novel Spaces, Scales, and Embodiments") and Susan Schneider ("Addressing Questions of LLM Sentience"), both of which raised fundamental issues concerning selfhood, autonomy, and agency in artificial systems.
Day 2 opened with a plenary session featuring Susan Blackmore ("What Is It Like to Be Artificially Intelligent?"), David Chalmers ("On the Computational Correlates of Consciousness"), and Robert Clowes ("Confabulating Centres of Narrative Gravity with Large Language Models").
Subsequent sessions included contributions by Riccardo Manzotti and Maria Raffa, focusing on value, active inference, and artificial freedom. In the afternoon, a special art event at the Municipal Gallery of Heraklion explored intersections between art, consciousness, and AI.
Later sessions featured Roman Yampolskiy, who examined the limits of explainability and control in advanced AI systems, and Daniel Hulme, who addressed intelligence and consciousness from a practical perspective. The day concluded with a panel discussion, "Sentience Beyond Human Biology," featuring Joscha Bach, Matthew Macdougall, Murray Shanahan, and Dmitry Volkov.
Day 3 was dedicated to the inaugural Dennett Prize ceremony, held at the Vitsentzos Kornaros Cinema. The award honored Andy Clark, Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, as the first recipient of the Prize for his outstanding contributions to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Clark was awarded a $10,000 prize and a statuette of The Crusader, a replica of Dennett's hand-carved soapstone original.
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